"PLANNING is everything. The plan is nothing." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
ONE WEEK of plotting, or at least an element of it, dissolved inside two minutes last year when Essendon unravelled what Melbourne was doing with its makeshift ruck corps.
The Demons' resident swingman Tom McDonald started that clash as a seventh defender-of-sorts just off the centre square, but his role wasn't quite as it seemed.
McDonald became a red and blue chameleon in Max Gawn's absence, morphing into an extra midfielder once play began who would immediately drop behind the play at stoppages.
His job description also enabled partner-in-crime Cameron Pedersen, the chief ruckman, to push deep forward and leave McDonald to man Tom Bellchambers at kick-ins.
The Bombers' brains trust, armed with game intelligence and opposition strategy coach Rob Harding, was helped by the fact there were multiple early stoppages.
"A minute of game time is a lifetime in the coaches' box on game day," Harding told AFL.com.au.
"You've got to be sure (about what you're seeing), because you don't want to send multiple messages down, but you also understand the quicker you get the right message out, the better it is for the team.
"You might make a little adjustment around that, which we did on that day, and we were in front at half-time and it wasn't causing us issues."
WATCH: McDonald and Pedersen tag-team Bellchambers
Opposition analysts like Harding generally study their upcoming rivals, and all their intricacies, for the three weeks leading into a match, but that doesn't mean they can't be caught out.
The pressure-packed challenge on those occasions is to find a solution before it becomes a problem.
On and off-field scouting has become so hardcore that teams are experts in the art of deception and disruption.
Secret spies: the life of an opposition analyst
Geelong, for example, used to unleash "chaos" players, regularly Jimmy Bartel or Paul Chapman, around stoppages in its golden era (2007-11) to muddy the waters and befuddle the opposition.
Teams had to work out if Bartel was a wingman, half-back or high half-forward, as well as if he was swapping into the midfield to "spit" a teammate, such as Gary Ablett, into the forward line.
"Champion Data will tell you most games are won or lost by four goals, so a couple of good tactics are crucial," one analyst said.
"If you stop them scoring a couple of times and you score a couple of extra times, then you go from a loss to a win pretty quickly."
IN PREPARATION WE TRUST
Mark Stone is outside AFL ranks and a head coach for the first time in almost two decades this year, in charge of SANFL club Glenelg.
He spent the past six seasons as a Fremantle assistant – specialising in stoppages – after four years at Sydney and five more at West Coast, where he was an opposition analyst.
That experience gave him a strong understanding of the modern game at the elite level and what it takes to be successful, even before on-field tactics go into action.
"One thing Freo was strong on and did well was putting a well-prepared team on the park in round one, where every player in the team had to have accumulated a certain number of (pre-season) minutes played," Stone told AFL.com.au.
"We aimed for 300 minutes, and some were under, but you had to be over 200, unless there were exceptional circumstances."
The Dockers won every season opener in Stone's first four years there before dropping the last two.
Fremantle's minute philosophy is more than just an internal benchmark, and is also applied to the club's round one combatants.
"One of the things we would do is target players we were coming up against who had interrupted pre-seasons and who we knew were a bit underdone in terms of minutes," Stone said.
"Physically, we'd put them under tackle pressure, we'd physically hit them – within the rules of the game – and target them with elite runners.
"Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't."
The strategy certainly succeeded against an undercooked Collingwood in 2014, with the Dockers, Grand Finalists a season earlier, overcoming a slow start to crush the Pies by 70 points.
Former opposition and game analyst Luke Chambers, who worked at Hawthorn, Essendon and Melbourne, would typically present his findings to the playing group two days before a match.
Beyond that, it was up to the footballer to tap further into Chambers' knowledge as part of their weekly preparation.
"I would have Dyson Heppell coming up saying 'I know I'm going to get tagged this week by Kane Cornes, so show me the last three players he's tagged and how they've won the footy'," Chambers told AFL.com.au.
"It just depends on the player, but Heppell was one who was so studious and organised. He wanted to know exactly what his tagger was doing.
"I'd even bring the laptop down to the rooms at half-time. I'd cut the last three centre bounces where, say, Adelaide has won it, and I'd go and sit with 'Hep' and Jobe (Watson) and these guys.
