- Joined
- Feb 3, 2000
- Posts
- 2,775
- Reaction score
- 318
- Location
- Adelaide
- AFL Club
- Adelaide
- Other Teams
- Adelaide Crows, Centrals
Something to Crow about
by Chip Le Grand
February 19, 2005
THE new Adelaide coach beckons The Weekend Australian into his newly completed office and wipes the warehouse dust from the seat of a chair. Downstairs, tradesman are putting the final touches on extensive renovations.
Outside the coach's door, a massive skylight floods the new Adelaide football department with bright sunshine. An apt metaphor? Season 2005 may tell.
Encircled by neat stacks of research material, a desk littered with stats sheets and a laser printer still in its box, Neil Craig is in his element. But he also understands that just outside his window, a dramatically altered football landscape awaits.
Gone is any talk of Adelaide being on a premiership footing. Gone are Gary Ayres and Wayne Carey, the former coach and big-name recruit on whom the club so publicly staked its flag prospects.
Instead it is Port Adelaide, that despised mob from across town, who will unfurl their own premiership flag in the middle of AAMI Stadium in six weeks' time. That, as far as Craig is concerned, is the best thing to happen to the Crows in a long time.
"Just at the moment, we have some real competition in this state," Craig said. "She is on. People now want to be associated with Port Adelaide as members and as sponsors. That makes us do it better here.
"Where we might not be winning premierships right now, we have got to make sure that we service our supporters and sponsors, get into the schools and tell people we want them in our club."
Although Craig does not say it explicitly, there is an acknowledgement here that the Adelaide Crows, the one-time pride of South Australia, have become complacent in their ways. With just six players remaining from the heady premiership years of 1997-98, the Crows have remained flush with money, supporters, sponsors and facilities. Yet somehow, they have lost their edge.
"It is human nature," Craig explains. "When you have a monopoly on something you can do what you like. As soon as you have a competitor you need to fight for your market share.
"Some people in the community feel that the Adelaide Football Club has the right to be good, because they are Adelaide, the first team in the comp with all the members. No one has got that right.
"When people like Kane Johnson and Mark Stenglein want to go home, we have got to do it better as a club. Now that our best draftees have come from interstate, our obligation is to try and keep them by becoming a better club.
"This year we have picked our game up. We have got to, because it hasn't been up to scratch."
The simplest way to keep players is to keep winning, as Brisbane have shown in recent years. But in the absence of guarantees that the Crows will return as an on-field force this year, Craig believes it is equally important for the club to develop as well as the team.
For Craig, this means two things: creating a greater sense of responsibility for the club among the players; and engaging the club with those supporters it has kept at arm's length.
"If you want to be a legitimate club, you need to engage all your key stakeholders," Craig said.
"Our members are key stakeholders, they have watched footy for a long period of time and they have an emotional attachment to the game. A lot of them have come from following SANFL clubs where you could get on the oval and mingle with the players and go back to the club rooms and socialise with the players.
"For me, that was the club. They had an emotional attachment to it and they lived day to day for it.
"AFL footy is starting to distance itself from those people and become untouchable because of so-called professionalism. I think that is wrong. If we can fill this ground with 45,000 members who are all passionate about our club and have an emotional attachment to our club, can you imagine how powerful that can be for us?
"But they have to feel, and it has to be sincere from our point of view, that they are part of our club. I include sponsors and coterie groups in that. I want them to feel an attachment to this club so it becomes real to them -- not just to buy a ticket for the sake of entertainment."
Coming from any Melbourne-based coach, it would be tempting to interpret this kind of talk as traditional pre-season spruiking.
Such is the dour struggle for clubs to remain financially viable in the crowded Melbourne market, senior coaches can be regularly heard pleading for the community to engage and members to sign.
Coming from an Adelaide coach, it is a different story. In relative terms, the Crows should never want for members or sponsors.
From their moment of inception they entered the AFL as a broad-based, financial powerhouse. One disappointing season does not change that.
