If you’re a football fan, you’ll be dreaming of nights like Geelong on Thursday.
Playing their best player and a five-time All-Australian, losing in the last minute, reaching the final against a team that has won six games in a row, including one by beating the only team ranked above them by 112 points. The team is being told it will be knocked out in straight sets, and faces a dangerous elimination final opponent.
And showing the middle finger to all the doubters, to the fiercest enemy, in hostile territory, virtually demolishing it completely from start to finish, booking a home preliminary final and making a $9 chance to reach the flag on top, looks extremely foolish in the process.
Win a Ziggy BBQ on Grand Finals day, thanks to Barbecue Galore! Enter here.
For supporters of the other 17 clubs, it will be a performance that will long be remembered, a game that will be dusted off and replayed, and a game they will remember with a smile when the inevitable dark days arrive.
Believe me – my team’s glorious win over Port Adelaide in a major final at Adelaide Oval is still one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in my life.
The problem for the Cats is that not only did those dark days basically end in a tenth-place finish with 11 wins instead of 15 or 16, but this is a club that has about half a dozen famous, earth-shaking victories that us fools who support other teams yearn for for decades.
This was Geelong’s 14th finals win under Chris Scott, which is well above the average of one per season. I believe that nothing, not even two premierships, has represented the team and the club better than this win.
Was the port miserable? No doubt about it. But at every turn, Cats made They look poor.
He made the Power look like they were playing on a field buried under two feet of wet cement, as he played at the same crazy, furious pace as the competition, smashing the ball into dangerous areas inside 50 before his opponents could blink, let alone set up.
They made Port miserable with all-round pressure with feet and hands, coupled with the Cats’ classic defensive arrangement behind the ball that became more impressive the longer the night went on, particularly in the air.
He made the Power’s pressure second-rate, his tackling was SANFL level and his willpower almost negligible, while he produced one of the most remarkable kicking displays of the entire year.
At the centre of the carnage were the ‘Three Musketeers’, a trio of excellent, natural footballers who belie the notion that AFL teams these days only recruit athletes with speed and elite skills.
The most notable of this trio is Sean Manaugh; after playing 11 games in an AFL career that began at the age of 26, it was a moment he surely thought would never come, having been overlooked in the draft for nearly a decade running.
It was obvious to anyone who watched his six goals in last year’s VFL Grand Final, many of them pearly goals, that this was a player who had the skill and speed needed to succeed at AFL level… provided he came to the right club to utilise his strengths.
Geelong does this better than any team I can remember; where the Sydney of the mid-2000s and 2010s turned AFL-level players into major players, the Cats have done the same with forgotten, underrated and overlooked players.
And from Lawson Humphries, who was on 100 per cent of his feet at half-time, to Tom Atkins in midfield, another mature-age breakthrough player, who held Jason Horne-Francis in check in stoppage time, and Mannagh, roaming dangerously at half-forward, this team is far more than the sum of its parts.
What are the stats for this man nobody wanted, this 26-year-old who has worked his whole life to become an overnight sensation? 23 disposals, 18 kicks – the second-most on ground – seven inside 50s (only behind Patrick Dangerfield), a game-high 13 score involvements, five tackles and three direct goal assists.
If Holmes beats him out for best-in-field honors, it will be a very close contest.
Almost as good is the story of Close, once a rookie who has been an integral, if ineffective, part of a fantastic team since he kicked a goal with his first touch at the top level on a miserable night in Perth at the height of the Covid pandemic.
Close is the most Aramis of this trio – he’s the player you tend to forget about, with Mears’s spectacular All-Australian calibre kicking and Mannagh’s storytelling prowess consistently stealing the spotlight this year. But is the long-sleeved Cat adept at doing the unexpected, team-first things that every good team does in abundance?
Need a smart, sensible kick from wing to half-forward? Close is right for you. Need a smart crumber at ground level inside 50, a tackling small forward, an intelligent presence as a loose man at stoppages? Brad is right for you.
