How missing out on Sydney’s 2005 flag helped shape Adelaide’s new senior coach Matthew Nicks
Matthew Nicks’ coaching philosophy can be traced back to the 2005 Grand Final when he managed to sit in the commentary box as his Sydney teammates won the flag. The new Crows coach opens up to the Sunday Mail in the first of a two-part interview.
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On the day Matthew Nicks was robbed of Sydney’s 2005 drought breaking premiership by injury he somehow remained composed enough to call the game from the Triple M commentary box.
And he almost made it to the finish. Almost. As Leo Barry took that mark in the dying moments it was all Nicks could handle.
“There’s vision of it in the box and I’m gone, as the siren goes I’m out,” Nicks told The Sunday Mail this week.
“It was one of the most exciting and satisfying days I’ve been involved in, and yet one of the hardest.
“I had these mixed emotions that my best mates had just won the premiership, and I’d won the premiership, but I hadn’t.
“It went from absolute over the moon jubilation to nearly wanting to cry and back to jubilation.
“But what I did find when I ran out onto the ground, you were welcomed in, and I could see it in my teammates’ eyes that they felt as much for us with Stuey (Stuart Maxfield) and Andrew Schauble (who also missed out), they looked as you as if to say ‘I can’t believe we’ve done this and you’re not here’.”
Almost 15 years on, the coach that Nicks has become and the one who is now in charge of the Adelaide Crows, can be traced back to that day.
Nicks had already been ingrained in the ‘Bloods culture’ but his experience of the 2005 flag gave him an even greater perspective on the meaning of club and team.
“No doubt. I’m stronger on team, most likely because I went through that,” Nicks said.
“The first year I arrived at Sydney (1995) the reserves played in a grand final and I didn’t play in that, the second year (1996) the seniors played in a grand final and I didn’t play in that, and then at the end when we won in 2005 I didn’t play, so I had these bookends of ‘what a fun game this is’.
“But a lot of coaches you see that weren’t the best footballers, I’d say for some they relate better to different circumstances because they’ve actually been through it.
“Right through my career early I knew what it was like to be right on the edge of ‘you’re nearly playing, you’re not playing, you’re playing’, I was never that good that I walked into a senior side.
“I was drafted far earlier than I should have been … when I got there they’d lost (37 of their past 44 games) but also brought in Paul Roos, Plugger and drafted Micky O’Loughlin and it turned around, but all of those experiences are why I am who I am.”
When the dust settled on the grand final and Nicks’ retirement, he decided that after 175 games and 10 years he needed to do something different.
“The way I dealt with it was I had 12 months away from the game,” he said.
So he got an office job working in finance while later coaching part-time at a uni in Sydney and then with Scotch College in Adelaide. But the footy bug kept biting.
“I had a work colleague come to me one day and said ‘I’ve got a feeling you might be in the wrong industry’,” Nicks said.
“Not because I was bad at finance but I would talk footy to people in the office, drawing up plays I was doing with the Scotch boys and my colleague said ‘you’ve got to get back into it because you miss it’.”
The 44-year-old father of three describes his apprenticeship as the perfect pathway to senior coaching.
And after sitting in the passenger seat alongside Ken Hinkley at Port Adelaide and Leon Cameron at GWS, he is trying to keep things as normal as possible now he’s been given the keys to the car.
“I’m trying for it not to change and that’s the challenge I’m in at the moment,” he said.
“As a senior assistant you get as close as you can to this seat, and the process I’ve gone through from development to line to senior assistant has been probably the ultimate way to do it.
“I’ve been as close as you can to that head coach seat, being alongside Kenny was massive for my growth and working with Leon was a different dynamic in a different club but I had so much responsibility.”
But it was while he was still playing that Nicks learnt the fundamentals of coaching under Rodney Eade and then Paul Roos.
He says Eade taught him the “x’s and o’s” of tactics and game plan and Roos the importance of relationships in footy and empowering the players to go on the journey together.
He points to the growth of Adam Goodes who went from a player with potential to one of the greatest in the game’s history because of the freedom he played with under Roos, and that’s the coach he tried to become right from the start at Scotch College.
Nicks describes his time at Scotch as the “most rewarding coaching gig I’ve had so far”.
“If someone was to say to me then ‘what’s your strengths?’, I would have said ‘relationships’ and I was like that as a player,” Nicks said.
“I wasn’t a good footballer, I was solid, but I was about relationships and when we had success as a squad in Sydney it was all around relationships, we eventually got our squad to that point – where the relationship side of things meant more than the talent and that’s where the Bloods culture was formed.
“We were able to turn a successful organisation into the ultimate in a premiership in 2005 and there was no doubt that was off the back of relationships.”
After taking a beating for the best part of two years since losing the 2017 grand final, external reviews exposing holes in their culture and senior football staff being shown the door, the Crows are screaming out for coach they can relate to.
But Nicks is acutely aware of the line between the arm-around relationships guy and the coach who has to have hard and uncomfortable conversations or make unpopular decisions because it’s best for the team.
“In my view when you build a relationship it’s about mutual respect,” he said.
“It’s not about lovey, lovey, tickle, tickle, everything is warm and fuzzy.
“Relationships for me are about building that mutual respect, and when there’s that mutual respect there it can be a look, it doesn’t need to be a yell and scream and blow up – it may be that’s what’s called for in a certain situation – but it (that relationship) allows you to go harder in those moments where you need to because the foundation has been built.”
The most recent coaching experience Nicks will bring to the Crows is what he learned at the Giants where they came within one win of a historic premiership only to run into Richmond in the grand final.
“I couldn’t have been more proud of the club and the organisation. I thought it was an incredible effort and like can happen on those days it can just not go your way,” he said.
“Richmond played the best footy and got the game on their terms, that’s why (the Giants) lost the game, it wasn’t a lack of effort.
“There is an interesting dynamic that comes out of losing grand finals but we sat around and couldn’t have been more proud of what we saw.”
He says Leon Cameron could not have been more supportive of his decision to go after the Adelaide job.
“Considering it was 12 months in and the plan was always to go up and spend three years,” Nicks said.
“When you look at it now it’s incredible that Leon was so supportive, more than supportive, he actually assisted in helping me as he did for the 12 months and that’s a sign of where he’s at.
“That was a hard conversation to have because four or five jobs came up during the year and Wayne Campbell would come in and say ‘is there something we need to know?’ and I would say ‘no boys, let’s lock in and get this done’.
“But the Adelaide one was really interesting because things align and there’s a point where you say ‘this is probably the one, the way I coach, where I saw the club’, and Wayne, Leon and (CEO) Dave Matthews were hugely supportive.”
Outside of football Nicks says the other biggest influences on his life have been his parents and admits he is a touch sentimental about returning to his home state as a senior coach.
“My mum is the ultimate, she played a top level tennis but is very balanced. Dad played footy for Edwardstown so team and mates I’ve learnt from that as well,” Nicks said.
“We don’t talk footy like x’s and o’s, we talk bigger picture. They’re proud of where I’m at at the moment but they are like ‘mate, be you’.
“I think dad told me once how to play footy when I was at Westies, screaming out from the boundary line and that’s the last time he told me what to do in footy.
“It’s easier from the stands and I’ve had a few players tell me that too since I’ve been coaching.”
PART 2: Nicks’ non-negotiables for the Crows — Online at Advertiser.com.au on Sunday night.