What are the 10 symptoms to a premiership hangover and does Collingwood have them?
Is Collingwood on the precipice of a flag hangover? SAM LANDSBERGER speaks to premiership players to find out what makes and what breaks a reigning premier.
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Only four out of 27 premiership teams in the AFL era have gone back-to-back – Adelaide (1997-98), Brisbane Lions (2001-03), Hawthorn (2013-15) and Richmond (2019-20).
Just three out of the past eight reigning premiers – from Hawthorn in 2016 to Geelong in 2023 – have managed to win a final the following season.
In a special investigation this masthead has delved into case studies from several premiership teams this century.
It has uncovered 10 symptoms of the dreaded “premiership hangover”.
Collingwood’s flag defence is on the rocks at 0-3 in March. Which symptoms are plaguing the Pies?
THE 10 SYMPTOMS OF A PREMIERSHIP HANGOVER
1. OVER CELEBRATING
Hawthorn’s freshly-minted premiership heroes sat shamed in silence. They had spent 14 days sinking beers after the 2008 grand final on a bender that started at the MCG and finished in Hong Kong.
“Every player averaged 10mm more of skinfold when they came back,” then-Hawks fitness boss Andrew Russell told the Herald Sun.
“We had about 80kg more of body fat. So I went into a meeting with 80kg of lard and threw it on the floor and said, ‘Meet your new teammate’.
“I said, ‘You’ve got a new teammate because of the way you blokes went about the off-season and you’re going to have to carry him all year’.”
What was the reaction?
“Nothing. They just looked at you like, ‘Ahh …. we’re f----- here, aren’t we?’” Russell said.
Xavier Ellis was one of the Hawks’ best in the grand final against Geelong. He had 28 disposals, 14 marks and kicked a goal. That form continued at the celebrations.
“I don’t know what was more fatiguing – the 28 degrees we played the grand final in or the 14 days of trying to butter up and have a good time,” Ellis told the Herald Sun.
“I’m not sure the 20 beers a night were helpful. But I was 20 and from a town of 200, so I thought I was going OK.”
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Craig McRae said: “We are fitter now than we have been in my time. There’s 40-odd guys on our list, nearly every one of the guys have done the work – and that’s not just running.”
2. INSTABILITY
Twelve days after the Western Bulldogs won their fairytale flag their coaches played musical chairs.
Footscray’s VFL premiership coach Ash Hansen took charge of the forward line in 2017, backline coach Rohan Smith was redeployed as head of development and midfield-ruck coach Steven King replaced Smith in defence.
Daniel Giansiracusa was given the stoppage and set plays portfolio in 2017 after mentoring the forwards in the 2016 premiership.
September star Clay Smith said coach Luke Beveridge wanted to upskill his lieutenants.
“But when you’re really good at something, do you just master that skill even more?” Smith told the Herald Sun.
“It’s sort of like if it’s not broke don’t fix it, you know? And if it’s not working then maybe you do throw things around.
“I don’t think it did work. I know ‘Bubba’ (Rohan Smith) ended up going back to defence (in 2020), and the backs loved him.”
Smith is a professional boxer these days and will fight ex-Carlton player Damien Lock at Melbourne Pavilion on May 4.
But he is also a coach himself, and took Point Cook from second bottom to a grand final in his first season last year.
“You don’t know until you try, and what if it does work?” he said of the post-premiership assistant rejig.
“You’re never going to know until you have a crack. You’re going to get criticised if it doesn’t and praised if it does.”
In 2019 reigning premier West Coast’s preparation for its semi-final against Geelong was rocked when players found out about Willie Rioli’s drug ban.
“We were in the team meeting room on the morning of the game, so that was a bit of a cat amongst the pigeons,” defender Will Schofield said.
They lost to the Cats by 20 points.
Melbourne’s 2022 premiership defence started 10-0.
But in June Jake Melksham floored teammate Steven May at a boozy Entrecote dinner and the club finished the season 6-8 to crash out of finals in straight sets.
DOES COLLINGWOOD HAVE IT? TICK
Collingwood spun its premiership-winning assistants in similar fashion to the Bulldogs.
Jordan Roughead replaced Brendon Bolton as backline coach and Scott Selwood replaced Justin Leppitsch in charge of the forwards.
But the wildcard was the loss of esteemed football boss Graham Wright, who is in Europe on a sabbatical until September.
Bolton, Leppitsch and Clare Pettyfor were put in charge of the department, with Bolton the main man, Leppitsch helping shape the list strategy and Pettyfor again overseeing football operations.
That set-up lasted two games before Pettyfor returned to the Dees amid talk of friction.
