Like his embattled coach, Brisbane Lions captain Tom Rockliff has been increasingly busy on the ramparts. It’s the lot of a senior player when a team is failing. After one win in 12 rounds, the Lions are warding off the disbelievers.
Yes, Brisbane still had faith in coach Justin Leppitsch and his methods, Rockliff was telling RSN radio on Friday. “If there was no pressure from the outside on Leppa you would be surprised, but within the four walls the boys have faith in the system and the way we play.”
By Saturday night, after an 83-point loss to fellow cellar dweller Fremantle at the Gabba, the first question to the coach was on point: did he fear for his tenure? Leppa didn’t take it well. “Can we stop these silly questions?”
But that’s the problem for the coach of a losing outfit. No reputation, or credentials, or assurances from influential directors – even when those include Leigh Matthews – can withstand a losing streak if it’s long and deep enough. As many a departing coach has noted wryly, the industry sees only the win-loss column. No matter a man’s management skills, or aptitude for the job, he is tarred with the brush of failure. With each passing loss, faith in him ebbs away, until eventually nobody is listening.
Leppitsch is close to that point. How he must envy coaches enjoying the other end of this spectrum right now, like Adelaide’s coach-of-the-moment Don Pyke, whose team’s positive momentum has supporters abuzz with belief. Chuffed with the Crows’ exhilarating fortnight, Pyke has been talking up the value of pivotal wins over GWS Giants and West Coast. “Guys just get a real feeling of what they are able to create as a group,” he said after Saturday’s triumph at Subiaco. “They’ll take some belief from this, some real confidence.”
These days coaches talk a lot about belief. So they should; it is the currency of football – the bedrock, in fact, of the entire industry. For what is football but religion – a devout quest for the transcendence of premiership glory that inspires lifelong devotion to 18 cults and the demigods happen to be leading them? To borrow from Marx, it’s the opiate of the people. And belief is its lifeblood.
A week ago, dismayed by his team’s road losses to Adelaide and Geelong, GWS Giants coach Leon Cameron omitted to reach for the stock excuses: loss of structure, insufficient effort, contested possession differentials, and so on. Instead he offered up the refreshing example of his star recruit, former Geelong triple-premiership daredevil Steve Johnson.
“He just wants to win,” said Cameron. “I want our players to believe like he believes. That’s the next step for our players. If you don’t believe, that’s why you fumble, that’s why you make poor decisions going ahead of the footy, that’s why you miss goals when you should kick goals. You’ve got to believe. Steve Johnson believes.”
Actually, everyone with a stake in a football club, from players to board members, from fans to the media, must believe. Even after a heavy loss, with his game plan seemingly in tatters, the coach must have the world continuing to believe. It’s his top priority.
Last week on AFL 360, former Geelong premiership coach Mark Thompson was asked how a coach should deal with his men in the wake of demoralising losses of the kind suffered by St Kilda at the hands of the rampant Crows. Acknowledging the coach’s instinctive desire to unload his frustrations on already deflated players, Thompson said, “You have to be careful. You have to give the players something to believe in. And that can be really hard as a coach (in the aftermath of a loss).”
Perhaps the only man with a comparable job to Leppitsch right now is Essendon’s John Worsfold, whose near canonisation in the wake of the Round 2 victory over Melbourne has been steadily downgraded to mere competent stewardship through extraordinary circumstances. All that a rueful Worsfold can hold up for the Essendon players and supporters as worthy of belief is “the future”. As he noted after Friday night’s 108-point loss to Hawthorn, it’s a hard sell.
Note that as with Rockliff staunchly defending his coach, no player will ever offer up coaching shortcomings as reasons for a defeat. This would be heresy. Nothing will put the skids under a coach quicker than implied criticism from his players. No, for a player, any failure can only be his. A footballer must own it. He must make declarations of faith. And so in post-match interviews, he must stick with these shibboleths: “We went away from our game plan/structures” or “We didn’t work hard enough” or “We still believe in our method.” Forgive us, we have sinned.
The coach reinforces this, as he must, for his job is to instil in his disciples an unshakeable belief in what he is selling, so they remain staunch even when confronted by evidence to the contrary – when the momentum of a game, or season, is running against them.
So he acknowledges only the players’ failings: they must work harder, believe harder. Did you ever hear Mick Malthouse admit fault? Never in 718 games. Not once in 305 defeats. No, only his players could fail. (Jason Cloke, anyone?)
Whatever the reasons for a loss, the omniscient coach must purport to be able to identify and remedy them. Like Ross Lyon before this year’s western derby memorably telling boundary rider David King, straight-faced, that an earlier Fremantle defeat boiled down to a midfielder being a few metres out of position at a critical juncture. “So that’s an easy fix,” Lyon added. Seven losses later…
Listening to this I was reminded of King himself last season, when Richmond was in a bad patch, demonstrating on Fox Footy how a half-back flanker’s failure to turn into the corridor had squandered an obvious route to goal, then assuring colleagues that coach Damien Hardwick need only remedy this kink in his methodology to return to the winners’ stall. The Tigers lost again that week.
