AFL Odds: Stevie Stays A Cat
February 7th, 2015 by TJ DilferWe’ve brought you a few articles these past few weeks about players who won’t be running out for their respective franchises on the first day of the new AFL season – and we do think that’s well worth you keeping an eye on, as the injury lists will affect the AFL odds you’re seeing. But it’s a touch depressing – for us, for the fans, and for the players concerned – to keep talking about the guys that won’t be playing.
So today we’re talking about Steve Johnson, who emphatically will be appearing for the Cats in their 2015 campaign, even in spite of a potentially lucrative offer of a move to GWS in the off season. Rather brilliantly, we think, he happened to overlook the offer from the Giants whilst he was on holiday, but it sounds like he’s a committed Geelong man, and not out of loyalty alone, but because he’s in search of another flag win with them: ‘I really didn’t get a good chance to consider it because I was overseas on a golf trip and I think it was a day or two before the (trade) deadline finished. At the end of the day, my initial reaction was that I believed I had a really good opportunity to play in a premiership again next season at Geelong and that’s pretty much as far as I considered it. I was flattered by the offer from GWS to come up there for however long it was, but I’m certainly happy where I am at the moment. It probably wasn’t the time for me to really look at that sort of thing.’
What he will be looking at is getting himself ready for the new season, and that will mean managing his fitness quite carefully – especially a foot injury that is a risk of a recurrence, and that has been troubling him in recent weeks: ‘it was just a little bit of bone stress, it’s not even really stress. I had bone stress beforehand and it healed up pretty well over the off-season. I’ve been doing a lot of running (this pre-season) and I came in one morning and my foot was a tiny bit sore and they took the precautionary approach by saying ‘stay off it for a week’ and sent me to the Gold Coast.’
Which gives you an idea of how the management at Geelong are going to handle Johnson, who brings valuable experience to their roster, and who could be a key man in helping them overcome AFL odds of $14.00 to win the 2015 premiership. They’re going to handle him with lots of holidays, it sounds like. Nice work if you can get it…
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