BRISBANE Lions vice-captain Jed Adcock will hear nothing of Geelong's wobbly start to the season and says the premiers are still the AFL benchmark.
Ahead of their match at the Gabba on Saturday night, Adcock denied the Cats had lost their aura of invincibility and said they were still the opponent teams lifted for most.
Geelong have suffered losses against Fremantle and North Melbourne in the first four rounds, and escaped with narrow wins over Hawthorn and Richmond, to give them an identical 2-2 record to the Lions.
"Geelong is still Geelong," Adcock said.
"Joel Selwood said they're not playing as well as they'd like to, but that probably goes with most clubs at the moment. I think they're still very much the side to beat.
"I think everyone tries to lift when you play Geelong.
"You talk about the premier teams in the comp and Geelong is obviously one of them.
"To come up against Geelong here, if we can get a win, will obviously go a long way [towards the Lions gaining credibility]."
The Lions are coming off a scrappy win against Gold Coast where their contested footy was up but their skill level down.
Adcock said there was no plan to emulate North Melbourne's tactic of rapid-fire handballs that unstuck the Cats in round three.
He said the Lions had to concentrate on the simple things.
"We can't worry about what other teams did or didn't do against them, we've got to play how we play and what we know. We know if we get contested footy and pressure right that'll go a long way.
"When we do that well, we play well, and when we're getting beaten in that we struggle, so that's going to be massive for us, getting in-and-under and hitting hard.
"We have to be careful with the footy. We probably won't have the same time and space [as against the Suns] to be able to execute so we have to be pretty careful," he said.
Adcock said the Lions would be trying to win for 300-gamer Simon Black and said there would be no bigger game in Queensland for "quite some time".
"When you talk about any milestones, whether it be 100, 150 or 200, they're always big games, but when you come to a bloke like Blacky playing 300 - very rare thing in this day and age of footy - it's massive so of course you want to win it for him," he said.
"He's been one of the greatest players for this footy club, all three footy clubs put together, so for people to come out and support him is massive."
The Lions will hand out 10,000 masks of Black at the Gabba on Saturday night.
Michael Whiting covers Brisbane Lions news for AFL.com.au. Follow him on Twitter: @AFL_mikewhiting
The views in this story are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL
