> Watch head coach Mick Malthouse address the media after Thursday's training sessionCOLLINGWOOD coach Mick Malthouse says his team will enter Friday night’s blockbuster preliminary final against Geelong brimming with optimism and confidence built over a year of high achievement.
Undaunted by the finals credentials of the Cats, the minor premiers are also spoilt for choice at the selection table, with Simon Prestigiacomo and Sharrod Wellingham training well after being slowed by injury in recent weeks.
“We are very comfortable and confident that our best football is capable of beating anyone,” Malthouse said from the Westpac Centre on Thursday.
“We set, [in the] very early days, a criteria of our game structure being in place to win enough games to make the eight. As that became more evident we set it for the top four, once that became achievable we thought ‘Well, we’ve got to keep going’.
“We ended up with the double chance and won our first game, so along the line you just keep building and building confidence in one another and knowing that the structures have held up and the players have held up.
“It’s a process; you instil your own confidence because of previous performances. You don’t mysteriously come up to a preliminary final and go ‘Are we confident or are we not?’”
Prestigiacomo has not played since round 20 when copped a severely corked thigh, while Wellingham appeared to suffer a significant ankle injury in the qualifying final demolition of the Bulldogs two weeks ago.
But the pair is part of a 31-strong group of AFL-hardened players that Malthouse has the luxury of choosing from.
“One of our goals early in the season was to bring as many players into the squad as we could, on a sometimes irregular basis, to enhance the length of our list,” he said.
“We felt - and we’ve seen over history - that we know it’s a long season and we know that there’s going to be casualties and we know with casualties quite often you are exposed from 15 down or 18 down, or in some instances earlier than that in regard to list numbers.
“Our goal was to play as many players as we could and on top of that, if they’re not playing senior football, then certainly play them in a role that exposes them to as many demands as we can as close to AFL football, which is very hard to do at VFL level.”
Geelong coach Mark Thompson has engaged in a few pre-match mind games as the sides prepare for the highly-anticipated clash, speaking of Collingwood’s jealously and hatred of the Cats, but Malthouse would not be drawn into returning fire.
The Pies have been denied by Geelong at the preliminary final stage twice in the past three years, but Malthouse said a lot had changed since then.
“You look at last year’s result, and this is why I never say a great deal about injuries, but we were on our knees,” he said.
“This year we’ve been able to maintain a pretty healthy list coupled with a lot of players playing enough games to know that they can play senior football when their time is called.
“We were very dependent on [good] players through our early days. We came from the bottom in 1999 and played off in a grand final in 2002 and really the list wasn’t that long. If we got an injury ... I remember we lost Jason Cloke through suspension, and the replacement, as good a bloke as he was, wasn’t the calibre of Jason.
“Through natural attrition and through retirements through 2006, 2007 and 2008, if we lost a player we really got hurt by it. Last year we lost Pendlebury and we couldn’t replace [him].
“We couldn’t put a Beams or a Sidebottom in with the confidence that they had the experience to go with Geelong.”
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