Piggybacking on heartbreak
“I think we, as the leaders, just took a fair bit of the rap because we weren’t doing the kind of things that we preached.” - JARRYD ROUGHEAD
“You have a loss like that, where they were the favourites to win, and I knew the guys would be desperate to go that one step further.” - BRIAN LAKE
Of all the tasks a coach must perform, reviewing your team’s performance after a losing Grand Final, especially one that was there for the taking, ranks among the most onerous, even masochistic. It may not be quite as hard as telling a player you like and respect that he is being delisted, but it takes a lot longer, at a time when the last thing the mind and body feel like doing is focusing on footy.
After the cocoon of gloom that was the Hawks’ post-Grand Final function at Crown on the Saturday night, the obligatory appearance with the team before the faithful at Glenferrie Oval on the Sunday, and barely a moment to debrief with Caryn, Alastair Clarkson was back at Waverley Park early on Monday morning with Chris Fagan and the assistant coaches to dissect what had gone wrong on Saturday afternoon.
The temptation, indeed the practice of some coaches, is to wait until the players have returned from a few weeks away and then let them face their demons, their fallibilities, when they are refreshed, recharged and reinvigorated. But that isn’t Clarkson’s way. He figures the best time to get commitment from the players to do whatever is required to go the next step—buy-in, he calls it—is when their emotions are at their most raw. “Piggybacking on the heartbreak of the loss” is how he describes it.
So for around seven hours Clarkson and the coaching staff reviewed every aspect of the game, the errors the players had made, the errors they had made; the mistakes in defending behind the ball, in ball movement and at stoppages; the misjudged rotations, the missed shots at goal; the opportunities lost or not taken.
Then, on Tuesday morning, all the players, some of them sleep deprived, assembled at Waverley to talk as a group about the game and to speak one-on-two with the coach and Fagan. “We got shown footage of things we should have done better, like interchanging at the wrong time, missing shots on goal,” recalls Max Bailey, who had been an emergency after his injury-affected season. “And we probably thought our standards were pretty high, but in reality they needed to be higher.
“We hadn’t realised it, but our attitude had been, ‘It won’t matter if I stuff up two or three times, we’ll get away with it because we’ve got so much talent.’ But, through Clarko and the leaders, the message was ‘We’ve got to set our standards right up here, and if you don’t buy into that, well, see you later.’ And we understood we had to change the way we went about things. I just remember the off-season being a good holiday, but you were always thinking, ‘OK, how am I going to improve next year?’”
This was certainly Brad Sewell’s mindset a day or two later when the players gathered to commiserate with each other some more at the Elsternwick Hotel. Damian ‘Monkey’ Monkhorst, the laconic part-time ruck, marking and spoiling coach, was invited to join them and soon found himself in earnest conversation with Sewell. Monkhorst had been a premiership ruckman with Collingwood in 1990 and Sewell was drilling him on why, with the talent the Pies had in that era, they hadn’t achieved more.
Monkhorst thought deeply, then volunteered that at critical times, leaders at the club, himself included, had tried to do too much individually to turn a game, rather than think of the best option for the team as a whole. If there was a lesson for Hawthorn, it was that the strong focus on team and sacrifice of the last two years had to be stronger still. Much stronger.
“We started talking about the dynamic of the playing group and what was missing and that just got me thinking,” Sewell recalled. “That’s what started the ball rolling for me. I then spent a month in the (United) States and stewed and mulled and did a bit of writing over there and came back and ended up having a lunch at Georges cafe in Camberwell with Hodgey, Andrew ‘Jack’ Russell and Jason Burt (the player welfare and development manager).”
Luke Hodge credits Sewell with setting the scene for change. “It was ‘Sewelly’ who drove it at the start, as much as anyone,” he said. “I’m not even sure where he went for his holiday, but he had a lot of time to sit back and ponder what we went through and how we could improve. He called a couple of times and you could tell that his whole holiday he’d been thinking, ‘How can we turn this around? What do we need to do to make sure that we do take the next step?’