Such analysis of football is clearly absurd. But in a perverse kind of way it’s important too, in that the players have got to believe it matters. So have we, in a sense, because if we saw what passes as match analysis for the absurd abstraction it really is, we’d never fill all these websites, panel shows and talkback hours.
For another glaring example, the received wisdom that Hawthorn’s continued failure to win the contested possession differential despite its nine victories is unsustainable in the long run. On Friday night, Champion Data credited Essendon with 12 more contested possessions, yet Hawthorn won the game by 18 goals. Can end that conversation now?
I often repeat a line from Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley on belief as being the psychological currency of the game. According to Buckley, a team starts each game with a bank of belief; with every goal it makes a deposit into its own account and a withdrawal from the opposition’s. I think belief is the currency of momentum, the mysterious force at the centre of all competition. It goes without saying that Clarkson’s Hawks have stockpiled a great deal of this precious commodity. A Swiss bank vault full. For them, no match position is irretrievable. They believe like Stevie J. believes.
The beauty of Australian football is that it’s really not a tactical game. An immutable truth is that the team with the best available talent will inevitably win in the long run. Yes, teams need a certain structure and internal predictability, and set plays may come off occasionally, but in football any system will work for you as long as it gives players something in which to anchor their belief – something to have faith in.
In the AFL, differences in strategies are very much at the margins. Any game plan will work when you have the momentum. Every plan will fail if you lose the momentum.
The mechanics of game plans are wildly overrated. Did Hawthorn win the 2008 Grand Final by outfoxing the Cats with Alastair Clarkson’s box zone? No, it won because the Hawks got an almighty run-on in the third quarter. With that positive surge came the adrenalin-charged belief that they could win the cup; for the Cats that dreadful, energy-sapping realisation that they had blown it.
Do you think Lyon’s Saints of 2009-10 went so close to premierships because of their manic forward-press tactics? That after all those years of early draft picks they weren’t as near as dammit to the best list anyway?
Of course they were. The important thing was not the forward press but its manic application. Any game plan would have got them to the same place. Grant Thomas could have done it (if the board still believed his shtick). Any coach who instilled the requisite belief in a list of that talent could have reproduced Lyon’s achievement.
(It’s interesting that Lyon at St Kilda and later Fremantle coached his men to be defence-first momentum stoppers; as a result I would argue his teams were less able to generate a supercharged run-on themselves. Until Saturday night, the Dockers had not managed 20 goals for two and a half seasons.)
In 2010 Collingwood adopted the same pressing tactic under Malthouse (combined with his famed around-the-boundary-line advance) and applied it with an even greater intensity. The momentum the Magpies generated as that season progressed and the wins mounted carried them all the way to the 2010 flag and almost to the next. Strangely, nobody adopting such tactics has got near a premiership since. Malthouse’s methods failed abysmally at Carlton.
It’s often said that incoming Geelong coach Chris Scott countered it in 2011 with a few “tweaks” to evolve the Cats’ game and renew their edge over Collingwood. Rubbish. The Geelong turnaround, and 2011 triumph, had everything to do with the loss aversion and the self belief of a proud group of footballers humiliated in the 2010 preliminary final. It had nothing to do with “tweaks” to game instructions – as Scott himself often acknowledged.
Every pre-season, rival clubs pick apart the game plan of the reigning premier. As Clarkson himself recently remarked, the same plan never seems to work the next year. He’s had to constantly reinvent his own, he added. It doesn’t work again because it wasn’t the game plan that won it. To succeed, you don’t need a clever method; however, you clearly must believe you do.
Clarkson is widely regarded as being the best coach of this era. If he pulls off a historic fourth flag this year, he’ll be hailed as the best ever, and perhaps he is. But if so, what an incredible coincidence that he also coached the best available list – and produced the cleverest tactical innovations.
Would the Hawks have been chasing a fourth premiership on end with, say, Ross Lyon in charge? Or Justin Leppitsch? That is unknowable, but why not? The truth is that coaching tenures are all about belief. Grow it and the coach will stay in work. Lose it and he is cooked.
Football coaches require an audience of true believers. For a new coach, the confirmation bias (barracking for your beliefs) of fans and media will excuse early failures – players “getting to learn the game plan”, or “the inconsistency of youth”, or “hampered by injuries”. But eventually the footy world decides you should be doing better.
That’s where the Lions coach is right now. Once the doubts creep in, they quickly get to a critical mass and infiltrate your citadel. Then you’re done. Once revealed as a false prophet, the disgraced coach is quickly discarded, no matter what the financial cost. To clubs, faith is far more valuable than money.
And having evicted one idol, the club embraces the next messiah, to whom it will offer the same pedestal and same unquestioning devotion. And so the football world continues in a Pythonesque cycle. (Contemplate the rise and demise of Mick Malthouse, and the rise and rise of Brendon Bolton for more on this dynamic.)
Yes football is a form of religion; most of its principles apply. Remember Leppa in your prayers.
