Braithy wrote:
camel wrote:
Blue4ever wrote:
Cripps was full of praise for Clarke and indicated that he helped his game.
Yep, I thought that was good to hear. We often don't hear a lot about assistants, so getting some confirmation of positive input from Cripps in his speech was great.
i'm not sure it's good to hear? we all heard midyear what a great guy hansen is. now cripps glow up on clarke. yet, we were the worst defensive stoppage team in the comp.
... these guys aren't getting the job done. the gameplan is ass, the gameday strategy and moving magnets is ass, and this season add some injuries and it was a complete washout
i'm a solid believer you're not meant to love your coaches... respect them and love their work. but they're not your mates, it doesn't work. it breeds comfort, and nothing great (to my knowledge in sports) is achieved from any place of comfort?
heard a lot of ex-GF-winning players talk of their love for Clarkson (as hard to believe as that might be!) and headlines would suggest at least a few dislike him and Fagan intensely to this day.
i’m told from a direct source at least one of our ‘95 brownlow vote winning players “hated” Parko, and i wouldn’t be surprised if his best mate in the team was sympathetic to his cause. didn’t mean he could be coached by parko (i don’t claim to know any of the ins and outs of the relationship)
what you’ve said is true in one sense, Braithy, coaches are there to challenge, inspire, train, discipline, organise, develop, educate, motivate, orchestrate, guide and in a word lead their players. there’s a range of different ways and styles which coaches adopt to do that.
maintaining a certain critical distance between themselves and players so they can more easily remain as objective as possible is very important. that matters from the perspective of coaches as who need to be not the ball as game day tacticians and also as long term strategic thinkers of the game plan and player development. love is blind sometimes, we don’t want that in a coach. players on the other hand can often benefit from a (sometimes unquestioning) devotion in a father/mother figure who is their coach. that’s been shown in all sports countless times. sometimes it’s literally their mum or dad who as coach makes the critical decisions on their behalf that is critical in them winning an olympic gold medal.
in team sports, not playing the poisonous game of appearing to have favorites is also important for player morale and developing a culture of honesty and account accountability.
words like mates and love become difficult when talking about leadership. these words can be vague and can also be very loaded with subjective sentiment at times. these words used casually in this context can imply favoritisme from the get go. so yes a coach, manager or leader should never aim to be “mates” with a player or “loved” by the playing group, but it would be natural for some of the players to develop those feelings towards a coach over time.
especially given the age that AFL/AFLW players are drafted at and all the life learnings that they have to go trough concurrently to being “in the system” and many of them dealing with the money and fame that comes with AFL* and the way some of them will appreciate the guidance and care a coach has for them outside the footy clinics.
i wouldn’t care if our backs or forwards loved or hated their line coaches if we made the GF this year. i expect Fagan, voted best AFL coach in 2024 is loved by many of his players and even considered a friend by the older players. the proof is in the pudding, not the cookbook.
* i don’t know what AFWL players earn, assuming for most it’s like what Robert Walls earned when he had to be a primary school teacher to make ends meet.
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