Chris Scott has shed light on Geelong’s process that saw the club appoint Patrick Dangerfield captain, revealing not all players were given an equal vote.
Dangerfield was installed as Joel Selwood’s successor across the weekend when the Cats released the news of their new leadership group. Tom Stewart will serve as his vice-captain in a streamlined leadership group.
Geelong was among the last teams to announce their captain for 2023, with Brisbane the only side remaining ahead of Round 1 less than three weeks away.
Speaking on the process that began when Selwood retired in the week after the 2022 Grand Final, Scott said it was logical that senior players were given a more weighted vote.
“It was a relatively long process to get to a pretty logical conclusion, in my opinion,” Scott began on SEN’s Whateley.
“But it was important to us to work through that process… I think there is a bit of a school of thought out there that a lot of these decisions are contingent on a player vote. That’s not the way we work.
“Even if you think through it logically, a third of our list is very, very new and sort of at the stage where they don’t know what they don’t know.
“So an equal vote for a first-year player to a 10-year veteran doesn’t make much sense. But the important thing for us was we did make it a whole club thing because the role of a captain has evolved over the years.”
Scott also revealed that Geelong was interested modernising what a captain looked like in 2023 and going forward.
“While you’d love your captain to be an on-field leader, the kind of ‘follow me’ guy the reality is there’s a whole lot of work that needs to be done off-field… it gave us a chance to reassess what we wanted from that group of people and it became clear to us that we didn’t think a leadership group of six players, for example, was representative of who we are,” the Geelong coach continued.
He added: “Once we were clear on what we wanted from those roles it was a process of going to all the key people and having a mature discussion about it. In the end, we got to a unanimous spot, but it probably wasn’t the structured process leadership consultants would have you go through”.
As for Dangerfield as captain, the dual-premiership coach is hoping for more of the same from his Brownlow Medallist.
Dangerfield came to Geelong at the end of 2015 as a high-profile recruit and won the league’s top individual honour in his first year as a Cat.
But Scott says Dangerfield has never sought recognition from his teammates, a trait that will hold him in good stead as the new captain of the reigning premiers.
“In my mind… I just want him to be exactly what he was last year and what he was the year before,” Scott said of Dangerfield.
“(That is) in the context that we’re always changing… but in terms of how he goes about it, he doesn’t need to be anything different.
“When he came to our footy club he had every right to come in and say, ‘I’m already a really good player and I deserve as much recognition as anyone else’. He didn’t take that approach, his approach was ‘I’m here to support Joel’, and he’s done that as well as anyone could have hoped for.
“Now that’s what we're asking for the 12-15 senior players that fit in under him.”
Dangerfield was announced to the playing group before Geelong dominated Hawthorn in the first match simulation pre-season game, but his first official test comes in Round 1 against Collingwood.