Winning the premiership was a terrific experience and one that I will not forget, but our coach Alastair Clarkson was determined to let us know that we can’t spend too long reflecting on the past.
With that in mind, the playing group was focused solely on the future, particularly our first game against Geelong.
We might have beaten them last time around but we know the Cats are still the best team in the league.
In the past, our game plan has worked fairly well against Geelong but as we saw in the NAB Cup, they are at the top of their game at the moment and they are going to be hard to stop.
When I was a junior coming through the ranks at Geelong Falcons, I had the pleasure of playing alongside some talented kids like Nick Maxwell, Brent Moloney and Matt Maguire who all went on to forge decent AFL careers.
But there were two special talents in the squad who stood out more than most.
Jimmy Bartel was an absolutely superb player. He won our best and fairest as a bottom age player and was one of the main reasons we won the TAC Cup in 2000.
Gary Ablett took a bit longer to bloom. He always had talent but I don’t think it was until his second or third year at the Cats that he started working really hard. That came from a bit of feedback from his teammates but I always knew Gazza had the footy skills and the smarts from our days back at the Falcons.
I’m not surprised one bit to see them both become two of the best midfielders in the league.
But Geelong’s dominance doesn’t end with Jimmy and Gazza. Everywhere you look around the ground they are strong and any team that will get close to Geelong needs to play its best football. You can’t give them easy possessions and when they do get the ball, you have to put them under pressure.
It’s definitely not going to be easy for us in the Hawthorn defence but I’m confident we’ll manage. Clarko is a big one for saying we’ve got 22 fit players. It doesn’t matter who they are but we’ll go out and do the job with the blokes we’ve got on the field.
Plenty has been said and written about our injuries over the pre-season but we’ll have most of our core group back on deck this week. Grant Birchall, Stephen Gilham and Campbell Brown should be right to go after various little injuries.
Trent Croad and Rick Ladson are still a little way off but that only opens up the door for someone like Tom Murphy to step up. Tommy was one of the hard-luck stories last year and could easily have been part of the premiership-winning side.
It’s testament to our squad to see guys like Tommy, Ben McGlynn and Simon Taylor work extremely hard just to get a spot in the team.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.
