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Sport Nation
Brereton slams Cats' Friday night performance
Nicholas Quinlan • June 21st, 2025 4:56 pm
Dermott Brereton wonders whether the Geelong Cats struggled with the narrowness of their home ground in their performance against Brisbane on Friday night.
Despite the importance of the game for Geelong, being captain Patrick Dangerfield’s 350th game, a chance to solidify second place on the ladder and the debut of the Penn State-inspired whiteout at GMHBA Stadium, the Cats were defeated by 41 points to the Lions.
This was despite having only one less scoring shot than Brisbane.
Friday night’s victory for the Lions means it is the first time under Chris Fagan that Brisbane has beaten Geelong at GMHBA Stadium. It also means they will sit second on the ladder for the remainder of the round.
As part of the review of the game on SEN’s Crunch Time, Brereton felt that this was the worst kicking performance he had seen Geelong do at their home ground.
“I left there last night thinking, the style of game that Geelong tried to play and maybe we are looking for stuff that might not even be there,” Brereton acknowledged.
“I’ve never seen them kick so poorly.
“This team, this era of team, I’ve never seen them kick so poorly and make the shot selection so poorly where they just got chopped off time and time again.
“They were screaming out for, ‘Get down the line, just play the straight bat on it’.
“Just take it 55 metres down the line, compete, take it to a boundary line stoppage. But they kept trying to go inboard and they kept getting chopped off.
“And I know their kicking was poor at goal but the shot selection.
“And I was thinking, is that ground too narrow for the way they want to play?.
“For the first time ever it had me thinking, ‘Are they playing that oval, GMHBA Stadium, worse than they have ever played it before?’”
From an analytics point of view, it showed that Geelong had an uncharacteristic night in front of goal as they missed chances that they usually score from.
This season, Geelong currently sits second for shot at goal accuracy at 51.8%, second for shot efficiency at 52.8% and first for goal efficiency at 27.3% as per AFL Stats showing how unlikely their scoreline of 6.15 was.
The match against the Lions is also only the fourth time that Geelong have scored more points than goals this season.
Geelong’s will have plenty of time to recover from their defeat as they have the bye next week.
Their next match will be back at GMHBA Stadium when they Richmond on the 5th of July.
