7.30 am, Wednesday, a meeting of the Collingwood coaches at Westpac Centre. Twelve people in the room, three Brownlow Medals, five premierships. Nathan Buckley presides over the meeting in a relaxed manner.
He's agreed to talk to me and I always enjoy our conversations. Recently, the Barcelona soccer player Xavi said, "Ninety five per cent of people like soccer and two per cent understand it … the game is complicated." Over the past year or two, I have felt I understand AFL footy less. How, for example, do you understand Hawthorn's thumping of Sydney in last year's grand final?
Behind Buckley on a big screen is a still from a video taken at a Collingwood training session. It is labelled "Mid-block (2) = 2 march UC". Some of the key words being used in the discussion are squeeze, slide, sag, layers, wraps. All the AFL clubs, I am told, have similar systems of analysis. What differs between the clubs is the language they have invented to explain their analyses to their players in teaching them the game.
Through the window of the room where the Collingwood coaches are meeting, I see portraits of Dick Lee and Bill Proudfoot. Dick Lee played around the time of World War I, Proudfoot slightly before. The thought crosses my mind that I am closer to the game they played than the one being played now.
In fact, Collingwood's game plan is as simple as a single sentence of a dozen words. Even I can understand it, but it remains in-house. Says Buckley, "What we have to do is educate our players and give them the tools to deal with the situations they're going to encounter out there."
Later, with the players, I watch the video of a training exercise, an attacking move with four players running through the centre in a line across the field. The ball moves towards the right forward pocket, drawing a pack. The point of the exercise is that the player on the left of the attacking line must keep his "width". In American football, he'd be called a wide receiver. The aim of the exercise is to hit him with a pass – called a "Lampard" after Manchester City player Frank Lampard - on the unoccupied, left side of the ground.
When I talk to Neil Balme, Collingwood's director of football, about the complexities of modern footy, he says simply, "It's a game of outnumbering." More and more, the game is about running – particularly about where you run when you don't have the ball. Throughout the Westpac Centre are TV screens playing scenes from games illustrating lessons the coaches want learnt about positioning. They have captions such as "Key Defender Cover Oppo Corridor Wraps" and "Win Stoppage Safe Exits".
I speak to Collingwood CEO Gary Pert, one of my all-time favourites from his Fitzroy days when he was an acrobatic defender. Sadly, he injured both knees, lost his spring and elasticity and played out his career as a tough, reliable Collingwood full-back. The difference between now and when he played in the 1980s and '90s, Pert says, is that "one player doing his own thing can now put every other player in the team out of position". This, I gather over the course of the day, is the problem Collingwood had with Heath Shaw as a player – too often, he did things that supporters applauded but put teammates out of position.
A person who has taught me about football through the quality of his insights is former Hawthorn coach Peter Schwab. It's the same with Nathan Buckley and people may recall what he added to the game during his short stint as a football commentator. For example, Kevin Sheedy told me in the 1980s that your best six players win you grand finals. Buckley told me in the 2000s that it was now the bottom six on your team list who won you grand finals. I then saw this principle successfully applied by Collingwood in the 2010 grand final replay.
Buckley describes the pace of change in football now as follows. "I used to say you had to re-invent yourself every four years to stay relevant as a player. I'd say the half-life of an AFL player is now 18 months." I ask him the what he has learnt as a coach that he didn't know as a player. I get a crooked grin and he says, "Murphy's Law". Murphy's Law is that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
He says the big change in AFL football now is that "your elite players no longer win you games off their own boot". He believes games are now won and lost when one team's system breaks down and describes last year's grand final as "a game in which one team's system worked and one team's didn't. Once, people in the stands used to measure differences in games by individual acts, by what individuals did. Now the differences come because of what people don't do." Game-changing moments, he says, are what happens "when the 'what's good for me' ingredient kicks in and for a moment you've got 18 on 17".
Our conversation leaves football and we end up talking about Tom Uren, the old Labor man who died in Sydney earlier this week. Next morning, he sends me a text: "Hawthorn and Sydney meet in two grand finals 12 months apart. The major difference in that time is the removal from one team of 'the best player in the comp' [Buddy Franklin], who, fate has it, goes to the other team. The balance of talent and 'match-winning players' has clearly shifted.
"Yet, when the race is run, the gap between the two has widened in the other direction. How else can you explain that other than 'the best team' won? 'The best team' is harder to define than individual brilliance but it is what success always has, and always will be, built on. Footy hasn't changed much at all ..."
