We come here tonight carrying the title of reigning premiers … but to be blunt, there’s not much more I want to say about that - to me it’s really last year’s news.
As many of you would know, the 2012 Premiership Cup travelled far and wide throughout New South Wales and brought a lot of joy to our supporters.
The club’s staff did a great job making sure as many fans as possible got their hands on it.
But a few weeks ago, in early February, I felt it was important that the Cup’s journey come to a halt.
With the 2013 season just a few weeks away, I wanted to be sure everyone’s attention was on what needs to be done now and in the future, not what went before.
In the highly competitive world of AFL footy, you can’t spend too much time looking back, and you certainly can’t stand still.
Of course we all revelled in last year’s premiership, but the day after the final siren, the staff were planning for this season.
We were thinking about recruitment, and we made significant changes, adding 11 new players to our senior and rookie lists.
We were thinking about the continued development of our youngsters, and mostly we focused on where we need to get better if we’re going to be competitive again this year.
My message has always been that we must improve each season, and as boring as it may be, a premiership doesn’t change that.
As a senior coach, you are constantly searching for ideas.
I was inspired recently by the words and deeds of Nick Saban, the supremely successful US college football coach.
This January he took Alabama to back-to-back national titles and their third in four years.
“You have to do it every day, or you’re going to slip.” and “The process is still beginning. It’s always beginning.” This is his mantra and it must be ours.
At the Swans, we’ve been involved in the finals 14 times in the past 17 seasons.
People often ask what the secret is, as if you have a formula and success keeps coming once you’ve ticked a few boxes each year, but what we know is that success is never a given, that you are never, ever entitled to it.
You wouldn’t expect our friends at Volkswagen to think they’d made the perfect car in 1938 with the Beetle and then to just keep making the same one every year without improving it and expect it to sell as fast as pies at the footy.
Constant high standards, constant hard work, constant improvement are the only key to success in any field, and football is no different.
Each year and each day of each year you have to get up and go again, to drive yourself to be the best you can be.
There is no secret - or if there is one, it is simply that you have to keep doing things extraordinarily well, to demand consistently high standards all the time.
I believe that is what it takes. No doubt, it is hard, but that is what makes success so worthwhile.
If you back off even a little bit, standards can falter or slide, that’s just human nature. And our approach must be to chase the opposition. To be the hunter.
I only had to listen to Jude Bolton a few weeks ago to know the players will drive each other again this year.
“Training session after training session, we won’t accept any mediocrity. Certainly we’d jump all over that if we saw it,’’ Jude said.
These players push each other, but they also back each other.
We see it on the field. If one bloke makes a mistake, the next one comes in and helps to sweep it up, that is the ethos that binds them.
If anyone doubts how crucial it is to raise the bar every year and even raise it from week to week, there is an example from 2012 that I’d like to share. And I use this not to reflect, but to reinforce.
At the start of last year, we got off to a good start.
There were some telling stats, based around the “one percenters’’ that footy coaches value so highly.
They’re the small actions on the field that amount to a lot.
We count the tackles laid each week by the likes of Jude and Ryan.
We count the spoils when Ted Richards or Heath Grundy get their fist to the ball to stop an opposition forward marking.
We count the smothers.
We count when one of our players blocks an opponent, to help his fellow midfielder get a clear path.
We count the lung-busting chases, the sort of thing we see when Jetts or Benny chase down an opposition player. Sometimes the chasing player doesn’t even lay a tackle, but just gets a fingertip to his opponent, and that is enough for them to feel the pressure.
That fingertip could be enough to affect their kick which helped our defenders down the field take an intercept mark.
These things might not even count on the regular stat sheet, but to us they’re like gold.
We believe they’re the most accurate measure we have of players’ efforts of whether we’ve had a real go that day.
So, early on last year, we found that as a team, we needed 175 of these “one percenters’’ every week to give ourselves a strong chance to win the game.
It was going well, but the players felt we could, and needed to, do better. Jarrad McVeigh came into my office one day and said we want to make it 200.
And they rose to it, and we got to 200 a couple of times during that period in the middle of the season where we won nine consecutive games.
Then we set a new benchmark - our best for the year was 245 one percenters. That was pretty remarkable. So we thought if we can hit 245 in the Grand Final we’re a massive chance to win.
245 … it was nothing. In the Grand Final, the players achieved 333 one percenters, over a third more than ever before.
Almost every player had double figures, and some had more than 20.
The effort of our 22 players that day was off the scale, you couldn’t have wished for more.
But this also proves my point.
Why we have to get better again and push ourselves beyond what we might think are our limits. We thought 175 was enough. Who knows what would have happened if this wasn’t challenged by the players’ desire to improve.
There’s trying hard, and there’s really trying hard.
We had 333 one percenters that day, we kicked really straight, and even with that extraordinary, off the scale effort – more effort than we’ve ever measured before - the game could have gone either way and it went down to the last minute.
You might ask why do players do it if it’s hard? Well, the feeling after you’ve played an important role for the team, and you know that 21 others have done the same thing, is the best feeling in the world. It’s been 13 years since I last laced up a boot, and that feeling is the one thing I miss above all others.
We look forward to chasing them down again.
