Scott on the emotion in a Preliminary Final week

There is two sides of that coin.

There is the tension that manifests in a bit of anxiety and sweaty palms, but then there is the other part that is as close to the exhilaration that you would get from jumping out of a plane.

Again, I sort of look at it as the price of admission.

You can't get this feeling and have this opportunity in front of us, without the wearing the fact that there is going to be some bits that are less than comfortable. 

Scott on Rhys Stanley's availability

We are still holding on that decision at the moment.

It hasn't surprised me, but we have been so impressed with the progress he has made.

I think the short answer is that we could play him tomorrow night, and now we are just weighing up whether we should. 

Scott on whether Preliminary Final experience helps

I hope so, but it is never something that I have been able to assess with any clarity.

This is maybe a little bit of a concession that I shouldn't make on the eve of a Prelim Final, but I don't feel that much better now than I did before my first Prelim Final.

I think experience does count to an extent, but my experience is that it's not like you kick back and say I have been here before, it'll be fine.

Coming back to that natural tension you feel, sometimes it manifests in quite uncomfortable feelings. But pretty quickly you get to the point where, and I think this is where the experience does help, these moments are what you need to go through to give yourself a chance at the big one. 

Scott on how much work the Cats put into Jai Newcombe

A lot, but we have probably thought that way for a long time around the competition.

It is actually not the right answer in my opinion to say that when you are at this time of year, against the best teams, they have all got good midfields. You look around and whoever the bottom four couple of teams are, they have got stars in there as well.

I think the competition is much more even, in terms of those needle moving players within teams than it has ever been.

Jai is sort of part of that for them, but he is not the whole picture. I look at them and the way they have evolved, they are quite complete.

A lot of teams are realising that if you just rely on one or two players and they get shut down, you are in big trouble. I don't think the Hawks are in that category. 

Scott on the rivalry from his perspective

I barracked for Hawthorn as a kid and the 1989 Grand Final was amazing, but it doesn't shape the way I think about these games one way or the other.

Hawthorn and Geelong had a great rivalry, maybe this is a bit of a character flaw but certainly when it comes to the romanticism of the AFL world and the theatrics, I don't even really think that much about the rivalry we had when we were playing against them.

I just think more pragmatically, it is a different era, a completely different situation, different group of players.

But I reckon the fans should be completely out of their skin, when it comes to this game.

You could hardly script it better; two sold out Prelim Finals at the MCG, Hawthorn and Geelong on Friday night, go for your life.