PATRICK Dangerfield has highlighted a duo of first-year Cats as standout performers amongst the club’s young playing stocks.

The Cats vice-captain was quick to underline the efforts of father-son selection Oscar Brownless and mature-age ruckman Darcy Fort, with the pair making a quick transition to training at the top level.

“Oscar Brownless has been pretty impressive since he’s come to the club and a few of our mature-age recruits as well – big Forty (Darcy Fort) has been sensational,” Dangerfield said.  

“There are a lot of young faces (on the list), it’s scary when we’ve got players that were born in the year 2000. It makes you feel pretty old.

“They’ve all shown at different stages why we’ve recruited them… it’s great to see.”

Dangerfield says the level of competition has been high with the start of the season proper growing nearer by the day.

“We’ve been training pretty fiercely and obviously ramping it up again once we got back from our Christmas break,” he says.

“It’s been a really physical training block for us and it’s what we need to do. It’s an area we need to improve and it wakes you up early in the session.”