PARALLELS to the famous 1989 epic will continue to be drawn and some Hawthorn players are already talking up a physical encounter, but Geelong coach Mark Thompson simply hopes his men produce their best football in Saturday’s AFL decider.

Many pundits are expecting a brutal and perhaps fiery clash when Geelong, chasing back-to-back premierships, tackles Hawthorn at the MCG.

Adrenaline will no doubt be running high throughout the clash and Thompson said while he would remind his players to keep their emotions in check, he’d hope they’d already be a step ahead of him.

“We’ll probably tell them because we sometimes, as coaches, feel like we have to say something,” he said.

“But you’d probably expect the players, in their goals, would probably want to do that anyway – just go out and play football.”

The two teams’ last grand final meeting was one of the most ferocious battles in recent memory, with both sides struggling to find fit players toward the end of the match as the game’s physicality took its toll.

Thompson knows when the stakes are as high as they will be this weekend, any type of match is possible.

“You’ve got to expect anything,” he said when asked of the possibility of a super-physical grand final.

“You might expect that it might be just an open, fast game. You have to expect that it might be a really contested game and a real arm-wrestle.

“So you’ve just got to allow for everything and hope that your players adapt and feel the game and adjust to it. Our guys have been pretty good at that lately.”

The Cats coach poured cold water on the suggestion he would get his players to target Hawk Luke Hodge, who looked to suffer a rib injury during Hawthorn’s win over St Kilda last week.

“We’re going to really try to play the best football we can play and we don’t know whether Hodge has got sore ribs or not and it’s almost irrelevant,” Thompson said.

“We should just concentrate on playing the best football that we are capable of playing and make sure that we start that way and finish [that way].”

Thompson said there was little point reflecting on his team’s round 17 win over the Hawks despite the Cats playing the match minus Gary Ablett, Cameron Ling, Darren Milburn and David Wojcinski.

“We don’t really feel that what happened last time, if you have players out, makes that much difference,” he said.

“We had, you know, three replacements come in, we still had 22 playing.

“So what happened with the match-ups and the conditions and who they had in, who we had in is almost irrelevant … we couldn’t say we’re going to be a four-goal better team with Ling and Ablett in the side.”