Adelaide coach Don Pyke reinvents Crows with stronger defensive edge, defying AFL wishes for attacking football

Don Pyke has surprised — and defied the AFL’s wishes for attacking football — with a new playbook emphasising a defensive game that has made Adelaide a strong premiership contender.

Crows coach Don Pyke has a spring back in his step after the Showdown win. Picture: AAP Image/David Mariuz

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DON Pyke is defying the AFL with defensive football — and totally changing perceptions on his Crows team that is now a stronger contender for its first national league flag in 21 years.

Adelaide has its lowest scoring average — 78 points — in the club’s 29 seasons of AFL football.

But the more-telling note is that the Crows are conceding their lowest average score — 67 points — in club history.

After a poor 1-3 start, Adelaide has put together four consecutive wins — including a tough Showdown triumph — with Crows coach Don Pyke, left, proving his new defence-loaded playbook is the way to score success in the AFL this season. Picture: Sarah Reed

Pyke’s greatest victory — after supposedly “losing” his players as Adelaide stumbled to a 1-3 win-loss count — is convincing his squad to believe in his defence-loaded play book that survived a dominant Port Adelaide in Showdown 46 on Saturday.

Confronted by a player group taking issue with a failing gameplan after the 12-point loss to North Melbourne at the Docklands, Pyke has stood firm, resold his latest theory on how the game is to be played and benefited with Adelaide’s first four-game winning streak in almost two years.

“When we were sitting there at 1-3, we narrowed the focus down — and the players have trained that and playing consistently,” said Pyke of the week in mid-April that recharged Adelaide’s season.

“We’ve not worried about outcome — we have focused on process.”

Long criticised for lacking a Plan B on match day, Pyke — a coach with a strong eye on theory in football — has completely changed the Crows from the high-scoring, hard-running unit that blitzed the AFL competition for the 2017 minor premiership.

Adelaide’s 88 points against the Power marked the Crows’ lowest winning score in a derby since Showdown 24 (85 points) in 2008 at Football Park. This followed Adelaide the week before beating Fremantle with its lowest score (51 points) in six seasons at Adelaide Oval.

Rory Laird and Rory Sloane celebrate the win in Showdown 46. James Elsby/AFL Photos/Getty Images)

Remarkably, after the AFL’s nine rule changes were supposedly to favour attacking-minded teams such as Adelaide, Pyke has remodelled the Crows on defence — and made them sounder for a premiership challenge.

But Pyke had to hold his nerve — and conviction — after being challenged by the players’ views on his game plan after the denting loss to the lowly Kangaroos.

“It was sitting together and asking — not so much what we want to stand for — but what is going to create winning for us?” Pyke said.

“That is what the conversation was.

“Sometimes it is nice to have a simple focus on what we are doing … (it is about) how we defend the game. And that has allowed us to win.

“After the North Melbourne game, I sat down on Sunday (after the Saturday night game) … engaged our senior leaders to say, ‘This is what I am seeing, this is what I think is going to help us’. We agreed on what was our key messaging at training.

“It was a nice reminder on what the game demands … and the game was demanding more than we were giving earlier in the year. To our players’ credit, they have embraced that and are bring a lot of that.”

Brad Crouch brings down Port’s Connor Rozee in Showdown 46. Picture: Daniel Kalisz/Getty Images

Pyke’s key performance indicator from the Showdown — in which Port Adelaide won the clearances and inside-50 count — was in tackling. Adelaide’s 94 tackles marked a season-high count.

“Those 90-odd tackles indicates the space we’re happy to be playing in — and that’s creating the results,” Pyke said. “And that is what we need to continue to focus on.”

Pyke’s move from a theme loaded with attack to embrace defence challenges the AFL’s wishes with its nine rule changes this season.

“It is the great unknown,” Pyke says of why the game this season has not delivered to the AFL’s vision. “We (changed rules) to get more flow in the game. But the numbers last year clearly showed teams’ defensive actions were a lot stronger — and that has just continued this year.”

Pyke has read the trend to make Adelaide rebound from 12th to be among the league’s pacesetters again.

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