Cats Feast on the Suns While the Rest of Us Watch On
There are two certainties in this great game of ours — the sun rises in the east, and Geelong, when they get the Suns up to GMHBA Stadium on a winter afternoon, will make them look like a mob of school kids let out for a Saturday kick. Round 14, 2026, was no exception, and I watched the whole sorry business from my armchair with a cup of tea going cold beside me.
The Fortress Does Its Thing Again
Look, I’ll be honest with you — I don’t particularly enjoy watching Geelong win. Never have. Back in my day, when it was still the VFL and you could get a pie and a cup of Bovril for pocket change, the Cats were just another team you had to beat in a final. Now they’re an institution, a machine, a perpetual motion engine of winning football that somehow keeps regenerating no matter how many blokes they send out the door.
GMHBA Stadium is one of those grounds that does half the work for the home side before the first bounce. The crowd gets in behind them, the surface suits their grinding, contested style, and visiting teams from Queensland — no disrespect intended — tend to arrive looking slightly bewildered, as if they’ve only just realised it’s actually cold down here in June. Gold Coast walked out there and you could tell from the warm-up that this was not going to be their afternoon.
What Geelong Did Well (And They Did Plenty)
The Cats’ midfield brigade was simply dominant in the contest from the opening bounce. Their clearance work was sharp, their decision-making under pressure was the kind of thing that makes other clubs’ football departments weep quietly into their spreadsheets. They moved the ball with purpose — not just zipping it around for the sake of looking good, but actually building pressure, finding the corridor, and giving their forwards a crack.
Their key forward — and I’ll give credit where it’s due even if it pains me — was a constant headache for the Suns’ defence. Marking contests, leading patterns, the lot. Old-school forward craft that I genuinely appreciate, even when it’s being deployed by a team wearing those blue and white hoops that I’ve spent the better part of six decades wanting to beat.
The half-back line was composed and rebounding cleanly. Geelong have this extraordinary ability to make their defensive structure look effortless, which is either a tribute to their coaching staff or an indictment of every other football department in the competition, possibly both.
Gold Coast: A Work Still Very Much in Progress
Now I’ve got a soft spot for the Suns. I shouldn’t, really. They’re a creature of AFL House and their entire existence is a product of the kind of expansion policy that the suits up at headquarters dream up over expensive lunches. But I feel for them in the way you feel for any young club trying to find its feet on someone else’s turf.
The problem for Gold Coast today was threefold: their contested ball work was poor, their defensive pressure coming off stoppages was far too soft, and their forward entries were predictable enough that the Cats’ backmen were reading them like a large-print edition of the Herald Sun. When you come to a place like Kardinia — sorry, GMHBA, they changed the name, the AFL changees everything eventually — and you can’t win the ball on the inside, you’re in trouble before quarter time.
Their youngsters showed moments. There were flashes of pace, a couple of goals that had the travelling contingent on their feet, bursts of the kind of attacking football that gives you a hint of what the Suns might be capable of when everything clicks. But moments don’t win football games. Quarters do. And Geelong won enough of them to make this comfortable.
The Umpiring: Yes, We Have to Talk About It
I’ll say what plenty of people in the Suns’ cheer squad were surely thinking by the third quarter — the free kick count was lopsided enough to raise an eyebrow or two. Now, I’m not suggesting anything sinister, and I want to be very clear about that. Umpires are human beings doing a difficult job in front of thirty-odd thousand people who mostly want to throttle them. But the decision-making around the contest in that third term was inconsistent enough to be genuinely frustrating to watch as a neutral.
\p>Some of those holding the ball calls on Gold Coast players were marginal at best. You can make a case for them. You can also make a case against. That’s footy. It’s always been footy. Back in my day, you just copped it and got on with it, but the AFL’s endless tinkering with the rules has created so many grey areas that nobody — including the umpires, bless them — knows exactly where the line is half the time.
What This Means for the Cats’ September Ambitions
Geelong sit in a very healthy position on the ladder heading deeper into the season, and a win like this — against a side with something to prove, at home, executed with reasonable clinical efficiency — is exactly the kind of tick-the-box performance that finals-bound teams need in their ledger. They’re not playing their absolute best football yet, and that’s what makes them genuinely dangerous.
The scary thing about this Cats side is the sense that they’re still warming up. Their best players haven’t all had career-best games in the same match yet this season. When that happens — and it will happen, probably in September when the stakes are highest, because of course it will, this is Geelong — the rest of the competition is going to need a very good plan and a fair bit of luck.
Whether they can go all the way is a question for another day. But I’ll tell you this much: after watching them handle the Suns with that kind of unhurried authority, I wouldn’t be backing against them in a final.
The Broader Picture: Queensland Clubs and the Southern Challenge
There’s a broader conversation to be had here about Queensland clubs coming south to play in proper football weather, and whether the competition structure does enough to account for the genuine disadvantage those teams face. I’ve long thought the draw could be fairer in that regard — though knowing AFL House, any tinkering they do will somehow make it worse and cost the clubs an extra forty grand in administrative fees.
Gold Coast are building something real. Their list has genuine talent and their coaching group understands what they’re trying to do. But building a football club takes time, and playing Geelong at GMHBA in the depths of a Victorian winter is not the ideal environment for a teaching moment.
Final Thoughts From the Armchair
Geelong won. Of course they did. The Cats at home are about as reliable as anything in this competition, and Gold Coast, for all their promise, weren’t ready to cause an upset today. The final margin flattered neither side in particular — it was what it was, a professional performance from a polished side against a developing one.
I’ll go back to watching Carlton now, and trying to convince myself that we’re only a couple of pieces away from something special. We’ve been a couple of pieces away for quite some time, if I’m being honest, but that’s my cross to bear and I’ll bear it with the dignity appropriate to a man of my vintage and footy education.
Until next week, then. Try not to let the AFL change too many rules between now and Saturday.
