It’s one of those funny things in sport that, when the pressure mounts, there’s a tendency to move away from what works and not back to what does.
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It’s hard to put your finger on why that happens. In such a competitive environment, there can be a tendency to overthink things and question what got you to where you are.
It’s not just players. This is my 25th year as a fulltime professional coach and I can tell you, there are times where you second-guess yourself. Anyone who says they haven’t is lying.
That’s when you need to just have a look in the mirror and say ‘hang on a second, this I who I am, this is what I believe in, this is what’s made me successful over my career’.
That’s been a big theme for us this week. Yes we are 5-8, but we’re still well in finals contention. We don’t need a drastic overhaul but we have gone through what you might call a refresher course.
In our first year as a group, our plan was to establish a team culture, and identity around how we wanted to play. We’ve had nine players return from last season and those guys enjoy playing that style of game.
At times this year we’ve gone away from that and lost our way a little bit. That happens, but what we need to do is just ask ourselves: Why did we finish semi-finalists’ one year and grand finalists’ the next?
We need to revisit and have trust and faith in the system that works. The last couple of weeks we’ve had some injuries and line-up changes and that sort of thing and there’s been some confusion in the group.
It comes down to communication and, in our case over the last few weeks, a lack of it. When there’s a breakdown in communication you’re always going to have issues and we saw that last week, particularly defensively, against Perth.
We were right in it against the number one team in the country, but they showed why they’re the benchmark with their and mental toughness to execute their system when it counted.
You could say the same about our loss to Melbourne. With some key personnel missing, we produced a really great first half but in the second, we went away from the plan.
The way we play, we need to outsmart teams and we can only do that if everyone is one the same page.
It’s not as simple as just speaking up. There’s been instances over our last few games where we’ve had three people talking in the huddle saying three different things.
It’s a cliche, but you can have too many cooks. This week we’ve cut the menu down and gone back to what has made us successful as a club.
It’s time for us to re-establish who we are and that’ll be our mindset come Saturday against Melbourne.