“So when he got back, Jason, Andrew, Sewelly and myself met in Camberwell and pretty much laid it on the table where we thought it was at, where the players were at, and what we needed to do. From there, we went to Clarko and he was 100 per cent in agreement.”
The result was a decision to enlist Ray McLean from Leading Teams, an agency with the motto ‘We exist to create elite teams’, to facilitate a discussion at the team’s high-performance training camp at Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.
“The concept was, ‘Boys, we’re very good, but we’re not good enough. So what’s the problem?’” explained Russell. “It was a very simple process really, and the process was Ray coming in and saying, ‘I don’t know you guys from a bar of soap, you seem to do things pretty well, so you tell me what’s going on. You tell me why you can’t quite get back to the top of the mountain. I don’t have the answers for you. You come up with the answers and let’s just formalise it.’”
One key question was whether the Navy SEALs had passed their use-by date as a source of motivation and inspiration. The clear consensus was that it was time to move on. The SEALs’ team-first ethos, work ethic and selflessness had captured the imagination of the players and shaped their uncompromising mindset when the stakes were high, but there had been a downside.
“My view is that it allowed us to be in a position to win it, but in the end was our downfall,” said Russell. “So much energy was put into it, week in, week out, that it was like we’d been to war every week. And in the end, we’d been to ‘war’ too many times.”
In hindsight, Clarkson agreed that the theme had run its course by the middle of September, before the Hawks played Adelaide and prevailed by five points and then went down to the Swans in the Grand Final by 10. But that was an easy judgment to come to after the event.
“It’s so easy to get blinkered,” he explained. “There was nothing to suggest at the time that this couldn’t go on right through to the Grand Final. We’d changed our mindset to being much more team-focused and it was working for us. But when we got to the pointy end of the season and we’re playing against the very, very good sides and there’s much more pressure and more accumulated fatigue, we weren’t able to play our best footy.”
The brutal truth was that circumstances of their own making beat the Hawks. After the poor start to the season, they needed to win just about every game by a big margin to secure a top-two spot, but that meant driving themselves to their mental and physical limits each week and not being able to nurse players like Brent Guerra, whose mental capacity to absorb and play with pain was almost without peer, but whose body was becoming more vulnerable each season to soft tissue injuries.
“We ran our race too early” is how Hodge put it. “There’s no doubt that if you continually push something—as motivating as it was—after 14 or 15 weeks it’s going to tire out. Grand Finals are very hard things to win. You need everything going right at the right time of year, and that’s the last four weeks. The best footy we played was from about round 21 through to the first final against Collingwood.”
Of course, things would have been very different if Tom Hawkins had not kicked straight after the siren in round 19, or if a couple of errors had been avoided in the Grand Final, but the intention in 2013 was to leave as little as possible to luck, to try to take chance out of the equation. This was articulated by Clarkson to the players before they faced Geelong in round one, when the image of a dice was drawn on the whiteboard. “Let’s make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make sure that the luck goes our way,” he said.
If the SEALs were no longer to be the Hawks’ guiding light, the group needed to find another framework to build their 2013 campaign around, and that is precisely what happened at the high-performance training camp at Mooloolaba in December 2012.
As Hodge revealed when he addressed the Peter Crimmins Medal presentation at Crown in October, “A lot of questions got thrown around: ‘Why did we lose?’ ‘How did we lose?’ But probably the main one was ‘Have we been hard enough? Have we been hard enough on each other?’”
What distinguished the process at Mooloolaba was that it was driven by the players, and the values that emerged were not simply platitudes or reference points but principles and values—rules, if you like— to be adhered to religiously on and off the field by the entire group. They called them “behaviours”.
