It was the Thursday before the brash young Hawks were scheduled to take on the might of Geelong in the grand final.

Lance Franklin had just turned in one of the most extraordinary individual seasons, kicking a century of goals, prompting the man judged as the player of the 20th century, Leigh Matthews, to claim the Hawks spearhead was doing things that he had never seen before.

Russell was helping to put the finishing touches on a near flawless season from the Hawks when he looked out and saw Franklin – ever the showman – drilling long bombs at goal from outside 50m at the club’s Waverley base.

“We used to do a goalkicking session on Thursday mornings before we’d then go out and train on Thursday afternoons,” Russell told the Sacked podcast.

“Hawthorn hadn’t been (in a grand final) for a long time. So 10,000 people rocked up … and ‘Bud’ goes out for his normal kicking session. I never went down for the session but I look out and I see everyone is cheering him.

“He’s kicking goals from 60m on the run. He’s putting on a show. I’m thinking, ‘he’s entertaining … There’s nothing wrong with that’.

“He comes in and sits in the team meeting before we go out to train. And I catch his eye … and he’s looking at me and I’m thinking ‘I know that look from Bud. He’s no good’. So walks up to me and says to me straight after the meeting ‘I think I’ve torn my hamstring.”

Russell’s heart sank. The AFL’s best player appeared set to miss the most important game of the season.

“He (Franklin) went down to the physio room and every test said that he had done his hamstring,” Russell said.

He told Franklin to do some touch work on the sidelines in the training session with teammate Trent Croad, who was carrying an issue.

Given Franklin had been nailing long bomb shots earlier, he was confident no one would find out about what looked like being an injury calamity.

“It’s the only time I’ve ever lied in a match committee or to a coach, and said what I didn’t believe,” Russell explained.

“So (Franklin) goes to get the MRI. I go (into) match committee at one o’clock and I said: ‘Oh, Bud’s a bit tight in his hammy. (But) he’s going to be OK. We’re just going to do a surveillance scan.’”

What came next was “the worst two hours of my life”, according to Russell. “I’m thinking ‘the big dog’ is out and it’s going to come back on me”.

“I allowed him to do it (the goalkicking session) and I wasn’t down with him there.”

Russell was hurtling down the freeway on his way home, feeling a mix of helplessness and trepidation, when the club doctor finally called.

“I’m thinking this is going to be the worst 10 seconds of my life here,” Russell recalled.

“I’ve just gone ‘just cut to the chase’ … and (the doctor has) gone: ‘there’s nothing there, there’s nothing to see (on the scans)’.

“I was punching the air, high fiving myself as I’m driving along the freeway.’ I could say, ‘Clarko, there’s nothing wrong with him’.”

Two days later Franklin and the Hawks caused one of the biggest grand final upsets by knocking off Geelong.

It would be the first of four premierships Russell would win with Clarkson and the Hawks, and one of six flags he would oversee as a head of conditioning with four clubs across more than two and a half decades.

‘WE’RE NOT LEAVING UNTIL YOU CALL CHOCO’

Russell had an early lesson on how ruthlessly efficient Hawthorn could be.

Having helped Port Adelaide win its first AFL flag in 2004 after three years of ‘choking’ claims, he had already committed to joining Clarkson at Hawthorn.

“He did verbally have me on board,” Russell said of Clarkson.

Then, in the afterglow of the flag win, Russell changed his mind.

“We’re at the pub on the Monday after the grand final and I said: ‘Choc’ (Williams), I’m leaving’. And he said: ‘No, you’re not’. So Choco (Williams), Walshy (Phil Walsh), the CEO (John James), and Matty Primus basically bundled me into a car and took me back to the club.

“They offered me a sh*tload more money and I got caught up in it a bit, as a young bloke who wasn’t getting paid much.”

He rang Clarkson, the new Hawks coach, who went “berserk”.

“Jason Dunstall (Hawthorn’s acting CEO) rings me on the Tuesday and he says: ‘I hear you’ve changed your mind. I hear all these people say good things about you … I think you’re the biggest (expletive deleted) in the world. You tell me you’re a person of integrity. I will make up my mind tomorrow. I’ll be at your place at seven o’clock in the morning’.”

True to his word, Dunstall was there the next morning.