What his words reveal is that Craig, recently described by inaugural Adelaide coach Graham Cornes as "a footballer who became a scientist," is an intriguing mix of preacher and pragmatist, teacher and technician. On the one hand, he has used his extensive sports science background to bring a greater empirical emphasis to Adelaide's training and match-day regime. On the other, he is a football traditionalist when it comes to matters of club and community, team and culture.
The Craig science is already at work. Prior to his appointment as interim senior coach last June, Craig had spent several years developing a computer tracking system that plots the movements of players and speed at which they run.
This summer, he tracked his own players at training and it has allowed him him to tailor training to more accurately simulate match conditions.
The result is that the Adelaide players have conditioned themselves for the season while working on their football skills, abandoning the long-standing and time-consuming practice of pounding the pavement on gut-busting runs.
To illustrate his point, Craig runs his finger across a data print-out from last Monday's session.
The numbers themselves are meaningless to anyone outside Adelaide. For Craig, the sheet contains all the information he needs: type of drill, duration, player's perceived exertion, heart-rate, work-rate per minute, distance and areas covered and time spent walking, jogging, running and sprinting.
For the task of imputing and interpreting raw data, Craig has a team of three full-time fitness and running coaches all with sports science backgrounds and a visiting sports science student from the University of Limerick in Ireland. Within two hours of every training session, a fresh batch of stats sheets are deposited on Craig's desk.
The Craig faith meanwhile, remains a work in progress. Step one in building club and team culture has been to improve the leadership within the playing group.
Craig believes the individual leadership of captain Mark Ricciuto was brilliant last season but the depth of team leadership poor. He argues that one is related to the other and that the Crows had too many "leadership loafers" willing to leave things to the skipper.
To last year's captaincy quartet of Ricciuto, Andrew McLeod, Andrew Goodwin and Ben Hart, Craig has this year added Nathan Bassett, Matthew Clarke, Tyson Edwards and Brett Burton to form a senior leadership group.
For the remainder of the list, the well-worn phrase "second tier" is no longer accepted. Under Craig's watch, regular senior players outside the leadership group will be known as the "backbone" group.
The club has also identified the lack of a natural successor to Ricciuto and turned its attention to grooming the likes of Burton, Ken McGregor and Brett Reilly as future captaincy candidates.
At a time when McLeod's personal issues with Ayres have been aired in a women's magazine by McLeod's estranged wife, Craig is also intent on building new levels of trust and honesty within his football department.
Frank exchanges have already taken place, with some of the younger players requesting the senior group change certain things about their leadership, and a player delegation requesting that Craig soften his hard-line attitude towards injured players.
Although Craig was hardly delighted to receive the criticism, he appreciated the courage it took for players to confront the senior coach.
"The coach is often the last to know, sometimes too late," Craig said. "I might not like it but at least it gives me the chance to clean up my act."
The next step is for the players to reconnect with their supporters. Craig recently read the story of an NFL footballer who, upon retirement, was so detached from real life and lacking in basic domestic skills that he needed to live in a hotel. At the very least, Craig argues, AFL players should be able to mix with supporters after a game.
"For our players to go down to the sheds after a loss and mingle with that crowd and accept some criticism, that requires some social skills," Craig said.
"That is important for those blokes. The easy option for our club is to say 'don't go down, we will keep them away, because you have got too many other commitments and it is not professional'."
Saving a dramatic turnaround in playing fortunes, Craig's players can expect more brickbats than bouquets this season.
From meeting eventual premiers Brisbane in a semi-final at the Gabba two Septembers ago, Adelaide last year slumped to 12th place. Nigel Smart retired and has since taken a position on the board. Ayres quit mid-season and Carey retired soon after. Injury wrecked the seasons of Mark Stevens, Hart, Goodwin and Burton.
From Page 51
The only bright spots in a bleak season were the continued All-Australian form of Ricciuto and emergence of Ben Rutten and Brent Reilly as young, promising players. One experienced player joined the Crows in the post-season: former Demon Scott Thompson as a welcomed replacement for Stenglein. Of the first-year players taken in the national draft, only Nathan Van Berlo has shown enough to suggest he could be a regular senior player this year.
