The recent A-League grand final brought to my attention something that gets talked about a fair bit, but there are rarely true examples of it. That is a ‘winning culture’.
The goal for all young, rebuilding teams, or any teams from any sport for that matter, is to develop a winning culture.
When a team is starting out or is facing a tough period, the team hope that they may win. As they rack up a few wins and grow in confidence they start to believe that they can win until they achieve a winning culture where the team expects that they will win.
Brisbane Roar have recently displayed a prime example of a winning culture and how they find a way to win even in the most impossible of situations.
2-0 down at half-time of extra-time, the team would have still expected to win because they had won 26 games (which is the longest streak in any Australian code in the post-war era) straight prior to this, and although the game looked wrapped up, the Central Coast would have almost expected the Roar to strike back, which brings me to the point of the mental state of the opposing team.
As I explained earlier, a winning culture is almost all in the mind and a team believing that they will win. This works the same with the opposing team, who believe that they will lose which essentially is game over before it has begun.
Another team which possessed a ‘winning culture’ was the Australian Test cricket team under Steve Waugh. From October 1999 to February 2001, Steve Waugh led Australia to 16 consecutive Test match wins.
The astonishing fact about this particular streak was that they were not just undefeated for 16 consecutive Test matches they actually found a way to win in all conditions taking into account rain, flat wickets etc.
An example that is a little different is the Australian cricket team in World Cups. From the 1999 World Cup in England to the current day, Australia are undefeated in 33 World Cup games.
This example is different in that this streak consists of four different teams, although predominantly under one captain and one group of leaders and star players. This fact is more black and white representation of Australia’s dominance of world cricket over the past decade and a bit.
That’s why this year’s World Cup is shaping up to be extremely exciting because although the rest of the world are writing Australia off and the media is not expecting much due to the fact that our ‘golden era’ is coming to a close, deep down all Aussies still expect a fourth consecutive World Cup title.
Through recent history there have been many other great teams which you can tell are going to win just by the way they walk, such as the LA Lakers of 1986-1987 led by Magic Johnson, a team considered by many American sports fans to be the greatest team of any sport in recent history.
The West Indian cricket team of the 70s and 80s was a team that definitely had the opposition shaking in their boots and mentally in a bad place.
Finally, the Geelong Cats of 2007-2010 are considered to be one of the most dominant sides in the game’s history, especially considering how balanced the league is these days due to salary caps and a number of other factors.
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