“Bang on the door, Dunstall walks through, Clarko walks through, Damien Hardwick (Hawks new assistant coach) walks through,” he said.

“(Dunstall) didn’t look at me. He gets my phone, gets Choco’s number up and he chucks it at me. He said: ‘We’re happy to be here for five minutes or we’ll stay here all day. We don’t care. You made a deal with us. You tell him that.’

Russell made one of the hardest calls of his life. He was off to Hawthorn.

‘DO YOU WANT A JOB AT THE BOMBERS?’

Russell was a gifted athlete who ran in the nationals and Grand Prix meets, who grew up in Ballarat and who trained with Steve Moneghetti and Lee Troop.

He was studying for a degree when he went for a part-time job worth around $8000 at the Victorian Institute of Sport.

“I had some unbelievable mentors,” he said.

“I had this real sports science strength and conditioning (experience). I would go to work every day and … you would see Cadel Evans in the gym, I did some work with Cathy Freeman and Sonia O’Sullivan.

He was not yet 20 when Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy offered him a job in the late 1990s.

“I was (helping out) at the draft camp and (Sheedy) said ‘we need someone to help out’. He had no idea what I did. He said: ‘Do you want a job?’ And I’m like: ‘Yeah’.

“It was an unbelievable grounding for me. I got to see some of the best players who have played the game up close – Matthew Lloyd, James Hird, Mark Mercuri.

He worked underneath Loris Bertolacci and later John Quinn, but at the end of the ‘99 season was offered Port Adelaide’s fitness job when he was only 22.

He knocked it back after Essendon famously lost the “unlosable” preliminary final to Carlton by a point. He knew the Bombers would approach the 2000 season “like lunatics”.

“I’ve never worked with a group that was as physical in training as that one, as in, they wanted to hurt each other … in training.”

Essendon convincingly won the 2000 premiership, losing only one game for the year … and Port came knocking on Russell’s door again.

‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING COMING TO US?’

Russell left the premiers to go to a team that had finished 14th in 2000.

“I remember I went down to the running track and Brett Montgomery said: ‘Oh mate, we’re a debacle, what are you doing coming to us?’,” Russell said of his Port Adelaide introduction.

But after challenging and working with powerful personalities including Mark Williams and Phil Walsh, Russell won them over.

“I remember Choco was in my face saying ‘this is the way the game is and this is how it’s going to be played’. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t agree. I think this is the way the game’s going’.

“I remember thinking I’m gonna live and die by the sword here, I’m either walking out the door and they don’t want anything to do with me and I’m done, or they might like it.”

It turned out to be the latter.

Russell pushed the Port Adelaide players harder than any other group before or since.

“You’ve got to get it wrong to know how to get it right,” he said. “You have to push the envelope. You have to find their breaking limits.”

“So there’s psychology in it as much as physiology. You’ve got to make them believe.”

Asked what was more important, the body or the mind, Russell explained: “I can’t distinguish between the two because they are so intertwined.”

THE DAY DIMMA COPPED A DRESSING DOWN

Essendon hardman Damien Hardwick found his way to Port Adelaide after the Bombers’ 2001 grand final loss, but found himself immediately in the crosshairs of Williams and Russell after the club booked out a cinema night.

“Dimma (Hardwick) goes to the candy bar and he comes back with six choc tops, he’s got donuts and he’s got chips and a coke,” Russel joked without a hint of exaggeration.

“And in front of the whole football club, Choco stares at me and goes “what the f— are you going to do about this bloke trying to kill the whole culture you have created?”

“I said: ‘Well, I’m going to let him enjoy his choc top’. I went to Dimma afterwards and said: ‘Mate, you’re a big deal at this footy club. I don’t really care what you’ve done in the past, but we’re not doing this (eating fatty foods) in a public setting anymore. We’re going places and standards are standards, so c’mon on, let’s work through this.”

Three years later, Hardwick played himself to the point of exhaustion as he added a second premiership medal to his collection.

PUSHING HODGE TO BREAKING POINT

Russell maintains that having the courage to “put your balls on the line” is a necessary ingredient of great sides.

That comes back to the recruiters, the coaches, the high performance directors, and also the team’s core leaders

Robust conversations are required – every day.

