"Every battle is won before it's fought" – Sun Tzu
With this in mind, which player has already prepared to win the battle this season?
Ask this question to most players and they will turn to their recent PB (personal best) in the time trial as a sign of their readiness. I'm of the belief that this information could not be more irrelevant.
Warren Buffett calls it the 'institutional imperative'.. A tendency of individuals in the business world to mindlessly imitate the behaviour of their peers. In the football world, too, many players in pre-season focus on wanting to be good athletes rather than being great footballers.
Far more games are won and lost because of poor skills, they weren't physical enough, inadequate execution of game plan or lack of self-belief, rather than their fitness over two or three kilometres.
In Hawthorn's recent premiership years they punished teams with an elite ability to retain possession of the ball by foot, and in a similar vein the Western Bulldogs cut teams up last year with quick and accurate handball through opposition defence. Turnovers on game day are costly on the scoreboard and quickly change momentum. Turnovers create moments in games when it's easiest to be scored against; that is attacking into a disorganised defence.
A fan should want to hear that their team's kicking skills have exponentially increased from last season. That a focus on tackling and hardness has meant fierce training sessions.
It is a given that pre-season training is tough … everyone's doing it.
GPS units have created some great data for football departments, but I think some players place too much significance on GPS distances to make a judgment on rating their completed training session. That piece of GPS data represents just one way to measure their training, as only their inner scorecard may really know if their skills and hardness improved.
Pre-season is a time when you have an opportunity to work on deficiencies in your game, month after month, not bounded by weekly opposition analysis, to become an even better footballer.
Fitness may be one aspect, but in my experience any player dropped or game lost due to a lack of fitness is an exception to the rule. Games are usually decided because a team was harder, or capitalised on their chances when they owned the ball.
In November 2010 I reassessed what I wanted to achieve over the upcoming pre-season and it was a key turning point in my career. I set myself to be the best centre half-back in the competition and that meant putting on muscle and weight to compete with the big key forwards. I made a decision that in doing this I would consciously forgo any time-trial PB aspirations, and most likely go backwards a little. My belief was that it would make me a better footballer though. I wanted to be hard to out-muscle. I wanted to out-mark my opposition more.
For me, the best test of a footballer's fitness in pre-season is one you may have never heard of before; the yo-yo test.
It's similar to a beep test in how it measures endurance, but puts greater focus on maintaining speed while fatigued. It asks the question to the individual: when others are hurting, who can not only keep going, but who can get quicker? It also has no set finish line, so it tests individuals mentally as well. Who can keep running, even though others have already stopped? My old VFL coach at Essendon, Terry Daniher, called this "gut running". Put simply, it shows character and a real hunger under duress.
If a two-kilometre time trial is overrated, then the yo-yo test is underrated.
The best footballers that I played alongside were the ones that drove their own career. They worked on their deficiencies.
Adam Goodes and Ryan O'Keefe may have appeared to all fans that they had it all. They looked to play in a way that possibly suggested that they relied solely on their talent. However, they built their careers on grit and hard work combined with a specific sense of purpose. They deliberately practised areas they wanted to improve on, not just what the training schedule looked like that week.
Sometimes that may have been simply their fitness, but more often than not it was the consistent drive to continually improve on their basic skills in being a footballer; hardness and elite skills, time and time again.
Every battle is won before it's fought … well done to the players who have been running a lot and working hard at training, but that alone won't win you the battle.
Former Sydney Swan Ted Richards played 261 AFL games
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