Is Buckley coaching better than we think...?

[K]

Richo vows to be 'more consistent', less 'knee-jerky' in 2019

http://www.afl.com.au/news/2018-11-21/richo-vows-to-be-more-consistent-less-kneejerky-in-2019

"A review led by ... Lethlean enacted change, and Richardson himself received plenty of feedback.

"I needed to be a leader that made sure our program was more consistent," Richardson told ... SEN.

"At the time, you thought it was right to change, when things aren't going well. It's that old saying, it's a bit silly to keep doing the same thing and just trying harder, but there's a balance in that.

"There were some things that were a little bit knee-jerky. ..."

... Graeme Allan was brought in last month to help the list management team.

Allan was Collingwood's football boss when Richardson played there and he has provided another sounding board for the coach to work off.

"He's saddled up alongside me at training and just had a chat and asked questions about why we do that," Richardson said.

"He sits in meetings and says 'Yeah, that's good' and 'Have you thought about that?'. ..."

Richardson will head to New York on December 8 for a leadership course at Columbia University."

[K]

Bob Murphy:

Footy's double talk: please explain?

https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/footy-s-double-talk-please-explain-20180620-p4zmlx.html

"Even as a veteran footballer, the human battleships of modern footy was never a language I spoke as fluently as others. I had to go slow and concentrate hard in meetings. Eventually, I made peace with it.

It’s a balance. Tactics and strategy on one side of the scales, instinct and emotion on the other. A good football team needs to level the scales and so do the players.

I remember an exercise we did for a little while that used to send a shiver up the spines of players. A coach would pick a name out of a hat, but there was no whooping and hollering like you might find down at your local pub when the chook raffle is drawn. It was more a hushed tension.

A second hat was produced which contained up to 15 scenarios written on pieces of paper. Laid out on the carpet in front of the entire football department was a mini-oval and 36 little bean bags about the size of your palm. Half red, half blue. The poor bastard who won the “raffle” was asked to set up his winning scenario, which was a kick-in set play.

All 18 blue bags belonged in specific spots on the field that we’d trained over and over for months. It became apparent straight away that old mate with the winning ticket had no idea where to put the bean bags. It was excruciating to watch as he scattered them haphazardly. Bizarrely, half of them were in a bunch, the other half were in a messy, lop-sided zone. This is what would become known as “the worst kind of wrong answer”.
...

... Our runner. He’s got news for me.

Time is of the essence and both of us know it as Pinky delivers the news. The umpires are ferrying the ball back to the centre circle to recommence the chaotic battle. I strain to hear him over the crowd noise and I hold his elbow as he bellows into my ear: “We’re playing a joker, with a tornado, and sending a seventh off the back of the square.”
...

The sophistication of tactics in football continues to rise, but if it rises faster than players are able to compute under fatigue, it raises the question: what is the point? I laugh to myself when I hear people inside a club after a run of bad form talking publicly with lines like: “We’re just going to simplify things this week.” Hmmm. Could be something in that.

Note: A “joker with a tornado and a seventh off the back of the square” translates as “pretty much man on man”."

[K]

St Kilda plan to keep things simple in 2019

https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/st-kilda-plan-to-keep-things-simple-in-2019-20181213-p50m4a.html

Billings:

"We want to make some changes about the way we play and our game plan, so the last three weeks have been about learning that sort of stuff and trying to put it in place and train it over the next two or three months and hopefully be better next year.
...

"I think overall the changes are going to be better for the team, a bit more simple with the way we do things and more predictable to each other, the coaches have really driven that and Richo’s pretty excited about it all."

[MatthewBoydFanClub]

I think the main problem with Richardson is he’s a little too intense and technical as a senior coach. He was a great assistant coach at Collingwood and he had a great working relationship with Hinkley at Port Adelaide where he was a sounding board for Hinkley. It’s a bit different when you become a senior coach as Buckley found at. You need to take more of a back seat role as senior coach and delegate more to the assistants. Some coaching courses in the US sounds a good idea for Richardson. Also I think he needs better support at St Kilda which he hasn’t been getting. For a club that has finished in the bottom half of the ladder for the last few years some of their drafting decisions have mystified me.

[K]

Meanwhile in the NFL...

"When the NFL regular season ends, a new season immediately begins. The postseason? No, not yet. First comes the brief but brutal annual season of firing coaches.

Four teams dismissed their coaches on Monday (local time): Marvin Lewis was fired by the Cincinnati Bengals, Vance Joseph by the Denver Broncos, Steve Wilks by the Arizona Cardinals and Adam Gase by the Miami Dolphins.
...

Lewis leaves the Bengals after 16 seasons - a franchise record. Only Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots (19 years) has been at the helm of an NFL team for longer."

(NYT with Reuters, via The Age.)

[PyreneesPie]

From the Herald Sun - Wednesday, 2 Jan 2019 - Page 58 on the subject of the best 25 things for 2018:

[K]

News on assistant coaches:

http://www.afl.com.au/news/2019-01-07/the-assistant-coaches-making-an-early-impact-at-their-new-clubs

Noteworthy: "Montgomery, who had two years out of the AFL system after a relationship breakdown with Western Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge, has stood out with his diligence and level of detail."


(And Rhyce Shaw is now at NM.)