Outside of the COVID years, it’s almost 30 years to the day since an Essendon team came down the highway to play the Cats.
It was Round 21, 1993, the year the ‘Baby Bombers’ would go on to win their 15th flag, and many Cats fans would see that year, rather than the Grand Finals of 1989, 92, 94 and 95 as the one that got away.
It’s also a season that also has some similarities to 2023 as it’s currently poised.
But let’s go back before we go too far forward.
After losing the 1992 Grand Final to the West Coast Eagles, then Cats coach Malcom Blight started preparing for the 1993 season by implementing a more defensive game plan.
The Cats were one of the more high octane, exciting, high scoring teams the League had ever seen, but Blight thought a tougher defensive edge could be what put them over the hump.
But by Round 16, and coming off a 71 point loss to the Tony Locket-less Saints, changes were made and the Cats were finally unleashed, and they would go on to reel off one of the more electric end of year runs in the history of the game.
Cameron Ling, then a diminutive young Cats fan in the stands of Kardinia Park remembers it like it was yesterday.
“They had to win their last five games and they, on almost a rotating basis, they played the top team in four of those," he told the To the Final Bell podcast.
“They'd knock one off and that team would drop back down and someone else would jump up to top and then the Cats had to take them on.”
The run started with a win over the fifth placed Magpies, a 15 goal thumping of the second placed North Melbourne, and an 82 point demolition of the top of the table Hawks going into the Round 20 bye.
But that didn’t nothing to half the momentum of the fast finishing Cats as they dispatched the Bombers in that final meeting at Kardinia Park before travelling west and knocking over their 92 nemesis, the Eagles by 20 points.
But there was one hurdle to clear in a season that for the last time rewarded the top six finishes, before going to a final 8 the following year.
“Then they kept winning, and kept winning. They beat West Coast in Perth to give themselves a chance and then they relied on Collingwood to beat Adelaide in the final game of the round, but the result went against us and we didn't make the finals,” Ling said.
“I always thought that was out big chance of winning the flag in 1993. We were flying.”
Fast forward to now and Geelong sit in 8th spot with seven games remaining and six of those opponents currently sitting above them on the ladder.
If for a quirk of history, that red hot Geelong team missed out by percentage, but if they had of made it, history just may been very different.
It's now 30 years on and again the Cats have their destiny in their hands.
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