I think as Robert was saying, the more relevant
thing to talk about then is two games `05
and the night before the grand final I promised the team that they would win.
And I only said that because I knew we had the strategy
I knew we had the personnel, and I knew if we implemented the plan the whole time
we would win the game.
So you can't get caught up necessarily in the little battles
that are going on, you know the little things that are happening in the market, the news,
etc etc
there are some things that I can control...I can't control weather Leo Barry drops that
mark or takes that mark can I?
So that's not controllable.
If that ball goes to ground, we'd probably lose that game
So what you're trying to do is build a game style, and I said to them the night before
If we can play the way we did all year I guarantee you'll win the game
3/4 time I reiterated that, we have another quarter to go.
We will win the game if we keep doing the things that we do, we will 100% win this game
of football
And by that it's around the strategy, where you stand at stoppages, what players are capable
of doing, all those roles you have to play, if we do that we will win
Fast forward to 2006, I think we were about 30 points down at half time
They were playing really well, and obviously got some great players
Probably had more talent than what we did, and it's in those moments, its that "media
moment", its that "ice cream diet moment"
It's the "high return, low risk" moment, where everyone in the room is running around going
"what do we do, what do we do, what do we do?"
And in those moments, they're the defining moments as a coach for me.
Because what I see in those moments for a lot of coaches, it's "I know we've done this
so well for long, but we can't do it because were 30 points down...so let's try this, this,
this, and this"
And what ends up happening then invariably is you lose by 70 points.
I think it was Peter Jones or one of the assistant coaches, you can imagine the noise at half
time in a grand final...
there's 60 minutes to go and you can only imagine what that environment looks like
And then someone had said, hang on guys, we're just not doing the things that we actually
said we should do
And that was like...we probably know that, but for someone to say it in the heat of the battle
when the share market is plummeting, and everything going down
And then we said, right guys, we brought the players in and said, guys we just need to
tackle better, you need to do this better
Isn't that the stuff we talked about before the game?
Yeah it is, and it's not going to change at half time in a grand final just because we're 30 points down
So then those little things within a game, there the little battles that I often can't control
So I don't generally worry about those things, unless it's something completely out of control.
I think Micky the year before was missing goals and kicking points
What I did and this is really valuable.
The end of my playing career, I wrote down my 25 points of what it was like to be a player
I never wanted to forget what it was like to be a player when I went into coaching and
I wrote them down
One of them was players don't mean to make mistakes
And little simple reminders like that, I've never been in a game where a player deliberately
kicked the ball out of bounds, or deliberately kicked a point.
And those moments, they're really key reminders because they stay you on the non emotional
course of that head line or whatever
Football coaches that no longer coach get caught up in media headlines, and the boards
do, it's an emotional business and people get sacked.
Pretty much all the most successful coaches in the last 20 years, Clarke was going to
get sacked at one stage, Ross Lyon was going to get sacked, Bomber Thompson was going to
get sacked
A bloke called Andrew Demetriou said that Sydney played an ugly style they could never
win a premiership
10 weeks later we won a premiership
They're the really key moments where you stick to your strategy, you stick to your plan,
and they're hard to do in such an emotional business, whether its investing or playing footy
But if you an do that, and we ended up losing that game but it was by 1 point
The year before we won by 4 points and I think it legitimized what we were as a footy club,
that we were able to sustain a level of success over a long period of time, which is was we're
all trying to do
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