The Cat Who's Over The Moon Finally Gets His Name On A Locker
The Age
Saturday June 3, 2006
HIS teammates call him "Moons". And the opposition fans who like to really give him as much stick as they can probably like to think he's from the moon, with his wild hair and occasional brain explosions that seem as heavily influenced by the lunar body as anything else.
Today, Cameron Mooney will achieve a less celestial but more earthly milestone of playing 100 games for the Geelong Football Club.Mooney reached 100 AFL games last year - having played 11 somewhat random games for the Kangaroos - and while it was an important occasion, it is clear today's milestone carries a greater resonance because without the Cats and the faith of coach Mark Thompson, Mooney, by his own admission, probably would have been lost to football years ago."If I hadn't come to Geelong when I did, I wouldn't have played 50. No question. I just would not have got there," the always-candid Mooney said this week. "For about two or three seasons, I basically had Bomber just giving me games when most other coaches wouldn't have. So I would have been thrown out of the system a long time ago but he kept giving me games and eventually I turned things around."He went through a lot of effort to get me to Geelong after the '99 season and I think he just didn't want to throw me out the door and he had a bit of faith in me and I'm finally paying him back, I think."So it's quite nice, I finally get my name on the locker, I've been waiting to get my name on one down in Geelong for six or seven years now. It took a long time to get there, a lot longer than most."With the playing group and coach under intense scrutiny for performing well below what many consider their best, rather than a best-on-ground performance to cap off his milestone today, Mooney, a member of the leadership group, said he would trade it all for a win to get the season back on track."Mate, I don't care if I get knocked out in the first two minutes and we win, just as long as we win. That's all I want right now, a win'd be nice" Mooney said. "We have been ordinary. It's not the year the football world expected from us. At the moment, we're not really sure why we're not there. There's a few things we've discussed and come up with but at the end of the day, we're not playing the attacking and flairy game that got us to where we were. But we will."The Cats run on confidence. When they are firing, they are almost unstoppable. But when the wind goes out of the sails, the ship doesn't just stop, it has a tendency to start to capsize.The shock loss to Hawthorn started things, and the poor performance against Sydney, the close loss to the Western Bulldogs and the thumping from Collingwood kept it spiralling. The Cats believe they played well enough to have beaten the Tigers last week, but let themselves down with inaccurate kicking."Stuff like that just gives you a kick in the guts and the confidence just hasn't been where it should be with us. We are a very confident side, so when things are going well, we're going great but when things aren't, we get down on ourselves a lot."It can fade quick. We're still a young group and we've got one of the youngest lists in the AFL. At the end of the day, we've only got a handful of guys that have played over 100 games and you really need about a dozen of those kind of guys to make sure the confidence doesn't drop," he said.So what's the answer? According to Mooney, it's simple. "There's no special tricks. At the moment, all we can do is keep pumping them up . . . I've heard a lot of people say that off-field, we're all blueing in-house, but nothing could be further from the truth, to be honest," he said."Not one bloke's pointed a finger, not one bloke's cracked the shits with another. We've all really stuck together, so I know when you do that, things turn around pretty quickly for you."And a win in a milestone game wouldn't hurt . . .
© 2006 The Age