With caution. All you are doing is positioning yourself at this stage of the season. You’ve got under way, you’re in a favourable position and you’ve got a pack chasing. And you realise how critical the next four or five games are going to be for you. It’s been pleasing to be in this position but we also know there’s a fair job ahead of us.
You mentioned the next four or five weeks, do you break your season down into blocks?
We try to. It’s a very long season so to get the guys motivated for that extended period of time is quite arduous. You’ve got to be able to break down the season a little bit to make it more achievable for the guys rather than thinking they have this enormous mountain to climb and you’ve got to do it tomorrow, so we do tend to try and break it down to roughly four or five games and it gives them a short term focus.
You weren’t coaching here last year but the team slipped away after the break. Did you do anything to address that?
One of the things we’ve struggled to do the last few years, rightly or wrongly, whether you’ve been here or not, has been finish out the season. That’s happened the last two seasons. So part of our [planning] has been to ensure that we can survive the length of the season. Perhaps we weren’t as fit as we could have been, or absolutely cherry ripe, come round one but that was all in the big plan to ensure our players could get across the season and be able to play at a relatively high intensity. But we don’t know what that outcome will be until we get the chance to play it.
And that meant holding back some of the senior guys in the pre-season, is that what you’re referring to?
A little bit. Some guys started pre-season training a bit later. We’re always looking for ways to keep the guys, not so much fresh, but ensuring that the big picture is in mind and trying to get our guys through the course of a whole season. That’s a fine balance because the next game matters the most. We think we’ve managed it carefully. At the moment it’s just a feeling, it’s a presumption, it’s a plan, but obviously we don’t get the chance to know what that outcome is until we participate in it.
You might not look this far ahead, but only three of your last nine matches are against current top-8 teams. How high are you setting your goals?
That’s one of the challenges you face, that we don’t become influenced by external [factors] and one of those is where people sit on the ladder. If you go through each team in the competition, whether you’re playing the 16th or the first, they each have capability, it’s just whether one team has more than the other and each one of those teams has the ability to win any game. The tendency is to look ahead but all we’re doing is planning ahead but we don’t live ahead. We live for the moment.
Just personally, how are you finding the week-to-week of the coaching game?
Oh, I think it’s rigorous, it’s full-on, it’s challenging, they’re all the parts why you love it and they’re also the parts that make it difficult at times. That is the constant thing for players, for staff, for our club, you ride that every single week win or lose sometimes. We’ve enjoyed the experience, it’s been great so far, but there’s nothing to hang our hat on so far other than we’re in the workman stage of the season and we’ve got to make sure we get the outcome we’re after and that takes a fair bit of hard work to get there.
Being your first year it was obviously important to surround yourself with good staff. Can you tell us a bit about the role your assistants (coaches) play?
You probably lean on your assistant coaches more than ever now. With the role, the hands-on ability with the players, it’s a little bit less than what you’d like it to be. But your assistant coaches are at the coalface of the interaction with your players, so having good ones that can teach and show the players what it takes to play AFL football and get their skill and competency level up is critically important for any head coach. To have Justin Leppitsch, Wayne Brittain and Adrian Fletcher, they’ve filled that role for us as well as our development coaches in Chris Johnson and Craig Brittain, they’ve been hugely supportive and the practises they’ve put in place have really set the players up for success, so hopefully we can maintain that intensity through the back end of the season.
What’s the single thing about the playing group that has impressed you the most?
I think their coach-ability and willingness to learn. I’ve been exceptionally impressed by their want to get better. I think we’ve still got to know what’s required a little bit better. But in terms of application, if you show the guys what’s required, they’ll do it. They’ll try and put things in place to try and achieve it and I think that’s a fantastic trait this group has.
On the playing side, what were your first thoughts when Daniel Merrett and Joel Patfull went down almost at the same time?
You have that 24 hours where you’re a bit of a sad sack and then you look at it and you look at the capabilities of the players to come in and we were excited by the chance for Lachie Henderson. He needed to get himself up and going another week before we felt confident putting him back in and setting him up, but he’s come in and done particularly well. Then we had Jason Roe who needed to go back for a bit of form and he came in last week and was good and now it’s about consistency for him.
When you lick your wounds and reflect, you say there’s some genuine capability with the players we have and we just need to make a few minor adjustments with the way we play. Then it’s head down, bum up and away we go. You can’t think about it too long, you have to get on with business and that’s what your players are expecting you to do, set a bit of direction for them and install a bit of belief, and the guys have gone about it in a really professional way.
Has Mitch Clark surprised you at all?
For every casualty there’s an opportunity that exists and I think if there’s any player that’s capitalised out of that, it’s Mitch Clark. Leuenberger’s gone down, Charman’s gone down, it was really thrust upon Mitch that he had to take that role for us and he’s been one of the players that has enjoyed having a fair degree of responsibility that comes with that. His step-up has been very, very pleasing, but he’s not the only one. I think we’ve had a number of guys that have come up and really progressed with their football and we need that to continue.