"That was the most rewarding thing; being able to go down in-game when the heat's on and have the mids come to you and say, 'What do we do?'."
Dyson Heppell left no stone unturned in his bid to beat taggers like Kane Cornes. Picture: AFL Photos
COPYCATS NO MORE?
If one thing came out of the Western Bulldogs' and Richmond's drought-busting premierships it is that they won their way.
That is not necessarily groundbreaking, given all the modern premiers did something new that helped set them apart, but the fairytale nature of the past two years rammed it home.
Harding points out the great Sydney and West Coast sides excelled in one-on-one warfare; Geelong countered that by outnumbering rivals around the ball; Hawthorn developed the rolling zone; and Collingwood implemented the forward press.
And so on.
"Teams can get caught chasing last year's premiers – and this has been an issue for years," Harding said.
"But there's more and more a feeling that you don't have to play a certain way to win a premiership.
"There are things that are fundamentally ingrained: you have to be a good defence and a good contested-ball team, and you have to be able to score.
"But, how you achieve that is up to you … there's no right or wrong way to play."
WATCH: Tigers pile on the pressure
The AFL's new coaching innovation and education manager David Rath, the Hawks' former head of football strategy and innovation, believes the follow-the-leader mentality remains.
"Teams look quite closely at what works and try and adopt it, or modify part of their game," Rath said.
"There were unique aspects to how flags were won in recent years and that may fuel a little more exploration, but I still think, in the main, there's an element of adopting what works."
Rath, like Harding, considers winning contested ball as one of the key pillars to success, but argues "contemporary statistics don't capture its essence well".
He insists there is a random nature to some of the sport's most-doted-upon statistics, including centre clearances, and that luck plays a bigger role than many would like to admit.
Todd Viney, back when he was a Hawthorn assistant, even once responded to coach Alastair Clarkson's questioning of the Hawks' clearance struggles with "it's just a bumbling ball".
"There is a lot of randomness within AFL football and clubs are trying to understand what the background randomness looks like and trying to extract 'signals' from that," Rath said.
"When you lose five centre bounces in a row, is that random or is there a trend?
"The real skilful coaches' box has someone who's not just taking the numbers, but actually looking behind the numbers and looking for trends."
WHAT'S NEXT?
Melbourne, a club that hasn't played finals since 2006, suddenly has the AFL world's attention.
The upstart Demons are a young team on the rise and play an aggressive brand of football that promises to challenge competition conventions.
They park elite kickers such as Bernie Vince and Jordan Lewis at half-back and are not afraid to attack the corridor, a far cry from Mick Malthouse's old boundary-hugging Collingwood teams.
It is more difficult and riskier to do nowadays, with teams increasingly competent with their forward-half pressure, but – a la Richmond – wanting to make the most of turnovers.
"In the past, teams turned a turnover situation into a controlled possession state," Rath said.
"Teams are now looking for opportunities to take ground when the opposition is not in a defensively stable state."
Melbourne dasher Jayden Hunt, arguably the game's most aggressive half-back, even has a licence at times to charge off the back of the centre square and leave his opponent behind.
In that sense, Hunt is banking on ruckman Gawn and the likes of Clayton Oliver and Jack Viney to win more clearances than they lose.
WATCH: Hunt leaves his man to launch a barrel
The Tigers adopted a similar "cheating" approach last year when their famed pressure game began to take effect, and they regularly kicked easy goals "out the back".
Percentage play is no longer in vogue.
The Demons might be the aggressive pacesetters, albeit with a black-and-yellow theme, but they aren't lone rangers in that space.
"If you look back to Hawthorn from 2013 to '15; they were using that precision kicking and maintaining possession," Chambers said.
"I don't see as much of that. Teams are now switching focus to Richmond and what they did, and keeping the ball moving, taking aggressive kicks and trying to get guys out the back."
As coaches and analysts try to predict the next tactical innovation in a minefield of strategy and espionage, Stone argues one key fundamental has never been more important.
"One of the most underrated skills in AFL football now is a player's ability to concentrate for long periods, because the game never stops," Stone said.
"The whistle doesn't offer a pause, and the next thing is happening all the time – changing positional roles, momentum swings, rotations on and off the bench, and tactics.
"So a player's ability to sustain concentration is definitely an advantage … one mistake can fracture team defence, and it's the same with offence."