“The greatest piece of psychology is getting the mix between going hard and when to love, you have to challenge and support, and that’s the art of working with anyone.”

One great example came from his relationship with a young Luke Hodge, who trained hard, but wasn’t getting the best out of himself in terms of diet, sleep and outside distractions.

Russell pushed him so hard that veteran Hawk Shane Crawford pleaded with him to ease up, fearful that Hodge might head back home to Colac.

“You could see what he was … and you could see he was a tough human,” he said. “I thought the best way to get the best out of him was to go harder. And not just go hard at him, but go hard on him publicly, as in our walls of the footy club.

“You’re not talking to just one player, you’re talking to 45 players, and every single time you open your mouth, whether it be in a group situation, or be it one-on-one, you have to expect that conversation is going to go somewhere’.

Hodge would go on to become one of the Hawks’ greatest players, a four-time premiership player and three-time premiership captain.

And famously he played in the 2008 grand final after copping a brutal bump in the prelim final a week earlier.

Hodge went on to win the first of two Norm Smiths that year.

So did he play with broken ribs? Russell: “Absolutely. His ribs were broken for sure.”

REBUILDING CRAWF, SILK AND CYRIL

Russell’s capacity to get injured players onto the field – in close collaboration with the physios, medicos and the support staff – set him apart from others.

Not every instance has worked, but some of those comebacks ended in premiership glory.

There was a time in the middle of the 2008 season where Russell believed Crawford had played his last game due to patella tendon issues.

“He was in all sorts of trouble,” Russell said. “We had one roll of the dice and generally it takes months to change the structure of the tendon by doing strength work.

“We went hard, really hard, with strength work in the gym.

“I did go to Clarko (at one stage) and say ‘I think he’s stuffed’. I didn’t tell Crawf that.

“He was underdone (in the finals) but the rest of the team weren’t, so we could cover for him. He became a role player, but he was important psychologically for the team.

“Grand final day was one of his best games of the year. But he willed himself to the line as much as we physically got him to the line.”

Crawford’s 305th and final game came in the 2008 premiership success.

A few years later Shaun Burgoyne hobbled into Waverley on crutches after knee surgery, with massive question marks. He walked out of there after 12 seasons with three more premiership medals to the one he won with Port Adelaide.

“The (Hawks) doctor says: ‘Do not sign (him) for longer than three years’ because his knee’s only got three years,” he said. “The doctor at Port Adelaide was telling people ‘he needs to retire’. The first thing he did was to drop weight. He went from being 94kg to 88 or 89.”

“He had a degenerative knee, so we strengthened him heavily. We built him up slowly.”

He ended up pushing through the 400-game barrier.

Cyril Rioli’s season in 2014 looked over after a series of serious hamstring injuries.

“We go to Clarko: ‘Cyril’s redone it. He’s out for the year’,” he said. “You can’t come back from that. The damage in his hamstring was horrendous. It was a high grade tendon injury.

“Clarko says to us: “I really want Cyril to play. I wanna give it a go.”

So Russell and his team – along with Rioli – went to work, ensuring that he never went beyond 80 per cent speed.

Against all odds, the Hawks got Rioli back for the VFL the week before the 2014 grand final, allowing a runway for him to play in the premiership playoff against Sydney.

More than a decade on, Russell conceded it was “the biggest risk” he ever took. But it was worth it as Rioli helped the Hawks to secure that flag.

He had similar success getting Carlton’s Charlie Curnow back to football after countless knee setbacks, and he went on to win two Coleman Medals.

Russell has coached 55 All Australians and four Brownlow medallists in his time in football as well as helped teams to advance to 11 preliminary finals for six premierships.

He is no longer involved at club level, but his new elite performance business is found at www.russellperformance.co. It is a high-performance consultancy business which helps apply elite performance methods to athletes of all standards.

His career has been driven by his commitment to high standards, his relentless curiosity, and his belief in human potential, traits that drove him in the AFL world and that he now applies to his business.

He helps individuals and teams unlock their potential in his Elite Humans Program, runs 12-week pre-season training programs for all levels of athletes, and is a keynote speaker on high performance.

“Even in the industry, the high performance role is not well understood. Some don’t realise how significant the role is in clubs,” he said.

“You have to have a good foundation there. Without that, you cannot win.”