“I go through sporting clubs right around the world and there are value and mission statements up on the wall at nearly every club,” Clarkson said in one of our interviews. “And you look and think, ‘That reads well. That would be something that might resonate among the players.’ But that’s the key to it. Does it resonate among the players? Is there genuine belief and buy-in? Because every club has them. Every club speaks about them and every club has, at some point in the year, a time when they say, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’
“But how much do they hold true to that? To what extent do they buy in and hold one another to account? If it’s just me holding them to account to the values I want, it will be pretty successful, but nowhere near as successful as the players having genuine ownership of them. So we were participants in that whole process as a coaching group, but it would be fair to say we stepped back a bit more than what we had in the past and said, ‘Hodgey, Roughie, Mitch, Jordan, Gib and Sewelly, you older guys—you drive the values that we need to adhere to.’”
One of the keys to getting a commitment to best practice in the future is to admit to less than best practice in the past, and that is also what happened at Mooloolaba. Some of the younger players admitted going into their shells on big occasions, but the more telling confessions came from the leaders.
“I think we, as the leaders, just took a fair bit of the rap because we weren’t doing the kind of things that we preached,” said Jarryd Roughead. “We were a couple of ones who came back heavy two years ago and we were probably a little bit of a breakaway pack, a few of us, and the best thing was that we were the ones to admit that. I think it opened us up to the group because they then didn’t think we were invincible. And that encouraged young fellas who had been around for a couple of years and hadn’t even played senior footy to speak up and give their opinions. “From then on, it felt like everyone was on the same page. It wasn’t as if it was Clarko telling us what the trademark is, or Jason (Burt). It was like, ‘Everyone has made this around the footy club. This is what we stand by.’ From then on, we knew what we had to do.”
It was no surprise that the four “trademarks” to be applied on game day reflected the teachings of the two coaches who had had the most profound influence on Clarkson: John Kennedy and Allan Jeans.
The first was pure Kennedy: “Commando football”, defined as being hard at the contest and willing to “fight to the death”. The second was quintessential Jeans: “Ego on the hook”, which involved putting the team first and being humble. Then came “Selfless”, and being willing to sacrifice your own game for the team and to encourage, nurture and guide your teammates, especially those with less experience. Finally came the commitment to “Open and honest communication”, on and off the field.
All were consistent with the mindset of 2012, when the Navy SEALs were the example, but this set of trademarks had another distinct advantage. “It was very hard to say anything about the Navy SEALs when it came to reviewing a game,” explained Sam Mitchell, “whereas, with the trademarks we came up with, you could rate your game according to them.”
Match reviews for both the senior team and the Box Hill Hawks were conducted through the prism of each trademark, with edited vision highlighting when a player had bust his gut running into space to create options or picking up a teammate who had fallen, and the players voted for their own award, the Lethal Award, on the basis of who had best represented the trademarks.
While the big-picture issue of culture and attitude was being tackled, there were three specific issues that needed to be addressed: potential weaknesses in the playing list, the inaccuracy that had proved so costly in the last two seasons, and the fact that Hawthorn lost more close games than it won in 2012.
The highest recruiting priority was to strengthen the backline, which could be vulnerable if the opposition had two or more big-bodied forwards who kept their distance from each other and reduced the scope for Josh Gibson to be the third man up in a marking contest. The mercurial Brian Lake had been on Hawthorn’s radar for some time and the deal to clinch his transfer from the Bulldogs was secured on the first day of the trading period. Twice an All-Australian defender, Lake had developed something of a reputation for lifting himself if he was playing on one of the game’s stars, but going missing if he did not consider the stakes sufficiently high.
Recruiting and list manager Graham Wright had reasoned that if ever Lake was going to make a move from the Bulldogs, it would most likely be at the end of 2012, when he was approaching his 31st birthday. Wright had spoken to Lake’s manager around August, but the serious talking didn’t get under way until Lake had returned from overseas a few days before the 2012 Grand Final.
“From our point of view, we felt we didn’t really want to go into another year without some support for ‘Shoey’ (Ryan Schoenmakers) and ‘Gibbo’ (Gibson),” said Wright, “and we suspected that Shoey’s best spot is centre half-back, and Brian could play back and cover the deep guys and they could swap and Gibbo could do his third man in and be able to play his more natural role rather than playing on the real monsters as well.”