“In high performance environments where a lot of stuff happens, people yell and scream,” Pies chief executive Craig Kelly said.
“Bolts and (Leppitch) are heading down a good path, and they want to head down that path together.
“Leppitsch is a better manager now, and he will be good at this list stuff.”
3. TACTICS COPIED OR OUTDATED
GEELONG was too stubborn to adapt in 2010. In 2007 – when the Cats won their first flag under Mark Thompson – clubs averaged just 59 interchange rotations per game.
That exploded to 117 in 2010 as Mick Malthouse transformed Dane Swan from a plodder to the game’s No.1 player – and the 2011 Brownlow Medallist – by using him in short bursts.
“It was brilliant identification from Mick about not just having a gameplan and going, ‘I’m going to use it no matter what my playing group is’,” premiership captain Cameron Ling told the Herald Sun.
“He identified that he had the real power athletes with speed and burst through the middle.
“They weren’t super strong aerobic athletes, whereas we were in myself and Joel Corey and (Joel) Selwood.
“Mick kept them fresh and I remember in that 2010 prelim final I just couldn’t go with ‘Swanny’.
“He went to the bench after a six-minute burst, I stayed on the ground and rolled on to (Scott) Pendlebury and then ‘Swanny’ came back on the ground and I couldn’t get near him.
“He destroyed me that night. Tactically they’d well and truly shifted past us, and we needed to be a bit more open to rotating ourselves.”
St Kilda’s manic front-half pressure with a fold-back defence under Ross Lyon had also zoomed past Geelong’s gameplan.
“I think ‘Bomber’ (Thompson) was trying to implement a few things, but us players got a little stubborn because you’ve had the success to back it up,” Ling said.
“Whereas we probably needed to be open to new tactics and new ideas in that year because Collingwood and St Kilda had kind of just shifted past us a little bit tactically.
“We weren’t playing perfect footy, and we felt that spluttering form at times.
“But you tell yourself, ‘Oh well, all we have to do is get back to playing our best footy and we’ll be fine.
“We’ll win again – we’re a really good team’.
The Dogs’ 2016 flag was born out of their unstoppable handball chains.
They cleanly flicked the ball from congestion to outside runners with unique skills taught at ‘Handball Club’ before every training session.
“Handball was our point of difference,” Smith said.
“But in 2017 teams started bringing extra numbers up or they started shutting players out. I think they also started doing a fair bit more of the handball stuff themselves.
“Everyone does skills, but when you emphasise something with repetition and with purpose you get better at it. You take little bits from the best teams each year.
“They study the way you play. When it’s something fresh and new in-season you can’t really change all the stuff you’ve done through the pre-season.
“But once you get that full off-season to work out how the good teams like to play and how you’re going to combat that you can train it for a whole six months.”
Like the Dogs in 2017, Hawthorn failed to make finals in 2009.
“It’s funny, you’re no longer the best once you’ve won the flag because teams have had six weeks extra to get better at what you’ve been doing,” Ellis said.
“Coaches spend their entire off-season dissecting top four teams and what they do well.
“So when it comes to the crunch, especially early in the season, they’ve had months of trying to design their own gameplan around what you’ve been doing.”
DOES COLLINGWOOD HAVE THIS? YES
Collingwood has leaked 208 points from turnovers in three games.
Jordan De Goey’s mistakes have cost five goals (the most in the AFL) while Oleg Markov (20 points), Darcy Moore and Steele Sidebottom (19) are the next worst offenders.
“If you’re a reigning premier, you’ve got clear signatures you need to deal with,” Lyon said after storming the Pies.
“It’s maybe taken a while, but we’re seeing all those signatures. Often it’s harder to stop, but tonight we did a pretty good job of it.”
Smith said: “Other teams have worked out how to defend the way they like to move the footy. It’s more what other teams are doing to stifle the way they want to play”.
4. COMPLACENCY
RICHMOND’S standards slipped late in 2018. The Tigers were effectively three wins clear of third after round 19 and certain to host a qualifying final at their MCG fortress.
In the final month they pipped Geelong, Essendon and Western Bulldogs and smacked Gold Coast by 74 points.
The Dogs – who finished 13th – should’ve beaten Richmond in the final home-and-away game. But Brad Lynch’s set-shot from the boundary in the dying seconds hit the post.
But it was against the Suns that coach Damien Hardwick pulled his hair out.
Players were uncharacteristically running ahead of the ball. They were also determined to feed Jack Riewoldt, who kicked 10.6 to help stitch up a third Coleman Medal and deny Ben Brown.