He kicked 11 goals, behind only Manaugh, Dangerfield and Jeremy Cameron on the field. Two of those goals were assists. Considering he also had 15 disposals, this is clearly an exceptional ratio.
Mears is the best of the three; the ideal half-forward for modern football, he has proved such a fine player over the years that Scott now entrusts him with moving around the field as a midfielder, even into defence. It is remarkable that such a meticulous coach has been fine with a forward who has a tendency to wander into a part of the field where those qualities need to be reined in for the good of the team.
Mears spent more time in the field against the Power, which saw his score involvement number drop to ‘only’ six, roughly half of what Close and Manaugh achieved from away.
But his disposals were clear, precise and always creative; his work as an extra at stoppages was crucial with three clearances; and with six tackles, only Rozee had more – and any power tackle statistic needs an asterisk to reflect how much time he spent on the night chasing tails.
And despite all that, he still had time to score three goals.
It is notable that the inside 50 count was 57-53 in favour of the Cats. The ratio of 38 scores and 53 attempts in attack – from 67 per cent of their entries, the second-best by any team in 2024 – is frankly obscene.
And no one contributed more to this carnage than the superbly skilled, lightning-fast, whip-smart musketeer trio.
Tom Stewart, and his habit of starting on the centre bounce and then getting behind the ball at will to stop it, before being recalled at the last minute due to illness or persistent hamstring problems, depending on your level of faith in the Cats’ injury reporting, saw Scott decide to change his approach to stoppages.
Consistently, one of Mannagh, Close or Mears would step up until stoppage time to create an outnumbering, and then when Sherrin had won the ball, he would work ruthlessly into space ahead, baffling the Port defence on some experienced heads and showing time and again over the years how to be when the going gets tough.
The first quarter was a perfect example of how well this worked all night: starting from a standstill on the wing on the broadcast side, Mannagh helped the Cats win the ball, set up Port well behind the ball and saw them move laterally; and then fifteen seconds later burst into the forward pocket unopposed, and ran a good 100 metres to take the ball into the end zone.
Loose behind the ball for Port, Darcy Byrne-Jones – the defender-cum-forward switched back to his original role to cover the absences of Dan Houston and Ken Farrell – was completely at sea: as he was, honestly, for most of the night. He wasn’t alone, and 19 disposals suggest he had a reasonable evening; but it seems Hinkley forgot that one of the reasons he was switched forward so successfully in mid-2023 was that he was beginning to look like a stunned mullet in the backline.
The Cats led Port 57-21 by the middle of the last quarter, in scores from stoppages. They beat Horne-Francis, Rozee, Vines, Butters (for one half), Drew… all without Stewart, with a late-career Dangerfield, a clutch of youngsters and a small forward trio who outplayed them all.
The Power had no answer to Mears, Close or Mannagh all night, with only the arrival of Mears midway through the final quarter providing some relief – but by that point, the Cats’ dominance had extended to all aspects and Port had officially fallen into the ‘nothing’ category.
It was another embarrassing September moment for Ken Hinkley and his men, cranking the pressure up to 11 and robbing them of a chance to make another home final next Friday night. The only consolation is that it was such an appalling performance that a physical, animated reaction was almost certain (God help Hinkley if he puts in another poor performance), and that things literally can’t get worse from here.
But I hope that in the furore that will follow over the Power’s horror performance, the Cats will be given due respect – for their outstanding, mesmerising display at Adelaide Oval, and for the magnificent club that staged it.
Sean Mannagh celebrates a goal with Jack Bowes. (Photo: Michael Wilson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
It’s a victory for the scouts who recognised Humphries’ potential when he was playing amongst the WAFL seniors and reserves last year; it’s a victory for the coaches who looked after Manaugh during months of playing in the VFL this year and turned him into a real point of difference for a team already performing well in September; it’s also a victory for Scott, who put the Power on the back foot by changing his tactics in stoppage time and contributed hugely to the mayhem that ensued.
