Any Given Team by Ray McLean

Author:Ray McLean [McLean, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Management, Leadership, Motivation
ISBN: 9781925280722
Publisher: Leading Teams Australia
Published: 2015-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

Marching in on the Saints

Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is needed. You cant cross a chasm in two small jumps

David Lloyd George

I’d figured that if I was ever going to get a response from an AFL club it would be from one of the strugglers because they’d obviously be more receptive to the idea of change than clubs with recent memories of success. There’d be no pressing need for Hawthorn, Carlton, West Coast or Essendon to be fiddling with cultures that were already capable of delivering premierships. The mostly likely takers would be a club that, like Central District, had had a gutful of trailing the pack and were receptive to radical measures.

Along with fifteen other AFL coaches, I’d sent one of my letters to St Kilda coach, Stan Alves, who’d been in the job for six months or so when I wrote to him in 1994. From where I stood, the Saints didn’t look to be going particularly well and seemed to have cultural similarities to the old Central District. There were some extraordinarily talented high-profile players, there’d be heightened expectations with each new coach and each new season and the team would fire up at random times and look like they might be contenders. Briefly.

The cycle had been running in overdrive at St Kilda for nearly twenty years, and Stan was the tenth coach since 1976. The average St Kilda coaching stint since then had lasted about thirty-five games, or seventy hours of playing time- about the same time the average tail gunner over Europe in 1943 could expect to be in their job before they were hosed out at the end of a mission. If feeling secure about your situation is a condition for optimal performance then it’s no wonder St Kilda’s coaches had struggled.

Football club cultures are generally flint-hard and can resist change for decade after decade as the old induct the new into the club’s ways, then the new grow into the old and repeat the process. But the AFL clubs really are in whole other league and they’re tougher than diamonds. For the AFL clubs out of Victoria it’s a continuum unbroken by wars or pestilence for over a century, and reinforced by the reporting that makes sure nothing’s ever forgotten. For example, newspaper reports from the 1890s and 1990s, and probably every decade between, have praised the Geelong team’s skillful play while bemoaning its supposed aversion to physical contact. The mythmakers send no apologies when they’re proven wrong; instead, they credit themselves with highlighting the issue and inducing the turnaround. Then the moment the team goes off the boil the allegations resurface with new vehemence. Nothing changes but the dates.

For St Kilda, the perceptions have been different, in some ways the opposite of Geelong. Physical contact was in abundance at the club, on and reputedly off the field, and for years it had supposedly turned it’s home ground at Moorabbin into bog to reduce the skill gap between them and their opposition, whoever they were.

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