Championship Mindset

Thurston: Looking for someone else to blame

Two teams went out of their respective finals competitions last night, the North Queensland Cowboys (NRL) and the Fremantle Dockers (AFL), and their exits demonstrate why one will be competitive next year and why the other will remain a perennial failure.

To start off, these games were both coin toss affairs. The home teams, who won, would go in favourites on location alone but both challengers had form to make a seasoned tipster wary. This is the nature of finals football: you play well in the regular season to earn a home ground advantage and you hope that it pays off in the finals.

The Cowboys had a strong finish to the season and were almost favourites against the Manly Sea eagles. Thurston (JT) and Bowen were the magic pairing that could destroy the Manly defence and make it through to next week. Similarly, Fremantle was the hot team of the AFL with Pavlich kicking goals and the genius of master coach Ross Lyon. Both teams lost but only one showed that they might eventually win the big one.

That team wasn’t the Cowboys. In a nutshell: rather than acknowledge their own failings they would rather dwell on the wrongs done to them. This quote says it all:

''It's sour grapes from our point of view, but I just think the remaining teams in the competition would be a little bit nervous. I'd imagine the coaches would be going, 'It's a bit of a lottery'. Yeah, we could have tackled him into touch, yeah we lacked a bit of composure at times, but both those decisions rattled us.'”

Rather than admit that they could have stopped the try or could have been better at times they would rather criticise the referees for a couple of bad decisions. Were these bad decisions? No doubt and the refereeing in the NRL has been an issue all year. But everyone knew this was the case and the best teams simply take the referee out of the equation. Having been a long time Sydney Swans supporter, I come prepared for pro-Melbourne team umpiring and enjoy watching the Swans make their own luck and not allow the umpires to decide the game for my team. Moreover, their “sour grapes” indicates that they would rather dwell on the past rather than plan how to improve next year. A quick bit of advice for JT and the Cowboys: finish in the top four so you can have a home final. It’s a simple equation: play well all year (not just at the end because you decide to turn up for finals) and reap the rewards later on. This is a much better approach to winning a premiership.

Another key point is that Manly was the better side regardless. Their defence ensured that JT could not even score the points needed to win. This was partly due to JT’s poor decision making in the last 20 minutes when the game could have been won. Rather than be patient and pin Manly in their own half, JT put up a pointless chip kick, lost the ball on a poor tackle 5 option and lacked the composure it takes to win. Compare that to the way win which Cherry-Evans and his team just kept tackling and made meters in their own sets and one can see why one team had won premierships in the past 5 years and the other remains perennial underachievers. The Cowboys may have thought it was their year but someone should tell JT that premierships aren’t given to teams on a silver platter because they think they deserve it.

All this is in stark contrast to the attitude of the Fremantle Dockers’ coach Ross Lyon. Unlike JT or Neil Henry, he chose to make no excuses for his team’s performance. He didn’t blame the travel or schedule. In response to questions about these he said:

"It's irrelevant, it's all garbage to be frank... We're not into excuses ... we wouldn't be talking about scheduling if we had of been a bit more organised and a bit more polished."

Rather than do a JT and blame everyone else, he instead put the blame where it belonged: the team itself. This isn’t negative either because he chooses to focus the energy and improvement on the one thing he knows he can control. He can’t control the schedule or decisions by the AFL but he can control what his own team does. He knows that only by being better will they win their first premiership.

This is the message we should be sending our aspiring sport stars and children in general. Rather than a world of whinging JTs bemoaning the failings of others, that on a balanced look at the game did not cause his team’s failure, we should instead be showing them images of Ross Lyon focusing on a future with better performances. In the end, the only thing we can control is our own actions and performance. In a world of slow motion replays and a multitude of TV experts it is easy to find fault elsewhere but ultimately, if we take our chances and are well prepared we will achieve success.