That was genuinely what I thought was happening when Terry told me he was moving me up the ground for our round four match against Fremantle last year at Subiaco Oval.
But basically, it was out of necessity for the club.
Plough saw me coming towards the end of my career and decided it was time for the club to try to develop another key forward. So he just brought me into his office after round three and threw the idea up to me. And it was basically: ‘Well, you've got to accept it, there's no other choice’. I went away from his office with my head spinning a bit but I guess he had the vision to think that it could work, and he believed that I could do it.
I was full of doubts about the move. I knew I had the engine but just didn't know if I had the ability to run around on a smaller player or play around stoppages – I’d never played there in my whole career. When you are a forward, you're normally always a kick away from the stoppage. So I was just worried about getting lost in the traffic at the stoppages, losing my opponent and having him kick goals on me.
Luckily enough, moving to the wing worked well in the first game against Freo and it just grew from there.
Finishing third in the Brownlow means history will show it was one of my better seasons, and if it wasn't for Terry's foresight to put me up on the wing it mightn't have happened. But having said that, we didn't play finals, so it's not going to go down as a really memorable year. You want to remember finals and playing in a winning team, so it wasn’t the greatest thing ever, but it certainly had a positive impact for me. And I guess it did help the team.
Something Terry always had the capacity to do was pull a seemingly-bizarre rabbit out of the hat and make it work.
It seems so long ago when he arrived at Punt Road that I find it hard to remember what he did differently to Spud (previous coach Danny Frawley). But one thing I reckon was a real strength of Plough’s was his ability to pull off against-the-odds wins, which was a characteristic of his at the Bulldogs as well.
He got a real kick out of out the challenge of a really tough game and coming up with a tactic for one given game that could get you an upset win. I guess the biggest one was when the Bulldogs beat Essendon in 2000, but we had one against Adelaide at Telstra Dome that really stands out for me. He was really good at coming up with a tactic which he made you believe could work for that one day.
I'd love to be playing this Friday night for Terry's last game. He's been here for five years and for him to be in the 500 club is incredible. Last week, when they showed the names of the others who were in it, it really hit home what an achievement it was. So it would have been nice to play the past two weeks.
It's ironic how football works out, that Terry’s last game will be against the club he coached and played with. The Dogs will want to spoil the party, and it's the Friday night game, so it'll be a great atmosphere at Docklands. So it's really disappointing for me to miss out.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.
