Geelong coach Chris Scott says he won’t be expecting anything new from the club’s new leaders, Patrick Dangerfield and Tom Stewart, saying that they’re in the position they’re in because of who they already are.
The Cats announced on Saturday that Dangerfield will be succeeding premiership skipper Joel Selwood in the role he’d held since the 2012 season, with Tom Stewart as deputy.
Speaking with Gerard Whately on SEN this week, Scott said that neither player should carry himself any differently in lieu of their new title.
“I just want him (Dangerfield) to be exactly like he was last year and exactly like he was the year before in the context of the understanding of we're always changing, we're always evolving as a team. But in terms of the way he goes about it he shouldn't think that he needs to be anything different,” Scott said.
“Tom is the same. We think they're great representatives of our group because of what they already do. So most of that in my mind is what you do on the field, it's less what you say and more what you do, and then it's about not over-indexing on thinking now because I have a title next to my name that I have to behave differently or say more around the club.”
The Cats coach also opened up on the process of selecting the new on-field leaders, a process that prioritised the view of the senior players on the basis of their experience.
“It was a relatively long process to get to a pretty logical conclusion, in my opinion,” he said. “But it was important to us to work through that process, but having said that it wasn't a really structured process. I think there is a a school of thought out there that a lot of these decisions are contingent on a player vote. That’s not the way we work.
“Even if you think through it logically, a third of our list is very, very new and at the stage where they don’t know what they don’t know.
“So an equal vote for a first-year player to a 10-year veteran doesn’t make much sense. But the important part for us was we did make it a whole club thing because the role of a captain has evolved over the years.”
One thing the club was clear on, according to Scott, was that they’d adopt a formal, two-person leadership structure.
“The club was really clear that we did want an official leadership structure, which was one captain and one vice captain. Once we were clear on what we wanted from those roles it was a process of going to all the key people and having a mature discussion around it. In the end, we got to a unanimous spot, but it probably wasn’t the structured process leadership consultants would have you go through”.
