GEELONG coach Chris Scott believes his side is fortunate to still hold the title of the competition’s only undefeated team, suggesting the Cats’ thrilling two-point victory over Carlton at Etihad Stadium on Friday night had been won by resilience rather than performance.

“No-one can doubt the resilience of the Geelong players, certainly not at this stage. They are ultra-competitive and they hate losing. But I think all the players are sitting back thinking they are a bit lucky to get over the line tonight,” Scott said after the match.

Scott said his team had been “fortunate to be in front at the end of the game” after being outplayed by the Blues for much of the evening.

The Cats had just 46 inside 50s for the match, 10 fewer than their opponents, a fact not lost on the coach. Despite being able to score on 27 occasions, Scott said his players would need to improve if they wanted to maintain their unbeaten record.

“We don’t think we are going to win too many games when we lose the inside 50s by 10,” he said.

“That to me is a reflection of a team who was outplayed around the ball but had enough class to make the most of their chances.

“If you keep playing poorly, we are going to lose ... We have had a few games this year where we were a bit fortunate to get over the line. I am not sure the ladder or our win-loss (ratio) is a fair reflection of the evenness of the competition, but we never expected to be playing our best football in round eight or nine. We believe that is to come, and it will need to be to be successful.”

Scott said regardless of the result and its position on top of the ladder, the Cats would still look for ways to improve their performance in coming weeks. After difficult matches against Collingwood and the Blues in the past week, Geelong now has an eight-day break before facing a Gary Ablett-led Gold Coast in Queensland next week. He said Carlton had shown deficiencies in Geelong’s game.

“Win or lose, we need to concentrate on the things that will work for us long term,” he said.

“There were a few things that we were not happy with. We will review the game really hard and I suspect what we will come up with is that we need to improve around the ball. They (Carlton) are a good side, their tackling pressure is really good and they beat us in the contest.

“There were times where we just clearly needed to get the ball going forward and we just didn’t handle the pressure that they brought.”

With less than 90 seconds remaining in the final term, Carlton ruckman Robert Warnock had an opportunity to put the Blues, who appeared to have all the momentum, in front. Scott admitted he thought the match was lost even before Warnock missed his set shot from 15 metres out.

“I was worried that the game was slipping away from us a few times,” he said.

“I don’t think (the loss) is going to be all that detrimental to their season; they would come away thinking what they are doing is pretty good and stands up.”