I like watching Geelong play; in fact, after my team, I prefer watching Geelong ahead of anyone.

I've supported them against Port, and Hawthorn, and St Kilda in the past three grand finals, and marvelled at Gary Ablett, and Joel Selwood and Jimmy Bartel and wondered how they'd look in my club's colours. Oh, how we could do with any of them.

I must say I'm not as mad on St Kilda, just because they don't play pretty - or not pretty enough to win over this neutral - and they often slog their way through a match, in much the same way that Rafael Nadal does on a tennis court. They kind of bludgeon their way to victory. Geelong, meanwhile, purrs along like Roger Federer.

Anyway, the point of that overuse of the vertical pronoun is that I wanted Geelong to win last night's qualifying final against St Kilda.

So when, in those frantic final moments, the ball squirted out to Geelong captain Cameron Ling and he had just enough time to size up the goals and skip through a shot from 40 metres or so, I too jumped out of my chair. But then I realised I'd heard the faint trill of an umpire's whistle, just at the start of that passage. And while Ling was being mobbed by Steve Johnson and others, there was this nagging feeling that all was not as it seemed.

And, sure enough, as the camera panned to a wide shot, there was Stevic with his arm pointed towards the Geelong goal, indicating a St Kilda free kick.

As the howls of injustice could be heard all the way up the highway from Geelong, Channel Seven began replaying the incident. And any neutral only needed to see the vision a couple of times before coming to the conclusion - painful, I know, for Cat lovers - that the man in the yellow shirt got it right.

In tackling James Gwilt, Geelong forward Cameron Mooney propelled the Saint forward with force. He landed on Gwilt's back and Gwilt's face hit the ground. (See Video of the Day on the BPL home page.)

Sorry, but any time of any game, that's a free. The arguments that it's a final, and therefore more latitude should be given by umpires, or that the context of the game should be taken into account - it's late in the final quarter and it's wet - don't hold water. Sorry. If that same incident happened at the five-minute mark of a round-one game at Skilled Stadium, and it was a Port Adelaide defender on the end of that same Mooney tackle, you'd expect a free kick to be paid. End of story.

As 3AW dissected the match on Saturday, it became apparent that former Geelong premiership skipper Tom Harley thought it was a free kick, as did the club's previous premiership captain, Fred Wooller, the man who took them to glory in 1963.

So, if I'm banished from the honorary Cat Lover's Society, I'm expecting Harley and Wooller to go out in sympathy with me.