Although there might be a temptation to play other young players for the sake of experience, Craig insists they will have to earn their games, even in the Wizard Cup.
"Just because they were drafted doesn't mean I am going to give a game away," Craig said. "This club is going to be about performance. I am not going to hide behind the fact that they are kids. If a kid gets picked, he will be expected to perform.
"We are not there, and I could send that message out to the community. But that is a cop-out. If I start doing that it immediately gives people an out. If we make sure that the club is always playing to win, with no cop-outs, then your decisions and standards stay razor sharp. It keeps you on the edge."
So if the Crows have no new stars and no intention of blooding youth in the name development, where will the improvement come from? For Craig, the answer lies partly in science and partly in the mob across town.
Science tells Craig that the Crows play an inefficient style of football and that the most efficient teams are the teams that win finals. Adelaide went inside their own 50 metre zone as many times as any club last year, yet averaged only 88 points per game.
The mob across town tells Craig that even when injury robs a team of the combined talent of Matthew Primus, Josh Francou, Brett Montgomery, Adam Kingsley and Josh Carr, the right team culture and playing system will allow a team to keep winning.
Entering their 15th season, Adelaide can't hope to replicate the century-old club culture of Port Adelaide. But they can attempt to instil a Power-like discipline into their forward line, midfield and defence.
The Crows will get a closer look tomorrow night, when they start their pre-season campaign against the Power in the 'Showdown'.
"I watch Port, and to me they have a very efficient system," Craig said. "I didn't see Warren Tredrea have an outstanding game on grand-final day.
"Everyone said Tredrea had to kick six goals but all Tredrea had to do was play his part. The key is to have a system. We will try to come up with a system that allows a lot of people to play in the various roles.
"But it won't be the star system. We all want the player who can do something special but if you start relying on that, good luck."
You'd imagine Craig will need a good dose as well as he sets about knocking down walls, opening up windows and returning his players to the people.
The Crows were once a great team. What Craig intends to find out is whether Adelaide can ever be a truly great club.
The Australian
** There was a press conference with Craig yesterday, yet I can't find his comments on the AFL, AFC or Advertiser/news.com sites yet. Hopefully it will be up later today.
by Chip Le Grand
February 19, 2005
THE new Adelaide coach beckons The Weekend Australian into his newly completed office and wipes the warehouse dust from the seat of a chair. Downstairs, tradesman are putting the final touches on extensive renovations.
Outside the coach's door, a massive skylight floods the new Adelaide football department with bright sunshine. An apt metaphor? Season 2005 may tell.
Encircled by neat stacks of research material, a desk littered with stats sheets and a laser printer still in its box, Neil Craig is in his element. But he also understands that just outside his window, a dramatically altered football landscape awaits.
Gone is any talk of Adelaide being on a premiership footing. Gone are Gary Ayres and Wayne Carey, the former coach and big-name recruit on whom the club so publicly staked its flag prospects.
Instead it is Port Adelaide, that despised mob from across town, who will unfurl their own premiership flag in the middle of AAMI Stadium in six weeks' time. That, as far as Craig is concerned, is the best thing to happen to the Crows in a long time.
"Just at the moment, we have some real competition in this state," Craig said. "She is on. People now want to be associated with Port Adelaide as members and as sponsors. That makes us do it better here.
"Where we might not be winning premierships right now, we have got to make sure that we service our supporters and sponsors, get into the schools and tell people we want them in our club."
Although Craig does not say it explicitly, there is an acknowledgement here that the Adelaide Crows, the one-time pride of South Australia, have become complacent in their ways. With just six players remaining from the heady premiership years of 1997-98, the Crows have remained flush with money, supporters, sponsors and facilities. Yet somehow, they have lost their edge.
"It is human nature," Craig explains. "When you have a monopoly on something you can do what you like. As soon as you have a competitor you need to fight for your market share.
"Some people in the community feel that the Adelaide Football Club has the right to be good, because they are Adelaide, the first team in the comp with all the members. No one has got that right.
"When people like Kane Johnson and Mark Stenglein want to go home, we have got to do it better as a club. Now that our best draftees have come from interstate, our obligation is to try and keep them by becoming a better club.
