Not since the days of Cats legend, Cameron Ling has Geelong had a designated tagger with a goal of locking down the best players in the competition. 

Once considered a vital part of any game plan, tagging has become a lost art form in the modern game as teams prefer to trust their structures instead. 

But the debate has been reignited recently, with some teams choosing to use players in a run-with role against some of the competition's dominant forces. 

Geelong coach, Chris Scott was quizzed on his thoughts around tagging when he joined AFL360 on Monday night. 

"There is a cost to tagging, very few teams play one on one where they think they are going to take out a certain player," Scott said. 

"Every team prioritises their structures and their set-ups first.

"But what I will say, no team plays Collingwood and puts no time or effort into stopping Nick Daicos. It all happens on a spectrum, but two things need to be true for you to be able to completely tag a player out.

"One is that it needs to trump the rest of your structure, but you also need to have a guy that can do it. Plenty of teams try, but guys like Dangerfield in his prime, I would say that he was un-taggable.

"The reason a lot of coaches don't want to talk about it is because they prioritise other things, and to tag someone would mean compromising on other things."

Geelong are set to kickoff their 2025 campaign on Saturday afternoon, as they take on Fremantle at GMHBA Stadium. 

After their Opening Round match was postponed, the Cats needed to alter their preparations in order to be ready for this weekend against the Dockers. 

Scott believes that there are both positives and negatives to having an extra week of preparation, but he is confident that his team will be ready to go on Saturday. 

"There is a lot of work that goes into round one, it is quite extreme the difference in your preparations between round one and round two," Scott said. 

"You have got so long to think about it and even though we do play Brisbane again in round three, it will be a different situation so the work will need to be done again.

"There are always positives and negatives in these situations, I think our job is to focus on the positives and there were a few for us.

"We will have a few guys that will be better on Saturday than they would have been last Thursday, having more time means you can control your destiny a bit. Bailey will play, he is in really good shape and he is ready to go."