Among the questions that needed answering were whether Lake’s body was up to it, whether he would “buy in” without qualification to what the entire group was trying to achieve, and whether the Western Bulldogs were interested in letting him go. After a meeting with Lake at the club, Wright, Clarkson, Mark Evans and Fagan were confident on the first two counts, with the added bonus that Lake was willing to take a significant pay cut to make the transfer. For the Bulldogs, who were in the process of rebuilding their list and would risk losing Lake for no compensation under free agency at the end of 2013, the trade meant they could free up their salary cap and receive a couple of draft picks. “It was a pretty easy deal really in the end, and we were able to get it done on the first day of trade,” Wright said.
Perversely, Hawthorn’s gut-wrenching loss in 2012 made the idea of coming even more attractive to Lake. “I knew the hunger was going to be even greater, and the drive to succeed was going to be higher as well,” he said. “You have a loss like that, where they were the favourites to win, and I knew the guys would be desperate to go that one step further.” In a sense, Lake was piggybacking on heartbreak, too.
There were plenty of other comings and goings. While Chance Bateman and Cameron Bruce retired, Clinton Young took advantage of free agency to secure a better contract with Collingwood than Hawthorn was prepared to offer, and club stalwarts Tom Murphy and Stephen Gilham were able to extend their careers—with Hawthorn’s blessing— by moving to Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney respectively.
The arrivals included another big body, with the long unruly hair of a buccaneer, who could play forward, back and in the ruck in Matt Spangher, via West Coast and Sydney; a 19-year-old live wire from the Northern Territory named Jed Anderson who made his debut in round one and won a NAB Rising Star nomination in round three; and Jonathan Simpkin, who had a story of persistence to rival Sam Mitchell’s.
One of four brothers, Simpkin grew up in Colac and had the nickname ‘Joffa’ almost from birth because an older brother struggled with his name as a toddler and it came out as ‘Joffanan’. Initially drafted as a rookie by the Swans at the end of 2005, he was delisted two years later after making the senior list. When a pre-season at Melbourne did not lead to an invitation to become a Demon, he joined the Geelong VFL team, at one point returning to the Colac Tigers before being rookie- listed by Geelong in 2010. He was delisted at the end of 2012 despite playing four senior games and winning the best and fairest award in the Geelong VFL side’s premiership year.
“It just seemed that Geelong didn’t have enough spots to keep everyone, which happens, and he slipped out of their group,” said Wright. “So when ‘Youngy’ (Clinton Young) chose to leave under free agency, we decided we needed a bit more experienced run, someone who could cover the ground and had good speed to give us some depth in that position. We’d followed him the whole way through and felt that, if Young did go out, Joffa would fit the bill.”
After Leon Cameron became the second of Clarkson’s assistants to secure a senior coaching job after Damien Hardwick joined Richmond (Cameron was signed by Greater Western Sydney to succeed Kevin Sheedy in 2014), and Adam Simpson moved from being responsible for stoppages to Cameron’s role as forward coach, there was a vacancy in the coaching group. There was no better candidate to fill it than Brett Ratten, the former Carlton premiership player, captain and coach.
Ratten had spent more than half his life at the Blues, arriving as a 14-year-old and having only a few years away before being appointed senior coach in 2007. He was controversially sacked before the last home and away game of the 2012 season with a year to run on his contract— a kick in the guts he handled with grace.
Carlton champion Robert Walls was among those who considered Ratten hard done by and he said so in The Age, noting that Ratten’s success rate at Carlton in his five full seasons was 53.5 per cent. “Premiership and long-term coaches John Worsfold and Alastair Clarkson were both sitting on 50 per cent 18 months ago. It took Malthouse 11 years to deliver a flag to Collingwood. After a decade of ups and downs, his strike rate was 51.5 per cent. Collingwood thought about replacing him. It didn’t. Two Grand Finals followed.
“After seven seasons at Geelong, Mark Thompson’s strike rate was less than 50 per cent. The Cats dropped to 10th on the ladder and thought about sacking him. They didn’t. A united front of chief executive Brian Cook and president Frank Costa stood behind the coach and the rest is history.”
