canbracrow
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While the boys have been in Canberra they have spent some time working with Damien Farrow from the Australian Institute of Sport. He was out on the field with the team in their session at Ainslie yesterday. Here is an excerpt from an ABC Radio National March 2006 interview which you all might find interesting. 
Neil Craig: I think everyone can continue to improve Mick, and probably a specific example is some of the work that we've been able to do with Damien in our decision-making at the Adelaide Football Club. We have a pool of what Damien would describe as outstanding decision makers, and one, once again that would be known to your listeners who were involved in AFL would be Andrew McLeod. So one of the things that we're grappling with at the moment is we think a lot of the training that we're doing is catering for a big percentage of our playing group in terms of improving the decision-making, but what we don't know is whether it's actually overloading an Andrew McLeod because he's got such a high degree in that area, and he's just an expert in that area. So it may be that we're not catering for Andrew, and it might mean that some of the training we need to do needs to be increased in difficulty, or made specific to Andrew so we can actually make him even better again. And your best athletes are always looking for that.
Mick O'Regan: Well Damien, just to pick up on that, a player like Andrew McLeod, for listeners who aren't followers of the AFL, he has the classic silky skills, as the expression goes, but is a player who always seems to have more time than other players to make decisions about how he's going to dispose of the ball. When it comes down to sitting with players and talking to them about the decision-making process, what do you actually do?
Damien Farrow: Well it's an interesting question. One of the characteristics of players like McLeod is that they not always can articulate what it is they do do when they make good decisions. It is such an automatic process for them that to ask them, they might tell you information, but it may or may not be correct, because they just tell you what they think you want to hear. So that's a trait of expert decision makers straight away. So when you then come to train those that may be not in the Andrew McLeod class, you've got to be very careful about what you tell them, because very quickly you can get that situation that's commonly referred to as paralysis by analysis.
So if player A goes here and B goes there, you do C, and so forth, you can create a whole range of specific, 'if then' sort of situations for that player to have to deal with, and that might again, just overload their attentional capacity, and then we're really defeating the purpose of what we're setting out to achieve. So often with decision making, and I think it's very prevalent in Australian Rules, is that the better decision-makers have excellent core skills of the game. So Andrew McLeod's kicking and his hand-passing skills are exceptional.
That allows him to not have to devote any attention to those aspects of his performance, and hence he has got time to have a bit of a look around and decide what option I might take in a given situation. So to rush in and just change decision-making is one thing, but often it's a matter of taking a step back and actually making sure the core skills of the player are at a level of rehearsal where you can actually make an impact with decision-making.
Mick O'Regan: But just to tease this out a little: do you take a player through a scenario to try and say, 'OK, what would you do here? Is it better to kick along to the forward line or is it better to get the ball moving through a hand-pass?'
Damien Farrow: Yes that's a combination there, in that really that's Neil's role as the coach who'll define a style of play that he wants the players to play by. And obviously training then attempts to reflect that style of play. So essentially, Andrew knows what to do at centre-half back, we may or may not have set up a specific situation where it's a hand-pass, or should it be a kick? He'll make a decision based on having repeated opportunities to be placed in that situation and then basically output the style of play that's been discussed off the field, and has been reinforced time and time again with different scenarios and situations that we present him with at training.
So you're not really wanting them to process in that split second that they have, you don't want them to be having to think about the decisions. We want it almost automated that they know where to look, and they know to look to A, and then if A's shut down, look to B. And that all happens without them almost consciously having to think about it. And that's the coach's responsibility to design training to reflect those situations and have the player going through that, time and time again.
Mick O'Regan: Well Neil, then, to come back to you as coach, is the decision-making process that Damien's describing, as far as you wanting your team, the Adelaide Crows to achieve a certain style of football, is the decision-making also for players off the ball, that they're making decisions about what positions they can get into that they then provide options to the ball carrier?
