Saturday night’s nail biting victory over ladder leaders Geelong has proven St Kilda is making inroads in its pursuit back up the ladder, says reliable defender Jarryn Geary.

St Kilda recorded its second consecutive win, its fourth in five outings and its first over a top-eight side in 2016, to continue to make up for their poor effort in Adelaide earlier in the month.

“It just shows that we’re on the right path with what we’ve been doing the last month,” Geary told saints.com.au following St Kilda’s three-point win on Saturday night.

“We had that disappointing result in Adelaide three or four weeks ago now and we were really embarrassed about that. But since then, we’ve played a way that gives us a chance to be competitive against any team and we proved that tonight.”

In what was arguably the Saints finest performance under Alan Richardson’s guidance, Geary said the side had set themselves to produce a consistent four-quarter game against a side with premiership credentials.

“The boys are really rapt. We set ourselves all week to try and get a scalp,” Geary said.

“We thought we were in good form, we’ve obviously won three out of the last four and we were pretty confident if we played the right way we’d be pretty competitive and we managed to sneak over the line.”

With key defensive duo Sam Fisher and Sean Dempster watching on from the sidelines, full back Luke Delaney performed a crucial job on dual premiership star Tom Hawkins.

Geary praised the 27-year-old’s effort on the Cats spearhead, a week after he held Carlton beast Levi Casboult for most of that affair.

“We’ve had some soldiers go down over the last month unexpectedly, but we’ve had some blokes come in and really perform strongly,” Geary said.

“Luke Delaney’s last couple of weeks have been really good. He spent a lot of time in the VFL, which he probably didn’t want to be there, but since he’s come back in he’s done a super job. So one goes down another steps up.”

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