Lenny by Lenny Hayes

Author:Lenny Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2014-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

WHATEVER IT TAKES

After that finals series we knew we were still miles off it. Even though we’d finished fourth it was pretty clear to us that we needed to improve across the board to challenge teams like Geelong and Hawthorn for the flag.

We had a lot of discussions around how we were going to try to cope without Harves while still bridging the gap between us and the top teams. Part of that conversation was whether the club should have a go at recruiting Ben Cousins. I was excited by the prospect; obviously he came with a fair bit of off-field baggage, but I’d played against Ben a lot and I was sick of chasing him around the park year after year. He was a skilful running machine who could have really added to our midfield mix, and I think our club would have been a good environment for him. I think most of the guys felt the same, but ultimately it was Rossy’s call.

He thought long and hard about it, but when he told us that Cuzzy wasn’t part of his plans he put it on all of us midfielders to take another step up to fill the role that Ben might have had. I appreciated what Rossy was trying to do, but I felt for Cuzzy and I was glad he at least got an opportunity at Richmond.

* * *

If I had to single out one year as the most enjoyable of my career, it would be 2009. We were winning games, but it was more the way we were going about it that was so rewarding. After an almost tentative start to his coaching career, Ross had grown in stature as a coach and he had absolute buy-in from the players. I think he tried to please everyone in his first year or so at the club, but at some point he just decided he was going to do it his way and see what came of it.

He made some changes to a few of the defensive aspects of his game plan that were right on the money. We’d looked pretty closely at Hawthorn and they were playing more of a zone across the ground. Most other teams would go one on one, but the Hawks would cover an area rather than a man, so we did a lot of training on that over the summer. They called it the press, and Hawthorn’s stopped around the midfield, but we wanted to do it in the front half. We took a good look at the Cats as well and there were also a few aspects of their game we felt we could bring over to ours. Geelong was the best in the comp at scoring from turnovers, so we figured we needed to be able to create more turnovers as well.

We practised our press a lot and had a lot of meetings about it. There’s a bit of theory behind it, but at its core it requires every single player to be on the same page.

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