Chris Scott has declared Gary Ablett a certain starter in Geelong's round one clash against Melbourne, but the Cats coach isn't so sure if Patrick Dangerfield will play.
Ablett didn't feature in Geelong's pre-season series after suffering a hamstring strain in February and has been carefully managed since.
"He'll be fine, so unless ... no, I'll just say 'He's playing'," Scott told Fox Footy on Monday night.
Dangerfield sustained a hamstring injury in the Cats' second pre-season series game against Essendon in Colac.
The Brownlow medallist is confident he will be ready to take on the Demons at the MCG on Sunday, but Scott isn't as bullish.
"The short answer is he's still a chance," the coach said.
"I think there are some people at our club, me included, that would like to be definitive now.
"So I guess it's a good sign in terms of his recovery that we're not in the position where we're saying 'He's not playing but we think he might be right for next week or the week after'.
"But he's going well and in his mind he doesn't want to rule it out. I think that's a really good sign for round two and three, in particular.
"Whether it happens round one, more and more clubs are realising it's best to resist the temptation to see round one as the finishing line. You have to take a bit more of a longer view."
The recovery period for most hamstring injuries is generally three weeks and Geelong will open their season just 14 days after Dangerfield went down.
But the superstar's first-ever soft-tissue injury was at the very light end of the severity scale.
"It was so minor that it was actually quite hard to work out whether he'd done anything significant or not," Scott said.
"It's even more complicated with guys who have never done hamstrings. He's never had a soft tissue injury in his life, so they tend to be a little bit confused when it first happens."
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