An Invitation to ‘The Hopkins Institute’

‘Carlton’s strength has endured because it has almost always operated in a zone between stagnation and anarchy, “the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive”’.’

Dr Lionel Frost, The Old Dark Navy Blues: A History of the Carlton Football Club (Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 12.

Fellow blue-bagger

You are warmly invited to the inaugural dinner and launch of

The Hopkins Institute

Where: Brandon Hotel, 237 Station St, Carlton (cnr Lee St).

When: 7.00 for 7.30 pm, Thursday 27 May 2010.
($45 for two courses, drinks over the bar)

Guest Speaker: Ted Hopkins (Author of “The Book of Slab”; aka as a Carlton rover who played 29 games between 68 and 71, including one you all know!)

What is The Hopkins Institute?: A diverse group of Carlton barrackers who share the aim of promoting discussion and celebration of ideas and events related to this great club – our glorious history, the course of the current renaissance, literature about or by Carlton people and the meaning of football and life. It is not an official Carlton Football Club group.

RSVP: ASAP
Scott Hargreaves (contact@scotthargreaves.com.au or 0417564642) or Lachlan Carter (lcarter@vicbar.com.au or 0411694767).

Taking the ‘Bomber Shuffle’ to a New Level

Long before Apple Macintosh guru Steve Jobs cottoned on to the idea of the brilliant iPod music shuffle invention, another kind of shuffle was happening in front of our eyes at the MCG and other footy venues around the country. I am referring to the ‘Hot Potato Shuffle’ warm-up drill before games, in which players swarm together into a tightly packed huddle and start jogging up and down, bumping into each other and shifting places.

The sole object of the drill appears to be shuffling the pill among the players at a distance no less than intimate kissing range. It’s a totally whacky thing to observe for anyone like myself who is steeped in the ancient ritual of a warm-up lap and casual kick-to-kick before games. Now, the Hot Potato Shuffle (like the iPod is to music) has become a ubiquitous feature of football, happening constantly during games, and not just before them.

We know who invented the iPod but who was responsible for this other thing? My research has led me to conclude it was Essendon’s 1993 team – the ‘Baby Bombers’ who won that year’s premiership – which was responsible.

Here is how I think it happened. At the start of 1992, under the stewardship of coach Kevin Sheedy and astute football manager Danny Corcoran, Essendon boasted an outstanding coaching panel that included reserves coach Denis Pagan and assistant coaches Neale Daniher and David Wheadon. Highly regarded recruiter Noel Judkin was also on board.

Sheedy had declared he wanted change and creativity. A new plan was discussed by the panel and hatched: ‘quick hands, speed kills’. Lurking among the Pagan-coached reserves premiership team of 1992 was a special crop of youngsters ripe for schooling in the new plan, including James Hird, Joe Misiti, Mark Mercuri, Steven Alessio, Ricky Olarenshaw, David Calthorpe, Michael Symons and Paul Hills.

The following year, these Baby Bombers progressed to the senior Essendon team. They had already been stamped with Pagan-style commitment to win the contest and adherence to the new team rules and playing style the coaches had introduced them to. During 1993, they also benefited from playing alongside senior luminaries including Michael Long, Mark Harvey, Mark Thompson, Paul Salmon, Gary O’Donnell, Gavin Wanganeen and Darren Bewick.

Adding to the quality influence of leadership that these players represented, veteran champion Tim Watson was coaxed from retirement. As the season progressed, the combination of youth and experience and quick hands was beginning to gel. My observation is that over time, the 1993 Grand Final teams, Essendon and Carlton, had grown to dislike one another intensely, eating at the heart enough to elevate it to a fierce rivalry.

However, there is a dictum in warfare: learn from the enemy. On the Carlton side were the genius hands of Greg Williams. How did he do it? Opponents spent considerable time studying not how to stop ‘Diesel’ – an assignment that was nigh impossible – but how to copy him. While the total package was not easy for mortals to replicate, his method of handballing and not kicking when he picked up the ball in heavy traffic became a model for team rules.