With Charman out for the season and Leuenberger still a fair way away, do you have any contingency plans if Clark gets injured?
Yeah, I spoke to Beau McDonald and I said ‘mate I’m drafting you mid-season and you’re in’, that’s our contingency plan (laughs). No, obviously you need some contingency plans and they’re not always the preferences you want to go to. Your options start to dry up I must say. But at the same time we’ve got a couple of young ruckmen (rookies Daniel Murray and Joel Tippett) we’re working with feverishly right now that we’ve had to fast-track and put a fair bit of time into because who knows, they might get their opportunity. And there might be a couple of roles some of the other guys can fill should it be required.
So have you elevated a rookie to cover Charman?
Not yet. With the policies or procedures used in the AFL we can elevate a rookie as needed so we’ve got a couple of long-term injured guys so we’ve got no problem in bringing them in. The one we elevated who hasn’t got a game yet is Pearce Hanley and obviously he’s not ruck material, but we’d like to see a bit of him before the season is out but that will depend on his performance.
There’s been a lot of talk about Daniel Rich. Has what he’s been able to do been a surprise or what you expected of him?
I think when anyone comes into the organisation for the first time you try to minimise the expectations. In Daniel’s case he had already come with expectations about what he might be like and when he might be ready. I don’t put the expectations on them because I can’t put any greater ones on than what they place on themselves. They’re very, very impatient, I was when I came through, and I wouldn’t expect these guys coming through to be any different. The way he’s applied himself, he’s earned his spot. We haven’t given him the spot, he’s earned his right to be there and continues to do so. We’ve been very impressed with the way he’s gone about it, but he’s done that because he’s worked hard.
You’ve shown a lot of confidence in guys like Rich, Sam Sheldon, James Polkinghorne, these young guys and given them plenty of games. Was showing the young players confidence something you set out to do?
I think they’ve earned it. If they hadn’t performed, if they hadn’t gone to reserves and played very, very good football, if they hadn’t shown the necessary training or the intensity required or the professionalism needed, then you wouldn’t have confidence in the players to be able to say: ‘right I reckon you can do this job for us’.
But when they display all those things, as a coach that’s all you can ask for, so when you put them in there you can’t help but give them confidence. The confidence of putting them in there is to say: ‘you’re not in here for one week, you’re not in here for two weeks, we want you to be in here for as long as you can sustain that attitude, that performance and that intensity for’.
So for us that’s the level of confidence we want to give to all our players.
You often hear coaches talk about heavy losses as being turning points in a season. The match against Geelong, what did you get out of that?
We got a real experience about what they play like and how they work for one another. With Geelong they might be individually very good players but it’s the teamwork that they do for one another that we took away from it. They help each other out. So the point was made that despite how individually brilliant you may or may not be, you require everyone to participate to be an outstanding team.
For us we went back thinking about, and getting a fair bit more clarity of our role was and what was required. The players have slowly implemented that at the pace that they’ve needed to and we’ve sort of got some results off the back end of it. We’ve got to continue that momentum into the back half of the season, we absolutely must.
With Gold Coast’s inclusion and their draft concessions, does that make this next draft more significant to you?
Every draft is. I think we have an emergence of a few young players coming through. You always want your first draft pick and the picks that you make to succeed and we’re no different. We’ve got to be able to maximise the draft picks we have because we know that if western Sydney was to come in and when Gold Coast come in, our draft system has been seriously compromised in a fairly significant manner.
It’s going to be a fair period of time before we get back to a draft system that is uncompromised. Who’s to say in that three years that free agency isn’t going to exist, so I would imagine there would be a fair amount of activity in that area of trades and free agency and drafts and that has to be a fairly well planned and well-managed over that period of time to make sure you can maximise the opportunities that exist there – or lack of them.
How do you see Gold Coast’s inclusion affecting the Lions in terms of rivalry and market share in south east Queensland?
We’re at a stage where if you’re a Queenslander and you play AFL, we’re bought into this whole vision of what it can add to our game. I’m forever in a situation where it’s about the game and the growth of the game. For pure selfish reasons you have your Brisbane Lions hat on, but for the greater good of the game we hope it has a positive effect on our state and we get greater participation levels, greater interest, greater TV audiences, more people watching the game.
So for us as an off-shoot we also know there’s going to be short-term pain associated with that. For a period of time, the club’s going to have to be propped up for us to reap the long-term benefits of that. As a club we’ll feel the initial kick in the guts of that, but we’ve bought into the AFL vision that we think there’ll be a long term benefit so we trust the people that make those decisions and for us that’s the AFL Commission and executive. And we believe they’re the guardians of the game and they know best.
We don’t have a choice, we’ve got to make sure we’re in a position where we maximise it rather than really hurt us, where we see it as an opportunity as opposed to seeing it as a serious imposition to what we want to achieve as a football club.