"This year we have picked our game up. We have got to, because it hasn't been up to scratch."
The simplest way to keep players is to keep winning, as Brisbane have shown in recent years. But in the absence of guarantees that the Crows will return as an on-field force this year, Craig believes it is equally important for the club to develop as well as the team.
For Craig, this means two things: creating a greater sense of responsibility for the club among the players; and engaging the club with those supporters it has kept at arm's length.
"If you want to be a legitimate club, you need to engage all your key stakeholders," Craig said.
"Our members are key stakeholders, they have watched footy for a long period of time and they have an emotional attachment to the game. A lot of them have come from following SANFL clubs where you could get on the oval and mingle with the players and go back to the club rooms and socialise with the players.
"For me, that was the club. They had an emotional attachment to it and they lived day to day for it.
"AFL footy is starting to distance itself from those people and become untouchable because of so-called professionalism. I think that is wrong. If we can fill this ground with 45,000 members who are all passionate about our club and have an emotional attachment to our club, can you imagine how powerful that can be for us?
"But they have to feel, and it has to be sincere from our point of view, that they are part of our club. I include sponsors and coterie groups in that. I want them to feel an attachment to this club so it becomes real to them -- not just to buy a ticket for the sake of entertainment."
Coming from any Melbourne-based coach, it would be tempting to interpret this kind of talk as traditional pre-season spruiking.
Such is the dour struggle for clubs to remain financially viable in the crowded Melbourne market, senior coaches can be regularly heard pleading for the community to engage and members to sign.
Coming from an Adelaide coach, it is a different story. In relative terms, the Crows should never want for members or sponsors.
From their moment of inception they entered the AFL as a broad-based, financial powerhouse. One disappointing season does not change that.
What his words reveal is that Craig, recently described by inaugural Adelaide coach Graham Cornes as "a footballer who became a scientist," is an intriguing mix of preacher and pragmatist, teacher and technician. On the one hand, he has used his extensive sports science background to bring a greater empirical emphasis to Adelaide's training and match-day regime. On the other, he is a football traditionalist when it comes to matters of club and community, team and culture.
The Craig science is already at work. Prior to his appointment as interim senior coach last June, Craig had spent several years developing a computer tracking system that plots the movements of players and speed at which they run.
This summer, he tracked his own players at training and it has allowed him him to tailor training to more accurately simulate match conditions.
The result is that the Adelaide players have conditioned themselves for the season while working on their football skills, abandoning the long-standing and time-consuming practice of pounding the pavement on gut-busting runs.
To illustrate his point, Craig runs his finger across a data print-out from last Monday's session.
The numbers themselves are meaningless to anyone outside Adelaide. For Craig, the sheet contains all the information he needs: type of drill, duration, player's perceived exertion, heart-rate, work-rate per minute, distance and areas covered and time spent walking, jogging, running and sprinting.
For the task of imputing and interpreting raw data, Craig has a team of three full-time fitness and running coaches all with sports science backgrounds and a visiting sports science student from the University of Limerick in Ireland. Within two hours of every training session, a fresh batch of stats sheets are deposited on Craig's desk.
The Craig faith meanwhile, remains a work in progress. Step one in building club and team culture has been to improve the leadership within the playing group.
Craig believes the individual leadership of captain Mark Ricciuto was brilliant last season but the depth of team leadership poor. He argues that one is related to the other and that the Crows had too many "leadership loafers" willing to leave things to the skipper.
To last year's captaincy quartet of Ricciuto, Andrew McLeod, Andrew Goodwin and Ben Hart, Craig has this year added Nathan Bassett, Matthew Clarke, Tyson Edwards and Brett Burton to form a senior leadership group.
For the remainder of the list, the well-worn phrase "second tier" is no longer accepted. Under Craig's watch, regular senior players outside the leadership group will be known as the "backbone" group.
The club has also identified the lack of a natural successor to Ricciuto and turned its attention to grooming the likes of Burton, Ken McGregor and Brett Reilly as future captaincy candidates.
