The match started rather well for Geelong,
with the home side bagging the first four goals, the quadruple book-ended by
two from Mitch Clark, who is already looking like a Coleman Medal contender.
But the ominous portents were already there: the breezy weather conditions and
the hard-fought midfield battle would ensure that the match would be
low-scoring, and Robin Nahas’s pouncing on a loose ball in the forward fifty to
kick North’s only goal of the term showed that the Kangaroos were the better
side at extracting the ball from the packs.
The other thing that went wrong for the
Pivotonians was accuracy in front of goal: Tom Hawkins missed an easy one first
up in the second stanza, and their inability to convert would haunt the Cats at
the death. Ex-Carlton man Jarrad Waite was the key to a strong period for la albiceleste, as five goals ensured
that they went to half-time four points up against an injury-ravaged Geelong
side who sometimes looked as if they feared going in hard for the contested
ball. When Ben Brown, the revelation of last season’s semi-final between these
same clubs, torpedoed the first major of the second half, it was time to warm
up the supersub, Steve Johnson.
The mid-section of the third quarter was
characterised by more back-and-forth action in el centrocampo, scrappy but not as spectacular as when the likes of
Port Adelaide, Sydney, and Fremantle do it, and a certain legend of the game in
the commentary box was spot-on when he coolly remarked that neither of these
sides look to be top-four material. It ended when Tom Hawkins marked and goaled
in the forward line. There were misses at one end, rushed behinds at the other,
but Johnson’s arrival was greeted with a visible lift by the home side, as
Cameron Guthrie and George Horlin-Smith combined for a goal.
The Hothamites snatched two more behinds to
lead by a goal at three-quarter time; both teams’ employment of a libero (or ‘loose man in defence’ as
they say in Anglo-Saxon) making it difficult to break through the lines.
Johnson kicked the first major of the final term, but Brown responded. Clark
took a nice grab and goaled, but the dam broke from there on in, as North ran
away with it, surviving a late-quarter flurry of biancoazzurri behinds to hang on by sixteen points.
Geelong 9.13.67 – North Melbourne
12.11.83
Goals: Clark 3, Johnson 2, Caddy, Duncan,
Guthrie, Hawkins (Geel.); Nahas 3, Waite 3, Brown 2, Bastinac, Dumont,
Goldstein, Petrie (N. M.)
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