Gary Ablett's jaw-dropping, 46-disposal game against Adelaide to guide Geelong to a round four AFL victory was his greatest performance, according to Cats coach Mark Thompson.

Having watched all of Ablett's 150 games from the coaches box, Thompson said he'd never seen the 24-year-old so determined to keep winning the ball as he was throughout the Cats' 48-point win.

"It's probably his best game, I've never really seen him have an appetite to get the ball as often as he did and it didn't matter whether there was one or two players on him," said Thompson.

"He almost always knew when he was going near the ball or the ball was near him that he was going to get his hands on it.

"He kicked three goals, set so many up, he was outstanding."

Twice favourite for the Brownlow Medal, Ablett has not always won the favour of the umpires as readily as he has wowed the rest of the football world, leaving Thompson to grin wryly when asked about the votes.

"He should get three votes for that one," he said.

Ablett was typically modest.

"My best ever game? It's hard to say at this stage, I'll go back and review it and make up my mind then," Ablett said.

"I didn't realise at the end of the game that I'd had that many touches until the boys told me."

Thirty-three of Ablett's possessions were handballs, a stat that showed how dependant AFL sides are becoming on quick hands to work through zone defences of the sort employed so aggressively by Adelaide, who have taken on plenty of Hawthorn's ideas via assistant coach Todd Viney.

For the second and third quarters, after the Cats had skipped away to an early 42-point advantage, the use of a 10-man cluster through the centre of the ground succeeded in diverting Geelong from their patented attacks through the middle.

But by the end they had managed to find a way through, kicking seven goals to two in the last term to snuff out the Crows.

"There are a lot of teams that have this huddle/zone thing whatever they call it, Hawthorn do it and we seem to get it through when we play Hawthorn," Thompson said.

"We only had 40 (forward 50m) entries for the whole night, which was one of our lowest tallies for a long time, but in saying that once we did get through we scored 21 goals.

"In the end, to kick 21 goals through that sort of zone is a pretty good effort.

"To be fair to the players we spent all week on it and I know against some teams you just have to play differently, we knew it was going to be a struggle.

"We knew for us to win we couldn't just roll out our normal game plan, and we struggled a little bit with it but we kicked enough goals to win the game against good opposition."

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