Geelong now face an uphill battle to defend their premiership in 2023 after slumping to a 6-7 record following their 110-72 loss to Port Adelaide on Thursday night.
Now probably needing to go unbeaten for the rest of the home and away season to make the top four, it seems incredibly unlikely that Geelong will be able to compete at the very pointy end of the season.
SEN’s David King was critical of the Cats following their 0-3 start to the season and he believes the same issues are evident now with too much relying on too few, labelling the side the ‘four-cylinder Cats’.
“They've been an unbelievable footy club and they still won't allow themselves to go into decline and I admire that,” King told SEN Breakfast.
“But this season it looks like they're running on four cylinders – (Tom) Stewart, (Patrick) Dangerfield, (Jeremy) Cameron and (Tom) Hawkins - if those four aren't firing and aren't healthy, then it just becomes too much.
“That doesn't mean they can't gather, and they can't get a few more minutes into those that are just finding their way back from injury.
“I'd love to know where we sit with the health of Patrick Dangerfield this morning, which we're still yet to find out, but right now, that's them, they're the four-cylinder Cats.”
While King expects the Cats to eventually get on somewhat of a run and look like an elite side when everything clicks, he feels they’ll be coming from too far back to mount a genuine premiership push.
“I said they were cooked at the start of the year because those guys looked like they were labouring and then they had a resurgence for probably two or three weeks, they looked like they were going to gather and come,” King said.
“I understand that when they're in form, they're an awesome line-up and they’ll get back to Kardinia Park and it'll be the same again, there’ll be a two-week period in the back half of the season where we’ll be going, ‘You know, if they get in, they could cause some problems’.
“We'll all say that, but the reality is they're going to finish somewhere between five and eight and you just can't win it from somewhere between five and eight.”
Co-host Kane Cornes agreed with King’s take that they may be out of the premiership race as their unsustainable game plan was found out after quarter-time on Thursday against the Power.
“I agree with that,” Cornes said.
“You need to be top four, that's where you need to be (to win the premiership).
“But they're a bit of a tease at the moment because I'm sitting there watching it live in the first quarter last night going, ‘This is awesome’.
“They came with a plan, Port Adelaide had something like five uncontested marks in the first 28 minutes of that game.
“They shut them down, they protected the corridor and then when they got it inside their forward 50 at ground level, their forwards were devastating, they honestly were.
“But their plan was unsustainable, they couldn't maintain that for four quarters, not even three quarters.”
Geelong, who holds a 6-7 record, will be desperate to put in a big performance when they host third-placed Melbourne at GMHBA Stadium next Thursday.