Port Adelaide’s success in September’s top-eight finals could be determined by finding greater options in the next eight weeks
PORT Adelaide could find a lesson for September’s top-eight finals from former St Kilda coach Stan Alves’ great lessons on the importance of working a squad to win an AFL flag.
- Alves reveals his biggest mistake in 97 grand final
- Jamie’s Darren Jarman nightmare
- Ryder ready to leap into finals
- All players must follow rules: Lade
STAN Alves has closed the book on 50 years of senior VFL-AFL football as a player, coach and most-reasoned commentator with thoughts that should echo as he settles into retirement.
One of Alves’ lessons from coaching — in the 1997 AFL season that delivered premiership glory to his former North Melbourne team-mate Malcolm Blight — might well resonate at Alberton in the next two months.
Many regard Alves’ biggest mistake in coaching St Kilda against Adelaide in the 1997 grand final as not dealing with Blight’s masterstroke of placing Darren Jarman in the goalsquare to torment Saints defender Jamie Shanahan with five matchwinning goals.
But Alves says he erred months before the grand final.
“I still wake up in the middle of the night,” Alves said of his work in 1997. “My biggest mistake wasn’t made on grand final day, it was made during the year because I didn’t develop some of the lesser lights for when we got injuries.”
Here is another reminder that squads — not teams — will AFL flags … and why there should be more than 22 premiership medals awarded to the winners on grand final day at the MCG.
Blight did not waste such opportunities in 1997, particularly when games were shot and he was determined to salvage something when the four premiership points had escaped his grasp. One of these moments — to which Blight pays credit to assistant coach Mark Mickan — was thrusting Andrew McLeod into the midfield from half-back. This theme changed the 1997 grand final to the Crows’ favour — and delivered McLeod the first of his two Norm Smith Medals as best-afield in the 1997 and ‘98 grand finals.
There are coaches — as Alves was in 1997 — who search for stability and dream of minimal injury lists and working (for continuity) the same 22 for as many weeks as possible. And then there are the coaches who work squads to prepare for every pitfall in the marathon journey to a premiership.
Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley is at an interesting point in this grand debate on how to prepare a squad — more so than a team — for September’s top-eight finals. With the Power at 10-4 — and looking at a supposedly favourable fixture in the remaining eight home-and-away game — does Hinkley become imaginative with his line-up or does he search for stability at selection?
At Alberton, assistant coach Brendon Lade suggests the “evenness of an even AFL competition” — as noted with the weekend’s results with bottom-10 teams biting top-eight sides — the luxury of testing a squad’s flexibility does come with high risk.
“You have to put your best team out there all the time,” Lade said. “(But) you still have to find some people — as we did with Jack Trengove at the weekend.
“If we can have 25-30 players up and ready to go at the later part of the year, it will bode for us playing well.”
As Alves will testify, AFL coaches need to build squads rather than just 22-man teams to win flags.
michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au
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