Another ploy hatched by Essendon in 1992 was the use of quick hands to get away from a tackle, with the player instructed to aggressively run and carry the ball into attack. Carlton started the 1993 Grand Final clear favourite. By quarter-time, the Blues looked a beaten side, trailing by 30 points. Essendon was just as fierce at the contests as Carlton, but was also dancing ahead in tune to the quick shuffling of the ball that left the Blues bamboozled and flat-footed.

Long and Mercuri were sublime exponents. Thompson is also listed in the AFL Record Season Guide among the best players that day. Sitting in the box that day was Wheadon, architect of the quick hands, speed kills philosophy. Essendon in 1993 had struck a high note. Long won the Norm Smith Medal and Wanganeen the Brownlow Medal. The Baby Bomber brand was born.

Today, not so surprisingly, we are watching a team that does the Hot Potato Shuffle more often and better than anyone else. Geelong has featured in the past three Grand Finals and won two of them. At the helm is coach ‘Bomber’ Thompson – and in the background tutoring the Cats is Wheadon, the club’s skill acquisition and game development coach. It’s no coincidence, is it?
Ted Hopkins is a Carlton premiership player and founder of Champion Data. His current project is TedSport, a high performance data analysis and consulting service.

This column was first published in the AFL Record. Copyright AFL 2010.

Matthews the Chief Executioner

In the late 1960s as a Carlton reserves player starting to get an occasional run in the seniors, I once had the daunting privilege of coming up against Hawthorn’s young superstar Leigh Matthews. The encounter was brief, and it left me shocked. Scarcely a half of football but it was embarrassing. I was taught a humbling lesson about what it meant to excel in elite sport.
Although we were about the same height (I played at 177cm; Matthews at 178), I was a puny 68kg next to his compressed battleship frame weighing in at 86. For some reason, I thought I possessed enough silky skills, speed and footy smarts to compete with him. But pretty quickly, I realised otherwise.

This heavyset bloke was amazingly quick off the mark, agile and simply dazzling. In my face was the reality of exceptional talent executing sublime football skills. It was a painful tutorial, but at least there was a measure of how far I still had to go. But there was even more to learn. He was winning the ball regularly and I was scarcely getting a touch. And when I did – bang! A tackle that made me gasp for air and think I was going to die, and the umpire didn’t even blow the bloody whistle.

It immediately dawned on me that this bloke hated it when an opponent of any kind had the ball and would go hard and fast at him to get it back. It hurt. In a recent conversation with Matthews, he described this facet of the game involving getting the ball back from the opposition as effort.

Based on previous experience, I’m inclined to add the words: driven desire and blessed talent both ways, with and without the ball. He calls it execution under pressure, and I fully agree. Our conversation followed on the heels of comments he made recently on television and on afl.com.au.

In a website column, Matthews attributed the astronomical increases in handball numbers, often now outnumbering kicks in a game, to the exponential increase in interchange numbers. He wrote: “This handball footy has evolved because the pressure on the ball carrier has never been hotter. While specialist tackling numbers have honed good technique, it is the large numbers of players with the energy to surround the footy that is the main catalyst for the increased need to handball because of the difficulty in finding space to deliver an unpressured kick … “It is the use of the interchange bench to rest players regularly that enables them to play with such high energy in their spurts on the field.”

As a four-time premiership coach (with Collingwood in 1990 and the Brisbane Lions in 2001-03), Matthews explained the basis of his coaching philosophy: “My chief role was to influence talent to make the effort when it got harder, when an opponent had the ball,” he said. “At the Lions, we placed a lot of emphasis on tackling numbers. Most important was also the type of tackles, which we reviewed in video post-match.

These included our highly rated categories of special tackles in active play and missed tackles, along with the trapping-type tackles.” His other highest priority was execution. “Assuming the effort was there, the result of the game invariably hinged on how well the individual talent and the team executed when they had the ball,” he said.

Consequently, he believes one of the keys to coaching is to make sure the available talent is in the right place at the right time. He mentioned on Channel Seven recently that too much emphasis is being made of the concept of a ‘game-plan’, at the expense of the idea of execution.

