Geelong find fresh ways to defy the AFL’s law of gravity in rise to top of the ladder

“No rebuild,” Chris Scott promised the Geelong players and supporters half a decade ago. “No acquiescence to equalisation.” In the AFL, the theory goes, the house always wins. The house beat Alastair Clarkson’s Hawthorn. It beat Damien Hardwick’s Richmond. You take your turn at the bottom. That’s the deal. That’s the price of being good.

After all, you can defy the handicapper all you like but you can’t fight father time. Many of Scott’s best players turned up to the 2022 premiership celebrations wearing wigs and wielding walking sticks. The flag, a decade in the making and the end of the Joel Selwood era, seemed like a full stop. In 2023, the older players were legless, the backline was decimated, and youngsters didn’t seem ready.

Related: Collingwood and Essendon’s Anzac Day draw a tortuous but fitting result | Jonathan Horn

Glaringly, and unusually, the midfield lacked depth and mongrel. Selwood wrote a book, welcomed a son, bobbed up on hair replacement ads and had a grandstand named after him. But it’s doubtful whether even he could have carried that midfield.

How then, are the Cats currently undefeated and a game clear on top of the AFL ladder? Some say it’s the leg-ups they get from governments of all stripes. Some say it’s their ever-expanding catchment area (“anywhere west of Werribee and east of Adelaide,” Scott says). Some blame cheating umpires. Some point to their ability to identify, retain, nurture and utilise talent.

It helps, of course, to have a player like Jeremy Cameron. Early in Saturday’s game, he squeezed the ball on its pointy ends, made out he was having a long-range shot, and caressed the perfect pitching wedge to Tanner Bruhn.

I can’t recall any footballer who has played like Cameron. The closest I can think of is Terry Daniher. He goes wherever he fancies and wherever he’s needed. He’s one of those players who’s best enjoyed from as high in the stands as possible. You get a better sense of Patrick Cripps’ and Patrick Dangerfield’s talents by being close to the fence. But Cameron’s running patterns, his locomotion, his workrate, and his ability to go from a steady trot to a full gallop are best appreciated from high altitude.

Against weaker teams, in those early Sunday afternoon fixtures at Kardinia Park that are quickly put to bed and then forgotten, he can seem like a footballer going at half pace, a man whose mind is on the milking. But at a full MCG, against a proper opponent, in a game with real weight, there’s arguably no more engaged and dangerous footballer in the country.

It’s not the superstars who are the key to this Geelong team however. It’s not even its backline, stocked with rookie picks, held together by headbands, and resembling a Swedish volleyball team. Instead, it’s their conduits. It’s players like Gryan Miers, Brad Close and Tyson Stengle, players who do all the unrewarded running, who allow them to transition as high speed, who work high up the ground and who spread and link in perfect synchrony.

There’s no better group at punishing errors, and at creasing multiple overlap handballs. They’re all unprepossessing types, all utilities, all draft bargains, and all near on impossible to pinpoint what position they play from week to week. Prior to the 2022 flag, the Cats only seemed to have two modes – slow and steady, or slow and steady followed by a last-ditch release of the handbrake. Now the ball movement is crisp and swift and it’s all because of their hard running ‘bitzers’.

Miers was taken at pick 57 in the 2017 national draft, while Close, Jack Henry, Ollie Dempsey, Mark Blicavs, Tom Atkins, and Zach Guthrie were all taken after pick 11 in their rookie drafts. Scott backed them in when many had written them off.

For years, Guthrie always looked like the youngest, the slightest and the most vulnerable player on the field. You almost winced watching him in the 2017 qualifying final, not a night for the frail or flaky. But Scott kept playing him and he’s grown into a reliable and resolute defender who drifts across, peels off and mops up.

Likewise, Miers was pegged early as a goalsneak and a forward pressure player. But he’s so much more than that now. He ran more than 16 kilometres on Saturday, dicing, dinking, linking and making neat little incisions with his kicks.

There was a lot of airing of grievances from Carlton people on Saturday night – the umpiring, the injury list, the squandered set shots. But ultimately, it was a win for efficiency over brute force.

Both sides reconvene in seven weeks. Such are the vagaries and lunacies of the AFL fixture. They’re two playing lists that have been constructed completely differently, two teams that play completely different brands, and two clubs surely on a September collision course.