The sole focus of our next week was beating St Kilda. Our preparation for that match was exactly the same as for Hawthorn.
We put lots of energy into scouting and training reports. Although it was our second consecutive game off only a six-day-break, there was the added emotion of playing a rare Friday night game. There was also the significance of the Anzac Day round, which we talked about in the rooms prior to the game.
In the rooms, you try and judge the mood of the group and we all thought it was pretty similar to the week before.
At the 17-minute-mark of the first quarter, the score was 1.2 to 2.0 and it had been raining all week, so we fully expected it to be a tight and tough game.
We were sitting in the box thinking we were on track, but within a quarter we were down by 10 goals.
You think, what the hell happened? And I’m sure that’s exactly what our supporters and people outside the club were thinking too.
People started asking, ‘Did the players get ahead of themselves?’ and ‘Which is the right Port Adelaide?’
We consider a lot of things in the lead-up to a game and we try to prepare the same, but you never get the same result.
For me, it’s really about the psychology of each individual player.
As coaches, we look at the way we present ideas and ask, ‘Do we push the players over the top?’ Or ‘Have we under-stimulated them’?
Some players need a certain kind of attention, but what works best for some doesn’t necessarily work best for all.
Over the last couple of years, consistently getting the best out of players is something every club except, probably, Geelong, seems to have got wrong.
No one can consistently get up for a game, and then get up for the next one and the one after that. More often than not, it’s chocolates one week and boiled lollies the next.
You can show great team work, great confidence and great skill, but where does it go if it’s not there the next week? It’s really challenging and frustrating.
At the start of the year I attended a coaches’ conference, with 200-300 other coaches from around Australia.
One of the keynote speakers came in and talked about psychology. He suggested he had some answers, so I gave him the dilemma: you’re playing in front of 90,000 people, you’re down by 10 goals and it’s a grand final.
There was laughter and people thought I was making a joke of it, but the fact of the matter is that I’m yet to find anyone that can say, definitively, ‘This is what you should do in that situation’.
Yes, we can try a particular approach or method in that instance, but will it work again next time? There are so many variables that come into it, but everyone wants to isolate just one and it’s not as simple as that.
That’s where the art of coaching and sports psychology has to get to. Every club, commentator and supporter will have an idea. It’s a matter of working out which idea will spark an individual and group to say, ‘Yes we can still do this’.
As a person who feels as though there must be an answer somewhere, I’ll keep looking for it.
It’s the holy grail.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.