He suggested the term is a convenient one being used more as way of promoting the game and not explaining it. “It’s mystifying the game,” he said. “What coaches and commentators are fond of calling a game-plan is perhaps better described as strategies, themes, principles and team rules.” When champions such as Matthews are hunting you down, there is no time to follow a script. You can only execute the best you can, and when he’s got the ball, hopefully reciprocate.
Ted Hopkins is a Carlton premiership player and founder of Champion Data. His current project is TedSport, a high performance data analysis and consulting service.

This column was first published in the AFL Record. Copyright AFL 2010.

Reliance on Stars a Blight on the System

The observations of Malcolm Blight are formed with a unique perspective: star North Melbourne forward and premiership player, coach of Geelong in three losing Grand Finals, followed by dual premierships coaching Adelaide. No less spectacular was his brief stint as coach of St Kilda and controversial dismissal. Recently, during a television broadcast, I heard Blight repeat a familiar view of his: “Even stars have bad days” and then cautioning an over-reliance on “star systems”.

I had been (and still am) intrigued by his comments on star systems, and welcomed the opportunity to discuss the subject with him. Personal experiences of star systems had shaped my understanding of football. As a youngster, I passionately barracked for South Melbourne. I recall crying unbearably when South would lose – and I cried a lot.

Salvation was an extreme devotion to the Swans’ lone and exceptional star, triple Brownlow medallist Bobby Skilton. In my book, he was best on ground every time he played and never made a clanger. No doubt many who have followed teams consistently finishing at the bottom of the ladder feel this binding scenario of regular disappointment and adulation. Perhaps the most recent example is Richmond fans and the special emotions they attributed to Matthew Richardson.
Ultimately, this is one spectrum of a star system, a situation where the ranks of the stars available to a team are spread too thinly and the backup troops struggle to fill the gap. Alternatively, Blight’s experiences are at the other end of the spectrum. Blessed with super talent, his association is with star-studded teams during his playing era and coaching involvements at Geelong and Adelaide.

My conversation with him started with me mentioning the stark contrast I found between barracking for South Melbourne and then, as a recruit, walking into Carlton and confronting a locker room of genuine stars. There was awe but, importantly, it was immediately drilled into me the ‘team’ was the star attraction and everyone involved was required to contribute their respective talents.

Blight acknowledged similar sentiments, but went further to explain his particular issues with star systems. “At Geelong, we played in three losing Grand Finals. These were good teams but, like any team, it was critical to win or at least stay on even terms in the midfield,” he said. “I felt we lost those Grand Finals mainly because our midfield was beaten on the day and this exposed our defence, which was not blessed with super talent. “We had the stars in the midfield,” he said, referring to players the calibre of Brownlow medallist Paul Couch, Mark Bairstow and Garry ‘Buddha’ Hocking, “but there was not much I could do about it. We had a lot of players in the team who had developed into set roles and I couldn’t change things around that much. “I’m of the view, if a star is struggling on the day, get him to play a different role and at least take out someone important from the opposition.”

At Adelaide, he immediately took measures to make sure the same circumstances did not repeat. Consequently, a crop of midfield stars, including Mark Ricciuto, Mark Bickley, Andrew McLeod, Simon Goodwin and Darren Jarman, spent various times rotating in different roles, either forward or back. “Ben Hart was marvellous in defence,” he said, “because he was just as brilliant attending small and tall players. As a defender, Nigel Smart could easily be switched into attack.” In two winning Grand Finals, Blight’s tactical moves are legendary, including the unexpected and successful match-up of McLeod playing in the centre on Saint Robert Harvey, ruckman David Pittman at centre half-back on Stewart Loewe, Ricciuto switching to half-back against North Melbourne and Jarman bobbing up at full-forward for a combined 11 goals in the two wins.

Based on this reasoning – and casting an eye to the present – Blight is convinced that, of the controversial trade of Brendan Fevola from Carlton to the Brisbane Lions and Daniel Bradshaw from the Lions to the Sydney Swans, it is the Swans who have benefited most. “Both are outstanding forwards who have kicked a similar number of goals over distinguished careers,” he said. “But Bradshaw is the far better proposition. He is adaptable. He can play defence as well as attack. It’s best if the star fits within the system, rather than the star becoming the system.”
Ted Hopkins is a Carlton premiership player and founder of Champion Data. His current project is TedSport, a high performance data analysis and consulting service.

