Geelong coach Chris Scott has rubbished the suggestion that they are back on track to win the AFL premiership, deriding it as amateurish talk.
With their backs against the wall, the Cats were outstanding in Friday night’s semi-final and upset Sydney by 59 points.
The next step is even harder – an Adelaide Oval preliminary final on Friday night against the Crows.
The win over Sydney came a week after their disappointing qualifying final loss to Richmond.
Given what happened against the Tigers and their last couple of losses to the Swans, the Cats were at long odds.
Then it looked even more grim when key defender Tom Lonergan, their No.1 match-up for Sydney star Lance Franklin, was put out of action on Friday with food poisoning.
But the move of playing Patrick Dangerfield out of the goalsquare was inspired, throwing the Swans off balance from the start, and Geelong were relentless with their pressure.
Still, Scott bristled when it was put to him that after such a fine win, the Cats must believe again that they can win the flag.
“I’m not going to buy into any of that, the same way that I don’t think we’re a basket case when we lose and we’re not superstars when we win,” he said.
“That’s for the C-graders.”
Captain Joel Selwood said Scott should be in the match votes, saying he and the rest of the coaching staff had rallied the players superbly in the wake of the Richmond loss.
“The coach set the standard … he was the best ‘player’ (on Friday night),” Selwood said.
Again, Scott strongly disagreed when he was told of the sentiment.
“The players are always the ones who implement and we had a plan that everyone believed in,” he said.
Scott was asked what he had done during the week to help prompt such a big turnaround from how they played against Richmond.
“It doesn’t fit within a news grab to say ‘this is the one sentence we decided to go with’ – it’s more complicated than that,” he said.
“We needed to talk about, as a group … on how we could win the game, not all the problems we had the previous week.
“People at club level tend to move on a lot quicker than people on the outside, because they can’t impact it.
“They have nothing to work on – they’re just still pissed off about last week.”
Scott said Lonergan, who retires at the end of the season, would return from his illness for the Adelaide game.
He added that Tom Stewart only went off late in the game as a precaution because of hamstring tightness.