By Greg Baum
Just when it seemed a slow start to the season would become both embarrassing and damaging, Geelong remembered themselves – memorably!
In a blistering third quarter at the MCG, the Cats kicked 10 goals and did not allow Hawthorn one official entry into their forward 50, let alone a score. In all, the Cats kicked 15 goals to one after half-time. In an hour of footy, the universe righted itself.
Sluggish performances against Collingwood, Carlton and modest Gold Coast were one thing for the Cats, but when they trailed wooden spoon favourite Hawthorn at half-time in what is for both clubs a marquee Easter Monday meeting, lights began to flash and sirens sound. It wasn’t a trick of light or numbers.
Jeremy Cameron celebrates another goal.Credit: Getty
In the first half, Hawthorn had looked what they are: young, a bit naive, but up for anything. They had nothing to lose. Geelong looked what they were, last year’s nearly invincible premiership team, trying to remember how they did it. The mantle was weighing heavily.
The Hawks had the first three centre clearances of the match and the first five scoring shots, and it would not have been an injustice if they had kicked the first five goals. That reads improbably in the context of what became of the match, but that’s how it was.
The Cats then were bystanders. Their early game was slow and retreating, the antithesis of footy’s 2023 cutting edge. But they did have Jeremy Cameron. At times this year, that’s seemingly all they’ve had. Generally, it’s enough. At half-time, he’d kicked three of their four goals.
The stats bore out the mind’s eye. The Hawks were harder at it. They won the contested part of the game, but cried out for say, the injured Mitch Lewis up forward. The Cats’ slightly greater efficiency – and Cameron – kept them in it while they waited for their muscle memory to return.
Tom Stewart, Ned Reeves, Esava Ratugolea and Rhys Stanley compete for the ball.Credit: Getty Images
Coach Chris Scott said the Cats at no stage panicked about their flat form, but they were confused by it.
The quarter-time scoreboard was so deceptive it is a wonder Sports Integrity Australia was not called in. The half-time score was only a little less misleading.
Half-time? It would be more accurate to say that it was full-time in the curtain-raiser. It was the calm before the storm.
It would not be strictly true to say that the Cats who emerged after half-time were unrecognisable from the first half, rather than they were suddenly recognisable as the irresistible force of 2022. It was not that they swapped jumpers with the Hawks, but swapped back into their own old kit. As if by a jolt of electricity, or one good CPR pump, their airways cleared and everything came back in an instant.
Hawthorn coach Sam Mitchell had no answers.Credit: Getty
Time after time, they swept in formation out of the centre. Captain Patrick Dangerfield was back in his pomp. Tom Hawkins and Tyson Stengle, barely seen in the first half and in for that matter the first three games, made their marks. Ollie Henry at least had an alibi for being unseen; he was the sub. He also chimed in.
Everything began to whirr and hum as it did throughout their unbeaten last four months of last year. Mitch Duncan, in his first game for the season, stiffened and deepened the midfield. Tom Stewart again ran the defence like a drill.
The stats sheet again bore out the evidence of the eye; simply, the Cats did not allow the Hawks to get their hands on the ball. As coach Sam Mitchell noted, they just did not know a way out of their predicament. In the coach’s box, Mitchell asked the lamed Lewis if he could see an answer, but he could not.
Cameron, having kept the Cats in it, now led the parade, finishing with seven goals. Just turned 30, he is in career-best form, which is saying something. And it’s a blessed team that can send Hawkins up the field a little in search of form, knowing that they had a phalanx to fall in behind him.
The confidence that Dangerfield said had been strangely lacking suddenly suffused the team. It was like watching a big balloon inflate. When half-back flanker Mark O’Connor streamed through the middle of the MCG to get in on the goalkicking act, the Cats could stand down their emergency response team, pack away the life vests and put the kettle on.
At some point, what had shaped as an upset ceased even to be a contest. Of course, Geelong’s victim was merely Hawthorn, a rebored, prototype team, a project, still on the petrie dish.
But when a team clicks, it clicks. It’s not Monday’s spark that will matter in the long run, but the flame that is now burning. Geelong can file away the first three games under miscellaneous. The AFL spent most of last decade cursing the Hawks for their tyranny. Now they will be damned again for their helplessness and the way it gave Geelong’s season a push start.
