Here are some of the key takeaways from coach Chris Scott's post-match press conference, presented by Morris Finance.
Scott’s opening statement post-game...
It is really difficult in the moment to talk about anything that is positive given the way we all feel and we will feel for quite some time, but I think in the fullness of time we will reflect on not only this year but the last two years under a lot of adversity and how well our Club has stuck together and found a way to give all of our people a chance at the ultimate.
We have fallen short, and it is a bitter pill to swallow but our Club has over a long period of time found a way to recover from difficult situations and I think we are in that situation again where we have got a choice to make. We can rollover or we can take the time we need to regroup. We were pretty battered towards the end of the season. Not just the last couple of weeks but probably for six weeks leading into the finals series and there are a few things that I won’t speak about tonight that’ll become clearer over the next few weeks, but suffice to say I am proud of the way our guys endured and we just completely ran out of steam by tonight.
Scott on if the playing group is resilient enough to bounce back from this type of loss…
Well, that’s the challenge. It won’t matter if I defend it really strongly and do a great job of convincing you that they are resilient. All that will matter is what happens over the next four to six months in preparation for next year.
I can say with some confidence is what we have done in the past is what we will do in the future. Make good decisions, work together, stick together, support each other, and give our Club every chance possible to succeed shorter and long term. So, that’s all part of the puzzle but we are in a brutally difficult competition that is in effect a handicap and so the longer you are up towards the top, the harder it gets. I understand that part of it but that was our challenge at the end of 2010, and I suspect it is still our challenge now.
Scott on the strength of list and impact it has on the development of younger players…
It’s the price you pay playing in the successful Club as a young player. There is a different alternative, you can play a bit more and finish in the bottom four. I am not going to say this is definitively our strategy but I think it’s very underrated, especially if you use history as a guide, the dominant Geelong teams through the end of the first decade of this century have played a lot of VFL football and there is a very strong argument to say that is a good grounding to play your best football in your early twenties but again every case is a little bit different and I’d probably prefer to be a little bit better headspace to address that more coherently than I am at the moment.
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