At a time when McLeod's personal issues with Ayres have been aired in a women's magazine by McLeod's estranged wife, Craig is also intent on building new levels of trust and honesty within his football department.
Frank exchanges have already taken place, with some of the younger players requesting the senior group change certain things about their leadership, and a player delegation requesting that Craig soften his hard-line attitude towards injured players.
Although Craig was hardly delighted to receive the criticism, he appreciated the courage it took for players to confront the senior coach.
"The coach is often the last to know, sometimes too late," Craig said. "I might not like it but at least it gives me the chance to clean up my act."
The next step is for the players to reconnect with their supporters. Craig recently read the story of an NFL footballer who, upon retirement, was so detached from real life and lacking in basic domestic skills that he needed to live in a hotel. At the very least, Craig argues, AFL players should be able to mix with supporters after a game.
"For our players to go down to the sheds after a loss and mingle with that crowd and accept some criticism, that requires some social skills," Craig said.
"That is important for those blokes. The easy option for our club is to say 'don't go down, we will keep them away, because you have got too many other commitments and it is not professional'."
Saving a dramatic turnaround in playing fortunes, Craig's players can expect more brickbats than bouquets this season.
From meeting eventual premiers Brisbane in a semi-final at the Gabba two Septembers ago, Adelaide last year slumped to 12th place. Nigel Smart retired and has since taken a position on the board. Ayres quit mid-season and Carey retired soon after. Injury wrecked the seasons of Mark Stevens, Hart, Goodwin and Burton.
From Page 51
The only bright spots in a bleak season were the continued All-Australian form of Ricciuto and emergence of Ben Rutten and Brent Reilly as young, promising players. One experienced player joined the Crows in the post-season: former Demon Scott Thompson as a welcomed replacement for Stenglein. Of the first-year players taken in the national draft, only Nathan Van Berlo has shown enough to suggest he could be a regular senior player this year.
Although there might be a temptation to play other young players for the sake of experience, Craig insists they will have to earn their games, even in the Wizard Cup.
"Just because they were drafted doesn't mean I am going to give a game away," Craig said. "This club is going to be about performance. I am not going to hide behind the fact that they are kids. If a kid gets picked, he will be expected to perform.
"We are not there, and I could send that message out to the community. But that is a cop-out. If I start doing that it immediately gives people an out. If we make sure that the club is always playing to win, with no cop-outs, then your decisions and standards stay razor sharp. It keeps you on the edge."
So if the Crows have no new stars and no intention of blooding youth in the name development, where will the improvement come from? For Craig, the answer lies partly in science and partly in the mob across town.
Science tells Craig that the Crows play an inefficient style of football and that the most efficient teams are the teams that win finals. Adelaide went inside their own 50 metre zone as many times as any club last year, yet averaged only 88 points per game.
The mob across town tells Craig that even when injury robs a team of the combined talent of Matthew Primus, Josh Francou, Brett Montgomery, Adam Kingsley and Josh Carr, the right team culture and playing system will allow a team to keep winning.
Entering their 15th season, Adelaide can't hope to replicate the century-old club culture of Port Adelaide. But they can attempt to instil a Power-like discipline into their forward line, midfield and defence.
The Crows will get a closer look tomorrow night, when they start their pre-season campaign against the Power in the 'Showdown'.
"I watch Port, and to me they have a very efficient system," Craig said. "I didn't see Warren Tredrea have an outstanding game on grand-final day.
"Everyone said Tredrea had to kick six goals but all Tredrea had to do was play his part. The key is to have a system. We will try to come up with a system that allows a lot of people to play in the various roles.
"But it won't be the star system. We all want the player who can do something special but if you start relying on that, good luck."
You'd imagine Craig will need a good dose as well as he sets about knocking down walls, opening up windows and returning his players to the people.
The Crows were once a great team. What Craig intends to find out is whether Adelaide can ever be a truly great club.
The Australian
** There was a press conference with Craig yesterday, yet I can't find his comments on the AFL, AFC or Advertiser/news.com sites yet. Hopefully it will be up later today.
Hope we got a good deal for him.
