Hawks coach Sam Mitchell said he had not seen a replay of Meek’s actions and could not comment.

Geelong were the first reigning premiers to lose their first three matches the next season since North Melbourne in 1976, but Scott dismissed the relevancy of such history.

“Things that haven’t happened before happen all the time,” he said.

“It would have been significant [if we lost again]. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying you shouldn’t be saying those things. It’s your job.

“It’s just not my job to participate in that conversation and get distracted about what we need to do internally ... we were urgent. We’re not so in love with ourselves that we think, ‘We’ll just win the last 15, and we’ll be fine’. That’s not the case at all.”

The Cats will lose Jed Bews as he enters the concussion protocol, but Scott tipped key defender Sam De Koning to return from his own concussion.

As for Mitchell, he could not disguise his awe of Geelong in their blitzkrieg of a second half.

“Gee, they were sharp,” he said. “In the first half, I thought we were clean, and our tackling was good and the pressure around the ball really troubled them.

“Then, in the third quarter, they just blew us away. I think we’ve been waiting for Geelong to do that for the first three-and-a-half games, and it came in that third quarter, and we just had no answers for them. As harsh as that sounds to us, we just had no answers.

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“When they’re humming at their best, they were just too good for us.”

Mitchell said that at this stage in their development, the young Hawks were not equipped to cope with adversity on that scale.

“In the third quarter, we just couldn’t find any answers in any way,” he said.

“We can handle some amount of adversity, but if it crosses that threshold, we don’t ... we start to second-guess ourselves, and we start to play on the back foot, and we can’t get anything going for us. We were a bit shell-shocked, really.

“We didn’t know a way out of today, and that’s going to be an area we need to continue to improve over the journey.”