InsIde Football Summer Special, January 2010

Feature 13Dr Jodi Richardson

WHAT a ride for Hawthorn: premier in 2008 yet missed the eight in 2009.

It’s quite a contrast with the Hawks’ 2008 Grand Final opponent Geelong, which bounced back from that defeat to win in 2009.

How could there be such disparity between outcomes for these two premiership teams?

Does it all come down to a Hawthorn “premiership hangover” or is there more to it?

The circumstances seem confusing but scratch the surface and it all begins to make sense.

As head fitness coach at Hawthorn, Andrew Russell explains, to get the team in really good condition you need at least a three-month window for training.

He said that disruptions during pre-season had a great effect on preparation for the following season.

A delayed start to pre-season training leaves less of a buffer if things go wrong.

“The start date for pre-season is not significant, but what is significant is if (once you get started) you have major interruptions during that time,” Russell said.

“If you start early with your pre-season it just means you’ve got a fair bit of ‘fat’ in your preparation.

“When you have a longer preparation time, the guys have done a fair bit of work giving them a good base from which to draw on if they do get injured.

“With a longer pre-season, if they get injured early they still have time to come

back and get in a good three-month block of work before the season starts.”

Russell recounted some compelling statistics highlighting the importance of pre-season training.

He said that players who played more than 20 games in a season participated in 87 per cent of pre-season training on average.

This compared with players who played fewer than 16 games in a season having averaged 62 per cent participation in pre-season training.

When a club knows its team is not going to make the finals it can begin pre-season planning, in particular for players who require surgery.

Alternatively, more successful teams can’t plan in the same way as they don’t know when they are going to finish and if they do go right through to the Grand Final as did Hawthorn, they can end up four to five weeks behind other teams in getting players in for surgery and making pre-season preparations.

Russell said that during a finals campaign players are not training particularly hard.

“They are playing hard but you are not training them at a high level during that time so they are physiologically de-training during that time,” he said.

“If you kept playing at that level without the training their game play would start to decrease so it’s a fine line between freshening them up too much and keeping enough conditioning so they can maintain form through the finals and hopefully into the Grand Final.”

This means that after a Grand Final, even after a win, the training base of the players is actually at a lower level than during the season, so ample time is needed to bring players back up to full fitness.

So what events contributed to Hawthorn’s less successful performance in 2009 after 2008 premiership glory?

Russell recounts a number of factors that impeded the team’s 2009 pre-season.

The Hawks were unlucky to have both Trent Croad and Clinton Young out with big injuries on Grand Final day.

On top of these injuries, a number of players went down early in pre-season.

Several also suffered injuries late in season 2009, including Jarryd Roughead and Cameron Stokes with knee injuries, and Brent Guerra with a shoulder injury.

Of these three, Roughead and Guerra are back in training for 2010 but the injuries to Stokes and Croad remain long-term concerns.

“Our biggest issue was that we had some major interruptions in November and December 2008 with guys that got injured very early in our preparation and that was the thing that really hurt us,” Russell said.

Early in 2009 Luke Hodge and Jordan Lewis sustained shoulder injuries requiring reconstructions and Xavier Ellis required major hip surgery.

Russell described these as three to five-month turnaround injuries.

Five or six of Hawthorn’s top 22 were already injured in November and December.

On top of that, the Hawks lost more players with major joint injuries requiring up to six weeks in the first two rounds of the 2009 NAB Cup.

Hawthorn’s preparation for the 2008 Grand Final was hardly affected by injury.

Russell recalled that in the lead-up to the Grand Final, among their top 22 players, only eight games were missed in the last 10 weeks of the season – and two of those games were when players were rested.

This consistency led to a high level of performance.

In contrast, in 2009 the team remained

plagued by injury.“We had an amazing amount of joint

injuries in 2009; we lost 150 games for the season through joint injuries, which is extraordinarily high,” Russell said.

“We averaged between 50 and 60 joint injuries a year for the four years before that.”

Russell said the Hawks had a number of players requiring surgery but added that the club’s threshold for recommending surgery for players was now lower, particularly for hip problems resulting from overload of the pelvic region.

In the past for certain types of hip pathology, fitness staff would “wait and see”, resting players; now staff understand that surgery can be very successful.

Shoulder injuries in particular have increased significantly.

“Over the last two seasons we have tried to implement a lot more dynamic shoulder program to help the players

to withstand the forces of the game,” Russell said.

“Players are tackling more and there are more attempted tackles. A lot of shoulder injuries stem from these.

“Players are stronger, faster, more powerful, the forces are greater so they are hitting harder and landing harder so we have to do more work to reflect those greater forces.”

Russell said the Hawks were forced to promote a lot of inexperienced players up the list in 2009.

“Although it wasn’t fantastic for our club in 2009 we had a number of younger players who were thrust into a position they may not have been ready for physically or mentally but they had to adapt, they had to find a way and we think those experiences will be really beneficial for our group.

“We didn’t plan it that way but the players have now had some amazing high level conditioning playing AFL games, which you just can’t beat.”

The result is that the club now has some 35 players who believe they can play in Round 1, 2010.

Although Russell is not privy to Geelong’s injury statistics, he suggests that the main differences between the teams were the injuries at Hawthorn, the depth and age of their 2009 list and the repercussions of their 2008 success.

“The age of our list and the training age of our list were big influences,” he said.

“With that comes a lower training age and if you then have interruptions to your training with a lower training age they will decondition quicker than the older players with a lot greater training age.

“There’s also the challenge for young men dealing with success. It’s a challenge for any young man; I think our players have learnt a lot about this.”

RUN, HAWKS, RUN: Andrew Russell directs Hawthorn’s pre-season.

‘Players are stronger, faster, more powerful, the forces are greater so they are hitting harder and landing harder.’

An injury-free pre-season is becoming increasingly crucial to a premiership preparation.

Prelude to a premiership