For Geelong, victories like this might be the norm right now. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t look on with admiration, awe and a lot of envy, and want our club to be as professional, as well-run, as disciplined, as efficient as they are. GoodAs it has been going on for the last 18 years and continuing.
// This is called with the results from from FB.getLoginStatus().
var aslAccessToken = ”;
var aslPlatform = ”;
function statusChangeCallback(response) {
console.log(response);
if (response.status === ‘connected’) {
if(response.authResponse
&& response.authResponse.accessToken
&& response.authResponse.accessToken != ”){
aslAccessToken = response.authResponse.accessToken;
aslPlatform = ‘facebook’;
tryLoginRegister(aslAccessToken, aslPlatform, ”);
}
} else {
// The person is not logged into your app or we are unable to tell.
console.log(‘Please log ‘ +
‘into this app.’);
}
}
function cancelLoginPermissionsPrompt() {
document.querySelector(“#pm-login-dropdown-options-wrapper__permissions”).classList.add(‘u-d-none’);
document.querySelector(“#pm-register-dropdown-options-wrapper__permissions”).classList.add(‘u-d-none’);
document.querySelector(“#pm-login-dropdown-options-wrapper”).classList.remove(‘u-d-none’);
document.querySelector(“#pm-register-dropdown-options-wrapper”).classList.remove(‘u-d-none’);
}
function loginStateSecondChance() {
cancelLoginPermissionsPrompt();
FB.login(
function(response) {
},
{
scope: ’email’,
auth_type: ‘rerequest’
}
);
}
// This function is called when someone finishes with the Login
// Button. See the onlogin handler attached to it in the sample
// code below.
function checkLoginState() {
FB.getLoginStatus(function(response) {
var permissions = null;
FB.api(‘/me/permissions’, {
access_token: response.authResponse.accessToken,
}, function(response2) {
if(response2.data) {
permissions = response2.data;
} else {
permissions = ();
}
var emailPermissionGranted = false;
for(var x = 0; x < permissions.length; x++) {
if(permissions(x).permission === 'email' && permissions(x).status === 'granted') {
emailPermissionGranted = true;
}
}
if(emailPermissionGranted) {
statusChangeCallback(response);
} else {
document.querySelector("#pm-login-dropdown-options-wrapper__permissions").classList.remove('u-d-none');
document.querySelector("#pm-register-dropdown-options-wrapper__permissions").classList.remove('u-d-none');
document.querySelector("#pm-login-dropdown-options-wrapper").classList.add('u-d-none');
document.querySelector("#pm-register-dropdown-options-wrapper").classList.add('u-d-none');
}
});
});
}
window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
FB.init({
appId : 392528701662435,
cookie : true,
xfbml : true,
version : 'v3.3'
});
FB.AppEvents.logPageView();
FB.Event.subscribe('auth.login', function(response) {
var permissions = null;
FB.api('/me/permissions', {
access_token: response.authResponse.accessToken,
}, function(response2) {
if(response2.data) {
permissions = response2.data;
} else {
permissions = ();
}
var emailPermissionGranted = false;
for(var x = 0; x < permissions.length; x++) {
if(permissions(x).permission === 'email' && permissions(x).status === 'granted') {
emailPermissionGranted = true;
}
}
if(emailPermissionGranted) {
statusChangeCallback(response);
} else {
document.querySelector("#pm-login-dropdown-options-wrapper__permissions").classList.remove('u-d-none');
document.querySelector("#pm-register-dropdown-options-wrapper__permissions").classList.remove('u-d-none');
document.querySelector("#pm-login-dropdown-options-wrapper").classList.add('u-d-none');
document.querySelector("#pm-register-dropdown-options-wrapper").classList.add('u-d-none');
}
});
});
};
(function(d, s, id){
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)(0);
if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;}
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=();t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)(0);
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘1666565010224612’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);