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As a Carlton supporter, January used to be my favourite time of the footy season because all the news focused on how the boys looked and ran, instead of how we would play. After the third wooden spoon, I started taking it all with a grain of salt.
I thought I would wait until a few rounds into the season before working out how good we would be.
Fast forward several years and 2011 is no different with league stragglers from the previous season raising expectations without directly discussing their prospects.
For example, Jack Riewoldt is 4kg lighter, Bachar Houli is a standout performer on the 3.8km Tan circuit and Shaun Grigg’s contribution is ‘pleasing’.
I know the value of this type of talk for membership drives and confidence, but being fit this time of year goes without saying. I would expect nothing less than elite athletes in training for an upcoming season to be nothing short of peak fitness.
I’m not dismissing the value of fitness in football. To play it well you need to be incredibly fit. As a weekend warrior I played the 2009 season at 103kg and the 2010 season at 89kg. I had a far better season when I could run 3km in 13:25 instead of 15:30.
Fitness aside, I want to know answers to the real football questions. It’s nice to hear Shaun Grigg is ‘pleasing’ the coaching staff but I want to know how you are going to improve on your 15th place on the ladder last year.
Give me the why of what you’re planning to do. Don’t just tell us you’re going to play player X ‘up the ground more’ or player Y is ‘going to spend more time on the ball’. I want the why of the planning.
What about the specific game questions? Will we be looking at a different game with interchange restrictions? Will we see less rolling zones and flooding? Who will it favour? Will it hurt teams that rotate highly?
Instead, we get dumbed down cliché verbatim about skin folds, young injury-free footballers blitzing time trials and ‘he is really training the house down’.
We all know they’re fit, we all know they’re fast, but are they going to turn the ball over less? Are they going to find a find a way to kick a winning score and restrict a team from kicking one?
These are the answers I want to hear from coaches this time of year.
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