WHEN Collingwood surged the ball forward through the centre of the ground with seconds remaining on Friday night, Gary Rohan dashed into picture and put the final nail into the Pies coffin.

The former Swan came from seemingly nowhere to lay a hip and shoulder on Tom Phillips, win the ball and send it back the Cats’ way.

It was exactly why Rohan had been brought to the club, bringing the pressure the Cats have been searching desperately seeking for some time.

In his last two seasons in Sydney Rohan recorded 15 run-down tackles, ranked second in the league according to the 2019 AFL Prospectus.

The Swans scored from 36 per cent of turnovers caused by his pressure in that period, ranked third of the top-350 pressure players in the league.

Forward half play was identified by the Geelong coaching staff as a key area of improvement over the off-season, as coach Chris Scott confirmed in a pre-season interview with SEN 1116.

“We thought there was a serious flaw in our game style in that our forward half numbers for the most part were quite poor,” Scott said.

“A lot of that related to personnel. We’ve had some injury troubles over the last three or four years that meant we haven’t had much continuity in that area.”

“The things that we can control we’ve been pretty aggressive in trying to shift. That goes from our list management strategy where we targeted a few players that we thought could help us where we had a bit of a deficit.”

That new-look forward six stood up to the first real test of the year and passed with flying colours.

Luke Dahlhaus, Tom Atkins shared 11 tackles between them as the Cats buzzed around the forward half with a defensive fervour that had been lacking at key times last year.

Geelong wanted to bring the pressure, targeted pressure players over the off-season and the results spoke for themselves.

Now that the Cats have brought the heat, the task is to keep bringing it each and every week.