During his spell away from the Blues, Ratten had been the midfield coach at Melbourne in 2004, where he struck up a friendship with two men who would later work at Hawthorn: Fagan, who was the Demons’ forward coach, and Evans, who worked in areas of management, player welfare and communications before joining Hawthorn—as Clarkson’s choice—to be football manager at the end of 2004.
Fagan was among the first to call Ratten after his dismissal to commiserate, and was pleasantly surprised when the (then) 41-year-old father of five said he would be interested in another coaching role if a suitable one came up. Within a week, he was hired. Ratten was keen to see how Hawthorn operated from the inside. “To be able to come into an organisation that has been involved in 17 Grand Finals in the last 52 years (winning 10) and to see what was happening behind the scenes was pretty special,” he said. “I was rapt to get the opportunity.”
Then came the surprise departure of Evans, the highly regarded manager of football operations. “(Clarko and I had) been on a fair journey together and we always had the view that no one would get appointed to the football department unless both of us had absolutely ticked it off,” Evans recalled. “And I think we’d also developed a really strong bond of trust that there would not be anything that I’d know that I wouldn’t share with him.”
The club had supported Evans’ ambition to become the CEO of a club, ideally Hawthorn, and when he decided to make inquiries about the AFL’s football operations manager role—being vacated by Adrian Anderson—he told Clarkson and Stuart Fox, and kept them informed as he went through the interview process. He received word that he had the job on March 12 and drove straight to Clarkson’s home. “I think I know what you’re here for,” the coach said with a smile before inviting him in.
For all the philosophical thinking and the mental recriminations, there was something more tangible to address: Hawthorn was ranked 11th in the competition for accuracy in 2012, at 56.9 per cent, and these missed opportunities were arguably the main reason the team lost the 2011 preliminary final and the 2012 Grand Final. Within five weeks of the Grand Final defeat, Fagan visited St Mary’s College in San Francisco, an institution that has produced one of the top teams in the college basketball system off relatively meagre resources. One of the things St Mary’s focuses on is keeping statistics on the accuracy of players in training sessions, something that is more easily done on a basketball court than a football oval.
A few days after visiting St Mary’s, Fagan met up with Clarkson at the San Antonio Spurs, one of the top teams in the NBA, and was told one of the reasons they were ranked very highly for accuracy was the appointment of a full-time goal-shooting coach. Plenty of AFL clubs have had goalkicking coaches, usually in the form of a former full-forward who spends an hour or so at the club each week. This was a different concept— someone who would spend one-on-one time with the forwards, chart their accuracy and provide regular updates on progress—and it led to the appointment of Adem Yze, a former Melbourne forward who had been acting as the Hawthorn runner, as a three-day-a-week development coach.
While at the Spurs, the Hawthorn men also noted how the club trained to replicate close finishes, an area in which the Hawks had been below par. The club defined ‘close games’ as contests where there was less than two goals separating the combatants at three-quarter time, or less than one goal at the final siren. In their last two seasons there had been 10 such contests and Hawthorn had won just four of them, with the losses including the 2011 preliminary final (when Hawthorn led by 17 points at the last change and lost by three points) and the 2012 Grand Final (Sydney led by a point at the last break and won by 10).
Once again, basketball suggested a way forward, with the Hawks picking up the Spurs’ practice of simulating tight finishes. A scoreboard and a time clock were erected at the top of the Sir Kenneth Luke Stand at Waverley Park so that Hawthorn could do the same.
A big lesson from 2012 had been the importance of a strong start— not just to each game, but to the season—and the challenge in 2013 was all the greater because the Hawks had arguably the toughest draw in the competition, playing the other seven teams in the top eight of 2012 in the first seven rounds, starting with arch-rival Geelong.
The challenge became more daunting when Alex Woodward, a promising midfielder in his second year at the club, injured his reconstructed right knee at training, and Matt Suckling, one of the Hawks’ best and most consistent rebounding defenders in 2012, ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in a pre-season NAB Cup game.
