Left: Kane Cornes ponders Port Adelaide’s belting in 2007. Adelaide skipper Taylor Walker (right) after the 2017 grand final.
What is it about the fall-out from AFL grand finals that leaves losing teams in a mess beyond the scoreboard?
Greater Western Sydney underperformed – to become this season’s disappointing non-contender – after last year’s 89-point loss to Richmond in the Giants’ first appearance in an AFL grand final.
Port Adelaide went into denial – and then decay from ignoring the result – after its record 119-point thrashing from Geelong in 2007.
And Adelaide after 2017 … well, there is a thesis waiting for any would-be PhD aspirant.
Port Adelaide left the MCG after the 2007 AFL grand final firmly cast in the record books – and refusing to deal with the greatest threat to all the new promise the team had built, the “blue sky,” as 2004 premiership coach Mark Williams called it.
Denial brought destruction at Alberton – five years that put the club’s AFL licence at risk.
Port Adelaide’s line – that was repeated so often that at times it seemed club officials and players were trying to convince themselves more than their audience – was: “We had a bad day in a good year.”
And they dismissed that tough discussion until it was too late and the denial had created other deep-seated issues that tore apart the football club from within.
The post-match from the 2007 grand final humiliation created one damaging concept that split the club – the “blame game”.
Kane Cornes, a member of the breakthrough 2004 AFL premiership side, recalls: “We had an all-in meeting in the days after that game and we tried to address all the issues on the table that were then and there … but it wasn’t enough.
“We didn’t put it all on the line and there wasn’t enough finger-pointing, so no doubt it set the club back.”
By February 2008, the splits were deepening. A year later, the divisions were obvious in the reluctance the Port Adelaide board showed towards endorsing Shaun Burgoyne as captain. A further year on, Burgoyne moved to Hawthorn, where he will play his 20th AFL season next year and approach the 400-game milestone.
Port Adelaide most probably would have been spared the 2007 nightmare had Brownlow medallist Ben Cousins not hobbled out of the West Coast midfield with a hamstring strain during the qualifying final at Football Park.
Cornes played in two AFL grand finals – 2004, after which Port Adelaide celebrated and played in the semi-finals a year later; and 2007, which tormented the Power for years.
“In the preliminary final in 2004 against St Kilda, we won, we scraped through by a goal and Damien Hardwick straight after the siren came up to me and whispered in my ear: ‘This will be the best week of your life, get ready for it’, and I never (forgot it),” Cornes said.
“I went up to (future captain) Travis Boak,” recalls Cornes of the moments after the 2007 preliminary final thrashing of North Melbourne, “and said: ‘Boaky, this’ll be the best thing, the best week in your life.’ Turns out I was wrong because it was one of the worst days.
“The emotional scars and impact of losing that grand final in 2007 probably set the club back five or six years, and some of the players never recovered from the performance on that day.”
There was a time when grand final defeats were considered part of the path to an AFL premiership. Redemption would inspire ultimate success, was the well-worn script, “you need to lose one before you know how to win one” the mantra.
This certainly was the VFL story in the 1980s. First, Hawthorn worked over Essendon by a then record 83 points in 1983, the Bombers turning the tables on the Hawks with a stunning nine-goal last term to win by 24 points the following year, then in 1985, their third straight grand final clash, belting them by 78 points
Hawthorn once again set up the redemption challenge in 1986 by beating Carlton. Stephen Kernahan and his Blues reversed the script in 1987.
Hawthorn wrecked West Coast’s dream in the 1991 AFL grand final after the Eagles had been top of the ladder every week during the minor rounds (with a 19-3 win-loss record). In response, Michael Malthouse started the torment of Geelong in grand finals by delivering West Coast’s first AFL flag in 1992.
Since 2000, three clubs have turned grand final defeat into an AFL premiership celebration a year later – West Coast in 2006 in that epic rivalry with Sydney; Geelong in 2009 after the upset loss to Hawthorn; and Hawthorn with the start of its “three-peat” in 2013.
Each of these premierships has had at least one player speak of the follow-up campaigns being driven by a need to atone and redeem after grand final failure.
But there have been more collapses – even disasters – than successful rebounds after grand final defeats in the past 20 years.
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Five clubs fell off the cliff after grand-final losses in the 2000s: Melbourne (11th after losing the 2000 grand final by 10 goals to Essendon); Collingwood (13th in 2004 after two consecutive grand final losses); Brisbane (11th in 2005 indicating the Lions were spent after four consecutive grand finals); Port Adelaide (13th and tormented on and off the field after the 2007 grand final) and Adelaide (12th in 2018 and in free fall to this year’s wooden spoon).