There were signs the Tigers’ premiership defence was unravelling. But the bad habits were hard to call out because they kept on winning.
How do you keep players motivated and mentally challenged when their minds are wandering to September?
When the Hawks started 2009 miserably Ellis simply expected it would resolve.
“I remember thinking, ‘We’re sweet anyway, we’re the best team in the comp. What’s it really matter?’” he said.
“Everyone’s just going to try and copy us and we do it the best, so we’ll just work it out quickly.
“But from memory we were all shocked at how shit we were. We were one of the youngest teams to win the flag and then we were shit.
“It was like, ‘How did this happen?’”
The Cats cleaned up Melbourne (116 points) and West Coast (99) in the final month of the 2008 season.
But were they truly humming?
“We were still winning, but on reflection we weren’t flying or really peaking at finals,” Ling said.
“We were very, very good and so against some of the teams we played late in the season we simply might’ve just been a hell of a lot better than them.
“More talented, more mature, just better full stop. So you can put them to the sword, but not necessarily be playing the right way you’ve got to play come finals.”
DOES COLLINGWOOD HAVE THIS? QUESTION MARK
Danger signs are emerging.
McRae conceded: “There’s just fundamental stuff that we’re doing really poorly. Things that are a little bit uncharacteristic to our game, but also from experienced players. It’s just little things that mean big things, and we’ve taken great pride in the last period of doing the little things really, really well.”
Ling has faith they can turn it around. But said time was running out.
“They’re just wanting to play on their terms a little bit at the moment,” he said.
“A whole heap of hard work goes into one of those great attacking passages of play that we all love to play a replay of.
“There’s a lot of hard, sacrificial, unrewarded stuff that goes on to make that play look fantastic. That’s just not happening at the moment.”
Ellis said: “When Collingwood were flying everything was so in sync. You not only knew what you were doing, you know what the 17 people around you were doing.
“It’s natural instinct when the wheels start to fall off the first person in a good team will try to do more, and then when you try to do more matter of fact you’re doing less.”
5. PREMATURE PREMIERSHIP
Western Bulldogs fielded the youngest grand final team in 16 years in 2016.
“We probably won it out of turn,” Smith said.
“We were just so young. We played on pure adrenaline and pure instinct and it just all clicked at the right time and we put together four amazing weeks of footy.
“We just had such a young group and confidence and consistency in a young group is a big thing, and if you lose a bit of confidence it rubs off on a few and it can quickly change.”
The Dogs’ average age was 24.4 years, slightly younger than Hawthorn’s 24.6 years in 2008.
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Collingwood’s average age was 27.7 years last year. The Pies’ profile was perfect for a premiership.
6. OFF-SEASON SURGERIES
Hawthorn booked about 17 players for post-premiership surgeries in 2008, led by Lance Franklin’s shoulder reconstruction.
Ellis was one of them. He had a hip operation in December.
“There was an astronomical amount of people who ended up having surgery after the grand final,” he said.
“I remember a lot of players having surgeries after the celebrations were done, too.
“If you don’t win the flag and you’ve got a busted hand you’re probably having hand surgery on the Monday after the season.
“We were pushed back because obviously we won, we celebrated, and then slowly but surely we got to having surgery.
“Because we were so young they were a bit hesitant to just throw young kids in for surgery quickly.
“We were chasing our tail from the start in terms of conditioning and fitness purely off the back of the injury toll the year before.”
Russell said it was a “double-edged sword” following the premiership party.
“We had a group of young players who didn’t deal with it well and enjoyed themselves too much, and then we had a lot of off-season injuries that went into in-season,” he said.
“So we copped it on both fronts. If you had one without the other we might’ve been able to deal with it, but we had both.”
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Brayden Maynard and Jamie Elliott (both shoulders) were the only players booked for surgery after the grand final. Maynard missed 12 weeks of pre-season.
Brody Mihocek (calf) and Dan McStay (knee) also went under the knife after suffering summer setbacks. Mihocek missed six weeks while McStay’s season sadly ended before it started.
7. WOUNDED WARRIORS
Unavailability also helped spoil Hawthorn’s 2009 campaign.
“We lost 136 games to uncontrollable joint injuries in 2009, which is the most I’ve ever seen,” Russell said.
“Knees, ankles, shoulders. (Trent) Croad didn’t play at all, zero games.
“Max Bailey (ACL) played two games, Rick Ladson (knee) three games, Clinton Young (hip) five games and we were managing Robbie Campbell’s knee.
“We had an unbelievably good year soft-tissue wise, but we just carried a lot of big joint injuries for the whole year.”
