What separates the great teams from the broken ones

Firstly, a confession. On Tuesday night, I desperately wanted to leave my daughter’s netball game at three-quarter-time. It was late, cold … and her team was getting smacked.

I tell you this for three reasons:

1. It’s cathartic to get stuff like that off your chest;
2. My daughter doesn’t read The Age, and;
3. It’s a loose segue into this column.

I’m not a proponent that you have to have played the game to coach it, talk about it or administer it.

But I have a sense that you have to have played the game to understand something that isn’t recognised enough. That is, how easy it is to play in a winning team and conversely, how hard it is to play in a losing one.

When I say winning and losing, I don’t mean the occasional win or loss by a few goals. I mean consistently winning by good margins, or regularly being thumped. Think Fremantle – on a 14-game win streak – at one end of the scale, and Essendon – who have won just once this season and not since May last year before that – at the other end right now.

Fremantle would be feeling in sync, confident and skilful. Essendon would be hoping to be those things, but when it doesn’t happen, confidence evaporates.

At a particular period in my career, my Tigers were more the Bombers than Freo. But I was lucky enough to play in a state game at the Gabba, and was on the wing battling for a ball.

I got it wrong and was beaten by my opponent. I thought all was lost but North Melbourne champion Glenn Archer had come to support me and knocked the ball out of play. As he jogged nonchalantly to the back line, what he had done felt foreign to me. The reason it was foreign was that my Tigers weren’t playing like that. We weren’t in sync.

Football clubs aspire to be environments that if you walk in on a Monday you can’t tell whether the team has won or lost on the weekend.

My experience tells me that clubs do this really well. On the surface all looks the same. But it’s the feeling in the stomach that tells you. Winning is euphoric, and a couple of days later there is still a sense of that. By Tuesday or Wednesday you’re back to neutral, but on Monday there is the slightest hint of ease or tension based on the result.

The review is done, and again, it is always balanced, but winning reviews are better than losing ones. Even the positive losing review, while leaving you in a better space afterwards, is always with a view to redemption. Winning reviews have a sense of continuing the momentum.

When Damien Hardwick gave his Suns a clip in a press conference in 2024 about the need to “grow the f— up”, that theme continued into the game review. There was no ranting or raving, just a clear picture of what “growing up” looked like, and what actions illustrated a mature player and team. The players walked out clear in the knowledge of what needed to be done. They needed to redeem themselves.

But game day is where the mental struggle is amplified. The psychology of players on winning teams versus losing teams is fascinating: the mental toughness to continue competing and making the right decisions regardless of the score is the area of only the best.

You see it in many sports, but especially when the same teams play each other only days apart, as they do in the NBA finals. In the first game, team A is winning and everything is crisp and clean. Two days later the same team is losing, and they fumble and bumble. The only thing that’s changed is the score, and yet it turns highly functioning teams and players into disorganised rabble.

I have many fond memories of playing with Matthew Richardson, but one was his singlemindedness to get the ball. He would take a mark 20 metres out from goal, and perhaps too often, spray the shot. But not two minutes later, he would do whatever he could to put himself back under the same pressure. It takes courage to do that.

Carlton captain Patrick Cripps was quoted during the week when asked what had been the difference since Josh Fraser took over as coach from Michael Voss. He noted only a few tweaks but said, “The other thing is, when you get a few wins, you do get guys who get some confidence back in their game. That makes a huge difference.”

The term “confidence player” is not a tag that you want. My sense is that it’s code for “not mentally tough”. You can’t have too many of them in your team because the game fluctuates so much for your approach to be dictated by uncontrollable influences.

For all its complexities, and there are many, football is quite simple. Winning is the best, and losing is just the worst.

By the way, I didn’t leave the netball game, and the girls gave a great account of themselves in the last quarter. They lost by 22.

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