Port Adelaide chose to ignore the grand final loss in the summer of 2007-8. Everyone paid dearly for this mistake at Alberton. But while Port Adelaide failed to deal with grand final pain, the Crows in 2017 overreacted.
Adelaide – in particular coach Don Pyke and football boss Brett Burton – put far too much emphasis on one loss. They, too, have copped a heavy price for this mistake, with both being sacked last year, despite Pyke having two years to run on his contract and Burton able to point put in his settlement in leaving West Lakes that his boss, club chief executive Andrew Fagan, had given him glowing marks in his annual performance reviews.
The Crows’ woes began well before the infamous pre-season camp conducted on the Gold Coast early in 2018 by the external group, Collective Mind.
Pyke had a problem – a genuine test of his leadership – when the Crows players returned for pre-season training in November 2017.
This was the alarm bell poorly read by Pyke. He failed to note his team was struggling with the result of one football game – just as Port Adelaide had done during the summer of 2007-2008. Grand final pain does not dull with a big “Mad Monday”. Perhaps GWS, with its grand final scars, also has fallen into this trap.
Former Crows key forward-ruckman Josh Jenkins, now at Geelong, noted there is a significant difference in how AFL teams close and review a season after missing the top eight or losing in the first three weeks of a finals campaign compared to the fall-out of losing a grand final.
There is, Jenkins says, a keen rush to get away for holidays, when clubs should spend more time dealing with the toughest loss any team can take.
Pyke and Burton were disappointed and critical of the physical condition in which some Adelaide players presented on return to pre-season training in late November-December 2017. But it was the question of their mental strength – particularly in dealing with the challenges of the grand final more so than the aftermath – that put Pyke and Burton on a questionable path.
The camp, the association with Collective Mind, and the fracturing of the Crows squad into three factions last year meant the fall-out of the grand final loss could no longer be ignored by anyone, even those still trying to put up a false front at the Adelaide Football Club.
What happened in south-east Queensland in February 2018 during that contentious pre-season camp has been the subject of much debate, and now legal action by Collective Mind as it seeks to protect its image from a moment it chooses to describe as “bespoke”. That is, as designed by the Crows, not them.
A few lingering points do need to be addressed about the Collective Mind saga that is repeatedly described as a move based on “good intentions, but poor execution”.
Often, particularly in Adelaide, the reporting of the pre-season camp and other moments with Collective Mind – such as the “power stance” taken up by the Crows players during the national anthem before finals – are labelled as “media beat-ups”. This is ignoring that the vast majority of the accounts from the camp have come from players and staff who were at the camp – or staff who had to deal with the fall-out.
The bizarre note – one even the Crows’ administration now acknowledges – is how the Adelaide players were split into three groups at a camp that was supposed to connect them in a stronger mode.
In an interview with inaugural Adelaide coach Graham Cornes, one of Collective Mind’s founders, Amon Wolfe, declared there was no need for qualified psychologists at the camp because: “We didn’t need psychologists out there. We needed to fix their hearts, not their heads.”
This seems strange considering everything about the Crows-Collective Mind arrangement was above the shoulders.
In an endorsement video for Collective Mind, the company says its “multi-year program (with the Adelaide Football Club is designed) to unlock the next frontier of high performance. The mind.”
Pyke’s tribute is based on Collective Mind opening up “the value of mind training”.
“We have made a lot of progress on the physical side,” Pyke says in the video endorsement. “The frontier that hasn’t quite been tapped in consistently is the mind space. Clearly, the mind controls the body. A lot of our time has been historically on the body. (The Collective Mind program) is making our players aware of the mind and that the role that plays in their performances is really vital.”
Hearts or heads?
Collective Mind’s claim they built a “bespoke” program leaves the question as to what information, particularly sensitive details, they were delivered on the players by Pyke and Burton – and, as Pyke later admitted, how the bonds of trust between players and coach were broken.
It left a dysfunctional side that collapsed from an 8-5 win-loss start in 2019 to finish at 10-12 with seven losses in the last nine matches. This forced Pyke to concede he was not “part of the solution” at Adelaide. He walked the plank.
And there is so much curiosity from that strange Saturday afternoon press conference at Adelaide’s team base at West Lakes on 23 June 2018, when Pyke and Burton were at odds with what to reveal of the club’s decision to part with Collective Mind. Pyke did concede the camp was a “fail”.
It was. And the fall-out still lingers. Some teams are accused of over-celebrating a premiership and falling into a hangover. Losing a grand final, however, can lead AFL clubs into far more dangerous territory.