Another potential distraction was the news that Lance Franklin had told the club he would not discuss a new contract until the end of the season, when he would become a free agent, sparking fears that he intended to leave. The initial leak was followed by speculation that Franklin was heading to Greater Western Sydney and could have part of his hefty remuneration paid for by the AFL if he became an ambassador for the game in the challenging frontier of Sydney’s west. The implications were summed up neatly by Jake Niall in The Age: “The Hawks have no choice but to have a contingency plan in place for Franklin leaving, even as they try valiantly to keep him.”
Before the players ran out on to the MCG on April 1, Clarkson reminded them of all the work done over the summer and the need for a strong start. “It’s not all about today,” he added, conscious that a marathon was about to begin. On the board were the four qualities the players had defined as the fundamentals of their season:
- Commando trademark football
- Open and honest
- Selfless
- Ego on the hook
When the Cats prevailed again, this time by seven points after trailing until the 15th minute of the third term, the coach kept his composure and his perspective, while Jeff Kennett, the former president, lost both. While Clarkson said the club had emerged from the clash without injuries, only a bruised ego, Kennett insisted Clarkson should leave Hawthorn or be sacked at the end of the season. “There was an excuse in 2009 for our performance because of injury, but 2010, 2011, 2012, we have underperformed. Someone has to take responsibility for that,” Kennett told the commercial broadcaster 3AW before detailing what he described as a host of coaching mistakes that day and in the past.
“The reality is, we lost in 2011 in the preliminary final (against Collingwood) when we were well ahead. We failed to flood the backline. Last year I think we made a terrible decision when we played our captain when he clearly wasn’t fit. That to me is an absolute no-no in a Grand Final. You can’t go into that sort of match carrying people. Today, unfortunately, we were outplayed and outcoached. Unless there are some fundamental changes there, I fear for our season.”
It was the kind of outburst that endeared Kennett to some supporters because it encapsulated their immediate post-game frustration, disappointment and need to vent their spleen, but it was completely out of order from a senior club figure and highlighted the different styles of Kennett and his replacement as president, Andrew Newbold. “For two hours you barrack” is how Newbold described his approach. “Once the game is over you are in charge of the club and no longer a barracker.”
There was no vigorous public defence of the coach from Newbold because there was no need for one. Clarkson had Newbold’s unqualified support and knew it. Newbold had a brief discussion with Fox, whose only public comment was that the remarks did not warrant a response.
Clarkson, too, was unfazed. Kennett had not said anything that he had not told the coach before, many times. It was, Clarkson says, a bit like one of their conversations. “He’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to go!’ Then I’d argue black and blue that it wasn’t. I reckon I’d had that discussion with him 20 times in the previous two or three years. But it was round one of the season. We knew that we were going to be a side there-and-abouts again. We just needed to hang in there.”
To his credit, Kennett admitted he had got carried away after the defeat, retracted the criticism of Clarkson and penned the coach a personal apology. “He, like all at the club, has done his best and Alastair has personal values which I have always gratefully respected,” he said. “To make judgments based on one game is inappropriate.”
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The next week, the Hawks travelled west to play a team that was tipped as a strong contender for a top-four finish. The Hawks were coming off a six-day break; the West Coast Eagles had not played for 16 days, and were coming off a 28-point loss to Fremantle in the Western Derby. The 32°C heat was more conducive to midsummer cricket and several players, the fair-skinned Roughead among them, took the field with their face covered in zinc cream.
What followed was one of the most entertaining encounters of the season. Three times the Eagles came at the Hawks and each time they responded with clinical precision, punctuated by moments of individual and collective brilliance. When it was over, the heat was so oppressive in the briefing room that adjoins the open-plan change rooms that Clarkson spoke only briefly.
Music is usually played in the shower area after games but this time, some 15 minutes after the final siren, Ben Stratton pushed the play button and The Horses exploded from the speakers in the visitors’ change rooms and everyone—players, trainers, board members, medicos—joined in the chorus: “... and if you fall I’ll pick you up, pick you up”.