In 2018 Richmond lost Dan Butler and Kane Lambert to syndesmosis injuries and Dustin Martin – Mr Unbeatable in September – played the preliminary final without having trained in more than two weeks.
Like Martin, Lambert played that finals series. But their special powers were blunted.
DOES COLLINGWOOD HAVE THIS? CROSS
Smith said the Magpies were badly missing spearhead Dan McStay (ACL) as a focal point who straightened them up and brought the ball to ground for their small forwards.
But only McStay and Nathan Murphy (concussion) are unavailable for Easter Thursday from their best 22.
8. LOSS OF HUNGER
Will Schofield completed the 19.7km open water Rotto Swim between West Coast’s 2018 flag and the 2019 season.
“I was as fit as I’d ever been because I was really aware that you can’t let your guard down and you need to be better than you were,” Schofield told the Herald Sun.
But that hunger was impossible to replicate. He said it was human nature.
“The premiership hangover is in the brain – it’s not in the body,” Schofield said.
“Anyone who tells you that after you’ve won a flag you’re not content and you don’t have an element of, ‘I did it’ – the exact thing you exist to do – is absolutely kidding themselves.
“I’m sure there’s some hard-nuts that go, ‘I wanted it even more the next year’ – but there’s just no way.
“You’ve achieved the thing that you exist to achieve, yet you have to get yourself mentally motivated to go again. It’s difficult, there’s just no way around it.
“To be the best and to play on the edge and to perform in the AFL you need to be mentally switched on and so if you’re 1 per cent off you get made to look stupid.
“If you are not mentally there then you can’t perform physically.
“It’s nothing to do with preparation or physical fitness in my opinion.
“It’s all in the mind. The fundamentals that ‘Fly’ (McRae) talked about, he said no other team would prepare more fundamentals than we do.
“So that says physically they’re preparing – but you’ve still got to be able to execute, and that’s not physical. That’s mental.
“The premiership hangover doesn’t exist physically. It’s not like Collingwood’s been drinking piss and not training.
“The use of the word ‘hangover’ leaves people thinking Collingwood hasn’t prepared. They’ve probably over prepared. They’re probably physically more prepared than last year.
“But mentally maybe there’s a fog of, ‘I’ve just done what I was meant to do’.
“I was happy I’d won a flag, definitely. I can only talk about myself personally, but 1000 per cent.
“That is why teams don’t go back to back, and the ones that do are the greatest of all time because they’re that mentally strong the drive for a second and a third overpowers that feeling that is just so natural as a human being.”
Ellis said: “Naturally once you’ve achieved the goal you set out to achieve since you were a kid you’re not chasing the golden medal as hard as what you had been”.
Bulldogs great Bob Murphy famously said after his club broke a 62-year drought: “Hawthorn are mountain climbers. A premiership for the Bulldogs was like landing on the moon”.
DOES COLLINGWOOD HAVE THIS? QUESTION MARK
Did McRae hint at this on Friday night when he referred to a moment of hesitation between three players?
“There’s three of us and (the ball) is in the middle and they’re like, ‘No, you get it’. ‘No, you get it’,” McRae said.
“Nah, nah, nah – I’d rather have three guys get it than one waiting for you to get it.”
Perhaps those players were understandably feeling satisfied after filling their tummies in 2023.
9. EXHAUSTION FROM BEING HUNTED
Geelong had won 27 out of its past 29 games when it entered the 2008 grand final.
The Cats were $1.38 with the TAB – the shortest favourite in the past 21 grand finals outside of Richmond in 2019 ($1.36).
The Tigers thrashed the Giants by 89 points. But in this century’s biggest upset the Cats lost to Hawthorn by 26 points.
They kicked 11 consecutive behinds across the second and third quarters, which included sodas from Brad Ottens and Cameron Mooney and posters from Mooney and Tom Lonergan.
The goalkicking yips might have stemmed from exhaustion after climbing Mt Everest the previous season.
“You come back and you know you’ve got to do it again and opposition are just hunting you,” Ling said.
“Every time you take the field that particular team wants to take your scalp. Beat you as an individual, beat your team and knock off the champs.
“And it’s exhausting. You don’t fully know it at the time, but I look back now and we were almost just trying to hold on to that grand final.
“We were the best team all year – we lost one game – but we knew the only thing that mattered was the grand final.
“The (first) journey is exciting whereas when you’re trying to go again you know that the only thing that matters is the final game if you’re a good team.
“And we had 15 other teams coming at us and wanting to hunt us, and you just get exhausted from the whole thing.
“You might just lose 5-10 per cent and that’s what cost us on grand final day.”
