GEELONG coach Chris Scott says Tim Kelly was simply too good to refuse a spot in the side from the moment he walked through the doors at GMHBA Stadium.

It was some good fortune allowed smooth-moving mid to start his career in the middle of the ground.

“We didn’t really know what we had when we took him at pick 24 in the draft. He’d been overlooked five times,” Scott said on Fox Footy.

READ: FOUR ALL AUSTRALIAN CATS

“We probably thought we had a player who could come in and play relatively early in the season, probably as a forward.”

“He played through the preseason competition in the midfield because a few of our older guns had a later start to the season and he was just so good that we couldn’t refuse the opportunity to bring him in.”

“In my view he could have been All Australian in his first year, he took our team by storm really.”

Scott says Kelly didn’t just scrape his way into the All Australian side in 2019, instead leading the competition as one of the league’s premier players.

“The All Australian midfield is so hard to break into but particularly through the first half of this year, his form was just overwhelming,” Scott said.

“There was a stage there where I think he was the best midfielder in the competition.”

“When you look at the calibre of the midfielders in particular, especially when you force a few guys out to the wing, Dangerfield and Walters etc in the forward line, to get your way into an All Australian team after being a WAFL player for five or six years and being an apprentice electrician is just a remarkable performance.”