This column was first published in the AFL Record. Copyright AFL 2010.

A Theory Out of Left Field

An outlandish proposition was recently floated about the club whose colourful president is fond of wearing a flamboyant jacket. Last month, a backpage newspaper story claimed the Hawks won the 2008 premiership because the team was stacked with left-footers. I have news for the re-born left-winger Jeff Kennett. Hawthorn won the flag because it had the talent credentials and form at the right time of the season to win a flag.

Critically, its second half in the 2008 Grand Final was an absolute blinder. In contrast, its Grand Final opponent Geelong was blessed with more talent credentials and also had displayed good form, but had a shocker in the second half. That’s footy – sometimes it just happens this way.

Talented players and teams have good and bad days. Left- or right-sidedness had nothing to do with the result. For the sake of testing, let’s say it was possible to substitute Hawthorn left-foot premiership players Lance Franklin, Luke Hodge and Stuart Dew with the right-footed Nick Riewoldt, Chris Judd and Lindsay Gilbee. Would this have diminished the Hawks’ chances? No way.

There are activities and sports in which left- or rightsidedness is an advantage, due mainly to specific factors. Military statistics confirm that left-sided soldiers have a higher chance of getting killed in battle than their right-sided counterparts, primarily because of right-biased weaponry. Notwithstanding Phil Mickelson’s win in last week’s United States Masters, elite golf is another activity treating lefties poorly. The availability and range of left-sided clubs is limited. Hence, promising right-sided youngsters get all the advantages of access to equipment and coaching, and it is rare to see a left-hander on the professional golfing circuit.

Across all societies worldwide, the general population comprises about 90 per cent right-sided people. As such, life isn’t always easy for the minority 10 per cent. Indeed, in darker times, leftsidedness was often frowned upon as freakish and sinful. I recall a time not so long ago, before coach Terry Wallace took the reins at Richmond, when coaching staff blamed the club’s woes on too many leftfooters in the team.

Prejudice can also lead to strange conclusions. For instance, it is often claimed leftfooters kick the ball differently and faster, flatter and more accurately than right footers, despite the fact there is no reliable evidence or reason why this is the case, other than a right-sided perceptual view of the world.

Fortunately, we live in more enlightened times and I can gladly declare the adorable Sherrin is not biased to one side (like a lawn bowl) and the alignment of the centre circle, centre and goalsquares and scoring sticks are set perfectly plumb. A goal kicked from the left or the right pocket is worth six points and, over time, the number of goals kicked from either pocket is, I predict, about the same. The configuration of an AFL ground is a marvellously open and expansive canvas in which the result invariably boils down to a glorious mix of talent, tactical nous and luck.

If there were an advantage either way for either left- or rightfoot kicking, it would most likely appear in goalkicking statistics. Because the general population is represented 90 per cent and 10 per cent rightand left-sided respectively, it is reasonable to assume at least one of the 10 all-time leading goal scorers is a left footer – Essendon’s Matthew Lloyd. (Stats buffs are encouraged to test this proposition of one in every 10 by scouring through the goalkicking records).

The reason Hawthorn has had recent premiership success with an abundance of left-foot players is better explained by a coaching and recruitment philosophy that is non-preferential. The Hawks looked at talent on genuine merit, rather than lopsided views of counterparts. A similar occurrence of illogical bias once concerned indigenous players. How many were overlooked by recruiters in the past? Now, ignorance of indigenous talent is perilous for the career of a recruiter.

Perhaps, occasionally wheeling to the left rather than the right does have some tactical advantage. But it is surprisingly short-lived. Hawthorn, beware! It is in the nature of elite opponents to adjust, shut down and counterattack, catching off guard an opposition overly committed to one side of the ground.
Ted Hopkins is a Carlton premiership player and founder of Champion Data. His current project is TedSport, a high performance data analysis and consulting service.

This column was first published in the AFL Record. Copyright AFL 2010.