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GOING down to Lara by 69 points looks to have ended St Mary's chances of being involved in September action, but coach Jason Orr believes the finals talk had been externally generated.
Orr said a sniff of making the finals had excited the Saints, but made it clear they were not the club's primary goal.
"I think finals had been talked about by everyone else more so than our group," the coach said.
"As a side, I think we have a long way to go and we just need to be a little bit careful we don't get ahead of ourselves.
"We are sitting on the ladder where we should be sitting. And that's out of the finals.
"We've beaten everyone below us and only Lara (in Round 3) above us, so it's probably a true reflection of where we are at."
Orr said the loss wouldn't alter his approach for the rest of the season.
"We're working through a process and our group has a goal and we need to stick at it and try to achieve it," he said.
"That's competing, firstly, with good sides. I think we have done that in patches during the year, but we didn't compete very well today.
"Nothing will change, our skill level was poor so we'll work on our skills, our decision-making was poor so we'll do some decision-making stuff.
"We need to keep competing and get 50 games into these blokes.
"In the next few weeks we have West (GWSP), St Albans and Colac, if we win them, then it puts us in the mix to compete (for finals) on the way home. We need to beat a couple of top sides."
Cats respond to scathing coach review - Nick Brown
LARA coach Matthew Kershaw said a "scathing review" was the catalyst behind Saturday's 69-point win over St Mary's that has put the Cats' season back on track.
Kershaw and his players went into Geelong to take on the Saints ultimately knowing anything other than a win could potentially end their finals hopes.
It was obvious the Cats weren't settling for anything other than the 16.11 (107) to 4.14 (38) win they returned to Lara with.
"We had a pretty scathing review on Tuesday night, as a club, as a bunch of players and a few home truths and honesty came out about where we were as a group," Kershaw revealed.
"We identified a few things within the group and from that Tuesday night meeting, which went for about an hour. Since that meeting everything was positive."
And positive the Cats were as they started the do-or-die clash with the Saints looking like a totally different side to the one that lost to Grovedale only seven days earlier.
The Cats controlled a lot of the first half and led by 18 points at the main break before kicking clear with four goals to one in the third term.
Despite a spray from coach Jason Orr, St Mary's failed to respond in the final term as Lara kicked away with six more goals to win easily.
Kershaw was confident his team's trademark football was back after registering its seventh win of the year. The Cats play Newtown & Chilwell next week in what should be a cracker, before meeting Colac, North Shore and then reigning premier South Barwon.
"Today we went back to playing our brand of footy. You could see from the first bounce we had done our homework on St Mary's and we actually trained the way they play," Kershaw said.
"Our boys were terrific, that's the way we should be playing and that's the way we had been playing up until the last couple of weeks.
"Slumps happen, it's how you get out of them. And the boys got out of it really well.
"It's a test of character as to how you turn it around and I think today was our best test."