Neil Craig: Oh, to talk about playing the game without the ball Mick, is a huge area, and we're probably ashamed that we've only just started talking about it, at our club. Just from a statistical point of view Mark Ricciuto had an outstanding game a couple of years ago in Melbourne, where he had in the vicinity of 40 possessions if you like, which is an outstanding game for a midfielder, as good as you'll see. When you actually break all that down, it means that he actually had possession of the ball probably for about 1.5% of the total game time. So the question there of course was What was Mark Ricciuto doing for the other 98.5% of the time? And quite clearly, he was still playing the game without the ball, so there's a big emphasis on that.
But once again, that gets back to what Damien's talking about: the coach has got to make a very clear picture, first of all in his own mind, about how he wants the game played. And then the next question of course is what we spoke about before, the ability to better articulate that to the players. So there's that transfer of knowledge back into the action of the players. And I think a lot of the decision-making is once again as Damien has alluded to, is about game knowledge, if you like. When we're in this situation, when Adelaide is in this situation, the players will say, 'What do you want me to do?' We're getting better and better at that from the coaching staff to actually document our game knowledge, and educate our players of what we want them to do in that situation, which may be different for Collingwood, for Carlton, for Melbourne, for Essendon and so forth.
The other aspect of course is on the decision-making side, I think a guy like Andrew McLeod and then a lot of his decision-making attributes have been developed from a very early age, from the environment he grew up in, from the type of sports that he played, playing outside his age group, so he has this capacity to pick up all these cues very quickly in a game. And it might be that he can just sense an opposition coming in from the side, you know, and you often sit in the grandstand and say, 'How would he know that?' Or he has the capacity just to read the ball off the pack, and be in the right spot.
So what cues is he picking up to sort of predict that the ball's going there. That's nothing to do with game style or game knowledge, that's now about the ability to pick the cues up, and we'd like to think in Adelaide that we're putting guys in a training environment where they get a lot of practice at developing the capacity to predict those cues and look for those cues, as distinct from what I would call normal football training, which is very closed in its nature, you just go from A to B, have a kick from end to end, or from Cone A to Cone B, you know exactly what's happening in all those situations.
So the decision making package is I think about game knowledge as well as this innate capacity to pick up cues of where the ball's going.
Neil Craig: I think everyone can continue to improve Mick, and probably a specific example is some of the work that we've been able to do with Damien in our decision-making at the Adelaide Football Club. We have a pool of what Damien would describe as outstanding decision makers, and one, once again that would be known to your listeners who were involved in AFL would be Andrew McLeod. So one of the things that we're grappling with at the moment is we think a lot of the training that we're doing is catering for a big percentage of our playing group in terms of improving the decision-making, but what we don't know is whether it's actually overloading an Andrew McLeod because he's got such a high degree in that area, and he's just an expert in that area. So it may be that we're not catering for Andrew, and it might mean that some of the training we need to do needs to be increased in difficulty, or made specific to Andrew so we can actually make him even better again. And your best athletes are always looking for that.
Mick O'Regan: Well Damien, just to pick up on that, a player like Andrew McLeod, for listeners who aren't followers of the AFL, he has the classic silky skills, as the expression goes, but is a player who always seems to have more time than other players to make decisions about how he's going to dispose of the ball. When it comes down to sitting with players and talking to them about the decision-making process, what do you actually do?
Damien Farrow: Well it's an interesting question. One of the characteristics of players like McLeod is that they not always can articulate what it is they do do when they make good decisions. It is such an automatic process for them that to ask them, they might tell you information, but it may or may not be correct, because they just tell you what they think you want to hear. So that's a trait of expert decision makers straight away. So when you then come to train those that may be not in the Andrew McLeod class, you've got to be very careful about what you tell them, because very quickly you can get that situation that's commonly referred to as paralysis by analysis.
So if player A goes here and B goes there, you do C, and so forth, you can create a whole range of specific, 'if then' sort of situations for that player to have to deal with, and that might again, just overload their attentional capacity, and then we're really defeating the purpose of what we're setting out to achieve. So often with decision making, and I think it's very prevalent in Australian Rules, is that the better decision-makers have excellent core skills of the game. So Andrew McLeod's kicking and his hand-passing skills are exceptional.
