I'd argue this was his worst performance in what has been a dismal year for him.
The game was played completely on Geelong's terms almost from start to finish. Geelong know we want to move the ball quick and launch from half back so what do they do?
Engineer Harry Taylor, one of the better intercept markers in the competition as a spare in defence, alternating with Corey Enright forcing us to go slow and wide. Meanwhile our spare took 13 mins to touch the ball.
What did we do? Sat and watched and kicked 2 goals in the first half.
We've got the best defender in the comp and they have one of the best couple of key forwards. So we sent our third best big defender to him and watched him eat him for a quarter and get the confidence of him and his team up, before doing the obvious at quarter time.
The Steve Morris saga continued. After finally seeing what was obvious to all and sending him back to defence, he bobs up forward again. Ok maybe Geelong didn't have a small forward for him to go to, although I'd have liked to see him with Motlop or Duncan but when it is clear him playing forward doesn't work why didn't we play one of the kids that got dropped instead?
Our ability to score was once again non existent, especially in the first half but for some reason Dustin didn't seem to spend anywhere near the time deep forward he usually does. In the final quarter when we needed to find quick goals our most likely prospect was floating around half back.
Grigg did a great job on Selwood in the first half, but at some point in the second half we decided to move him off and put Miles on him. Grigg generated some shaky disposals and did kick a goal in the last, but Selwood became the difference in the last quarter. As he does.
But the play that summed up Hardwick as a coach for me came at the end, after we kicked a goal to get back to within 2 with about a minute and a half or so to go.
Geelong, very predictably sent two back in defence. Now you'd expect the logical response would be to send more forwards to make it one-on-one all over the ground, but not our Damien. He just sat and let it roll. Sound familiar? We win the clearance and the Geelong spares mop it up and the brief chance we had is snuffed out.
We played a club that is on the wane today and had several good players out and Steve Johnson playing like he was on the take. We 'came to play' in Hardwick speak but didn't get it done because we were out-coached.
I would go as far as to say that if everything else remained constant from today and the coaches changed boxes, we win.
