Geelong is expected to be without Jared Rivers for several weeks following knee injury Geelong defender Jared Rivers will miss several weeks with a knee injury. GEELONG defender Jared Rivers faces an extended stint on the sidelines after his knee injury turned out to be worse than first expected. The 28-year-old could have surgery to repair cartilage damage to his right knee, and will certainly miss at least the Cats' run of blockbuster clashes over the next few weeks. It has also thrown a slight spanner in the works of Geelong's plans to play Harry Taylor forward more often, but it remains confident it has the flexibility to cope. Cats coach Chris Scott yesterday said a course of action to treat Rivers had not been decided yet. "Jared Rivers unfortunately is worse than we first thought," Scott said. It makes a little bit of sense now given that the medical staff thought it was a slight medial (strain) but it was more painful that they would expect with that sort of injury, so he's going to miss at least a few weeks, maybe more. He's had a bad run, it's the same knee as he injured in Round 1 but in a different spot. It's a little bit of cartilage damage. He did have a slight PCL (posterior cruciate ligament) strain in Round 1, they thought it was a medial ligament this time, but his medial ligament's fine. There's just some cartilage damage that potentially will need to be repaired, but we haven't made a decision on exactly what process we'll go through there. Scott yesterday said Rivers' latest injury was unrelated to the one that kept him out for two games after Round 1. " (They're) both completely isolated," he said. This one was very much a bad luck thing in the contest. There were some replays shown on TV that weren't the actual incident, it was a separate one to that. Taylor sits third on Geelong's goalkicking leaderboard after Round 5, following his five-goal haul against the Western Bulldogs on Saturday night. Scott said the Rivers injury did not help plans to continue to play the key defender in the attacking half, but they had other options to replace Rivers down back. "We're on record as saying we'd like to play Harry forward, so having more defenders available would certainly help that," he said. The Rivers injury is a little bit of an impediment but we've got others that can come in and play both ends as well. We spent a bit of time in the pre-season training (James) Podsiadly as a defender and Mitch Brown forward and back as well so, with a few exceptions like (Tom) Hawkins, that's the way we train our key position players to play both ends. Taylor, out-of-contract at season's end, has also been in the news of late as speculation builds on his future beyond this year. Scott said he did not have a problem with people asking questions about Taylor's future. "When it comes to high profile players like Harry we understand and accept that there's going to be speculation," he said. It's a good sign that 17 other clubs probably think that he's worthy of a spot on their list. That will look after itself.