That allows him to not have to devote any attention to those aspects of his performance, and hence he has got time to have a bit of a look around and decide what option I might take in a given situation. So to rush in and just change decision-making is one thing, but often it's a matter of taking a step back and actually making sure the core skills of the player are at a level of rehearsal where you can actually make an impact with decision-making.
Mick O'Regan: But just to tease this out a little: do you take a player through a scenario to try and say, 'OK, what would you do here? Is it better to kick along to the forward line or is it better to get the ball moving through a hand-pass?'
Damien Farrow: Yes that's a combination there, in that really that's Neil's role as the coach who'll define a style of play that he wants the players to play by. And obviously training then attempts to reflect that style of play. So essentially, Andrew knows what to do at centre-half back, we may or may not have set up a specific situation where it's a hand-pass, or should it be a kick? He'll make a decision based on having repeated opportunities to be placed in that situation and then basically output the style of play that's been discussed off the field, and has been reinforced time and time again with different scenarios and situations that we present him with at training.
So you're not really wanting them to process in that split second that they have, you don't want them to be having to think about the decisions. We want it almost automated that they know where to look, and they know to look to A, and then if A's shut down, look to B. And that all happens without them almost consciously having to think about it. And that's the coach's responsibility to design training to reflect those situations and have the player going through that, time and time again.
Mick O'Regan: Well Neil, then, to come back to you as coach, is the decision-making process that Damien's describing, as far as you wanting your team, the Adelaide Crows to achieve a certain style of football, is the decision-making also for players off the ball, that they're making decisions about what positions they can get into that they then provide options to the ball carrier?
Neil Craig: Oh, to talk about playing the game without the ball Mick, is a huge area, and we're probably ashamed that we've only just started talking about it, at our club. Just from a statistical point of view Mark Ricciuto had an outstanding game a couple of years ago in Melbourne, where he had in the vicinity of 40 possessions if you like, which is an outstanding game for a midfielder, as good as you'll see. When you actually break all that down, it means that he actually had possession of the ball probably for about 1.5% of the total game time. So the question there of course was What was Mark Ricciuto doing for the other 98.5% of the time? And quite clearly, he was still playing the game without the ball, so there's a big emphasis on that.
But once again, that gets back to what Damien's talking about: the coach has got to make a very clear picture, first of all in his own mind, about how he wants the game played. And then the next question of course is what we spoke about before, the ability to better articulate that to the players. So there's that transfer of knowledge back into the action of the players. And I think a lot of the decision-making is once again as Damien has alluded to, is about game knowledge, if you like. When we're in this situation, when Adelaide is in this situation, the players will say, 'What do you want me to do?' We're getting better and better at that from the coaching staff to actually document our game knowledge, and educate our players of what we want them to do in that situation, which may be different for Collingwood, for Carlton, for Melbourne, for Essendon and so forth.
The other aspect of course is on the decision-making side, I think a guy like Andrew McLeod and then a lot of his decision-making attributes have been developed from a very early age, from the environment he grew up in, from the type of sports that he played, playing outside his age group, so he has this capacity to pick up all these cues very quickly in a game. And it might be that he can just sense an opposition coming in from the side, you know, and you often sit in the grandstand and say, 'How would he know that?' Or he has the capacity just to read the ball off the pack, and be in the right spot.
So what cues is he picking up to sort of predict that the ball's going there. That's nothing to do with game style or game knowledge, that's now about the ability to pick the cues up, and we'd like to think in Adelaide that we're putting guys in a training environment where they get a lot of practice at developing the capacity to predict those cues and look for those cues, as distinct from what I would call normal football training, which is very closed in its nature, you just go from A to B, have a kick from end to end, or from Cone A to Cone B, you know exactly what's happening in all those situations.
So the decision making package is I think about game knowledge as well as this innate capacity to pick up cues of where the ball's going.