Geelong, Hawthorn and Western Bulldogs occupied the ladder’s top three spots every week of the season after round 1.
“It was a strange year that year. The two teams we had our eyes on were Hawthorn and the Bulldogs and we didn’t play those two teams until Rounds 16-17,” Ling said.
“It was almost this feeling of holding your breath a little bit until you had your shot at those two. We won both those games, not super convincing but we handled them.
“And then it was kind of like, ‘Oh well let’s hold our breath until we have to play them again’.
“You lose that attention to detail of reviewing everything because you knew you just had to do it again against the Dogs and the Hawks.
“That sort of mindset is not conducive to winning finals, and we won one of them (preliminary final against the Dogs) and lost one of them, and the season was gone.”
DOES COLLINGWOOD HAVE THIS? QUESTION MARK
The Magpies are unquestionably being hunted each week. The gold AFL logo on their jumper is proof of that. But it is far too early to know whether that will be draining.
10. SHORTER PRE-SEASON.
The Cats started 0-3 last year and collapsed to 12th after their runaway 2022 flag. Tom Stewart partly blamed their shorter pre-season.
“We’ll be a lot better (in 2024) for having continuity of training together,” he said.
“Spending a lot more time actually training our system versus coming off a short run.
“It’s the longest pre-season I’ve had in my career (because) we’ve been lucky enough to play in finals every year except for last year.”
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Footy legends including Jimmy Bartel and Leigh Matthews have shot down claims that starting pre-season a month later than non-finalists inhibited the reigning premier.
McRae, too, has repeatedly stated that his players were ready.
HANGOVER REMEDIES
Lessons learned by Richmond in 2018 and Hawthorn in 2009 set-up their club’s golden dynasties.
It took the Hawks five years to recover from 2008 and their 2013 premiership defence started with a military-style training camp in South Africa instead of 80kg of lard being splattered on the floor.
“They’d set-up training camps up for the (2010) soccer World Cup and it was a compound out of Johannesburg that you couldn’t get into or get out of because of security,” Russell said.
“This compound was about 1km in diameter and so the first thing we did after the players had been out enjoying their off-season was lock them down and trained – and we absolutely trained them really hard.
“But we fed them, they slept when we wanted them to sleep, we trained them when we wanted to train them and they had no access to the outside world because of the physical set-up of these training camps.
“You weren’t allowed out for safety reasons and it was in the middle of nowhere.
“The players hated the first four days because they went from living their lives and having a good time to absolute rigid lockdown, training hard, military style.
“Then we actually opened it up and went down to Cape Town and enjoyed life a bit and trained hard.
“But it worked so well to reset the group.”
The Hawks became humble and transformed into the greatest team of the century. Would the 2013-15 three-peat have happened without that blowout after 2008?
“I’m absolutely convinced we wouldn’t have gone anywhere near winning three in a row if we hadn’t of learnt the lessons from 2009,” Russell said.
“The key people were still there – Clarko was still there, I was still there, Hodgey, Sam Mitchell Jarryd Roughead, Jordan Lewis were all there.
“All the key leaders were still there. Then you had the young group of enthusiastic players like Isaac Smith and Luke Breust coming through that added to the mix.
“The standards were very, very clear. We were pretty ruthless with them back then to be honest.”
Similarly, Richmond’s complacency from 2018 was crushed when Josh Caddy was dropped in 2019.
Caddy had kicked 46 goals in 2018 – second only to Riewoldt and 15 more than Martin – but was playing VFL in July 2019.
Brandon Ellis also started 2019 in the VFL while Dan Butler and Kamdyn McIntosh were axed and missed out on the premiership.
The Tigers waltzed to the 2019 flag and went back-to-back in 2020.
On the eve of the 2020 season I asked McRae if you could measure hunger. He was Richmond’s forwards coach at the time and well-qualified to answer.
Of the four teams to go back-to-back in the AFL era he played in the Lions’ three-peat and was an assistant at the Tigers from 2017-2020.
“I think you can (measure hunger),” McRae said.
“Early in the pre-season you look at time trials and skinfolds. They’re all measurable things.
“We’ve got a lot of guys with premiership experience and that can create motivation to get back there again.
“Once we get the competitive juices running in the season, that’ll be the biggest test. Time will tell, but hopefully we’re as hungry as ever.”
Last week McRae pointed out that Collingwood’s 0-3 start mirrored that of Geelong 12 months ago as reigning premier. But the Cats missed finals.
“That’s their story,” McRae said.
“They had their own story to tell, and ours will be different.
The Easter Thursday grand final rematch at the Gabba might just be a defining chapter in Collingwood’s story.
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