You'd think the Geelong mentor would have no trouble given the awesome array of talent he has at his disposal at the Cattery, but he admitted on Wednesday that it was going to be a whole new experience.
"It's an interesting question, because I really don't know how to coach the team – coaching stars, coaching guys from other clubs," he said.
"How do we play? Do we give them a lot of instructions, do we have a game plan, or do we just let them play and let them work it out for themselves?
"I know that the guys at Geelong, we encourage them to coach themselves on the field and fix up little hotspots that they see, so you'd hope that our guys would – being the best players in the competition – between them they could work a lot of things out and we don't have to have that much influence.
"But in saying that, if something's standing out, that's where coaches come into it, and we try and fix little problems that occur."
Thompson said another consideration was making sure the playing time was spread around, both to give everyone a fair crack and to ensure that nobody was run into the ground.
"I think the players are going to have to have a big input into how we play and what happens. Even the fact that there's seven interchange [players] – we don't want to cook too many players, we want to give everybody a decent run.
"We don't want to play anyone for 100 per cent of the game, we want to look after players from the clubs' perspective.
"Just handling seven on the bench is just a unique little problem in itself, so there's a lot to sort out in the next couple of days."
