Geelong’s senior coach says he’ll put his best men forward for Round 1 this Thursday night to ensure they’re in the best possible position to take on the Crows.  

Chris Scott won’t be taking any chances after Adelaide’s consistent performance during this year’s NAB Challenge.

“Well their preseason form is pretty good, you can’t do much than win your three practice games,” Scott said.  

“They play some attacking footy and they’ve added some dangerous forwards into their attacking mix and they like to play fast aggressive footy. They’ve got some different variations too and they seem to be defending pretty strongly.”

The first series of Round 1 has reinforced how precarious this year’s competition will be, with a number of top ladder sides already being caught off guard, including Sydney, Richmond and Collingwood.

Both Scott and the Cats realise they can’t afford to go in lightly otherwise peril is sure to strike.    

“Given last night’s performance by GWS I think their performance is up there, with only one on the bench we would count that as a pretty good one. We’re preparing for this game knowing that we’ve got to play our absolute best or we’ll get knocked over.”

Another hindrance that the Cats are preparing for this Thursday night is James Podsiadly.

The Cats know exceedingly well what their ex-teammate is capable of doing and they hope to shut him down as best they can.     

“We’ll play our best available player on Pods, there are two or three obvious ones there, as we know exactly what he can do so that doesn’t give us a great deal of confidence to be honest, it represents a serious obstacle that we need to overcome,” Scott explained.  

However, Scott is assured that his Cats have the preparation and strength to deliver a solid battle.

“Without sounding over confident we’ve got what we needed from the practice games.”

“We thought the first NAB Cup game was at a standard as high as any game early in the season.

“We played three pretty hard games for different reasons including a few injuries, but we didn’t really get injuries during the game it was more training incidents or bad luck issues, but no we’re really confident we’re going into Round 1 with our preparation really sound.”

Despite the number of upsets the Cats have endured this year, Scott expects his team to perform at their highest level.   

“We certainly won’t have any excuses, as every club has injuries and bad luck,” Scott says.  

“We won’t be saying we played poorly because we didn’t have x, y and z.”  

The Cats will come head-to-head with the Crows for their first game of 2014 at Simonds Stadium this Thursday night.