“It was just a beautiful moment of spontaneity,” Clarkson recalled. “Everyone belted it out from the top of their lungs.” The coach was so moved that he made a mental note that if Hawthorn prevailed on the last Saturday in September, he would play the song in the briefing room after the triumph.
An on-field “beautiful moment of spontaneity” followed a week later at the MCG when the Hawks demolished Collingwood after trailing by a point at half-time. At the 18-minute mark of the third term, Guerra booted a massive torpedo from a kick-in to Stratton in the middle. The Hawthorn defender handballed to Franklin as he was tackled by Collingwood’s Heath Shaw, and rather than attempt to sidestep the tangle of Stratton and Shaw on the turf, Franklin simply hurdled them both, steadied and kicked an 80-metre goal. “With two kicks and a handball, the Hawks had collapsed the MCG to pocket-sized,” observed The Age’s Greg Baum.
After the 55-point victory, the team and Clarkson were joined in the circle to sing the club song by the wife and children of David O’Halloran, the popular two-time premiership player who had died of a heart attack the previous week, aged 57. Among the tributes to the man they called ‘Rubber’ was one from former teammate Gary Buckenara, who said, “He was one of the best blokes you could get and a real gentleman— a ripper mate and a ripper teammate and just a really decent bloke.”
A seven-goal win over Fremantle in Tasmania in round four was sullied when 22-year-old Schoenmakers suffered a season-ending knee injury after having been in such outstanding form that some were wondering why the Hawks had recruited Lake, whose debut in the brown and gold had been delayed by a minor injury. The following week, after dominating the Kangaroos for three and a half quarters, Cyril Rioli’s troublesome hamstring failed him again and he faced another extended period in recovery.
Despite these setbacks, the team seemed possessed with a growing confidence that it had the game and the mindset to cover any challenges and the depth to cover any injuries. Down back, for instance, there was no longer the need for an extra number to lend support. Under the guidance of defence coach Luke Beveridge, they had embraced the idea of being “one and a half men”, who could not only cover their direct opponent but help their teammate in covering his. On the wing, 19-year-old Bradley Hill was adding poise, consistency and endurance to the speed and skill he had shown in his first season; premiership players Roughead and Grant Birchall seemed poised for their best seasons; Taylor Duryea had made his debut at half-back after four years in the system, and signalled that he could help cover the loss of Suckling; skipper Hodge and his predecessor, Sam Mitchell, were dominating; and there were promising signs from newcomers Anderson, Simpkin and (at Box Hill) Spangher.
Then there was Bailey, the big man from the West with the happy smile, who had navigated the long, hard road back from major knee surgery three times and was in career-best form. There was no doubting his resilience or determination, but there were times when Bailey’s confidence in his ability faltered, and he confessed as much to forward coach Simpson when they had a coffee early in 2013.
“Mate, do you know how much Clarko is backing you?” came the reply.
“And I didn’t know, because no one had ever said it to me,” Bailey said at the end of the season. “But that’s when I realised, this bloke wants me in the team—and that gave me real confidence and real belief that if he wants me in there, let’s have a crack!”
Before the Grand Final rematch at the MCG in round seven—with a six-to-one win-loss record—the coach cast the game as a test of the team’s progress from 2012: “I want to find out, and I’m sure you want to find out as well, just how we’ve evolved over the summer and in the games that we’ve played thus far.”
The yardsticks for measuring that progress would be the four trademarks decided on by the playing group in the pre-season: “How selfless are we in working for one another? How tough and hard are we at the footy in playing commando footy? How well do we communicate with one another and how prepared are we to do the genuine team things?” There was no better opponent for measuring these things than Sydney, Clarkson said: “They pride themselves on their Bloods culture. It’s Bloods culture versus Commando culture. Let’s find out tonight!”
The result was an even performance and a 37-point victory, and one more step towards redemption.
By Michael Gordon
Published by The Slattery Media Group, 2014.
Excerpt used with permission.
Available at all good bookstores or from www.slatterymedia.com/store
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