Why Tigers need to keep a lid on itThe West Australian
June 8, 2012The lid. Football clubs desperately try to clamp it on and bolt it down to ward off the mental ravages of a euphoric fan base trying its best to blast the thing off.
Like Richmond.
There is no greater level of hysteria than when the army of Tiger fans start to roar. When they are on the up, like they appear to be now after three decades without a premiership, they celebrate each go-ahead goal like a winning kick in a grand final.
Their club song becomes infectious in the extreme. Even non-fans are seduced into screaming "yellow and black" that punctuates the second last line of the song.
Richmond are 10th with five wins from 10 games and a battle with Fremantle ahead at the MCG tomorrow.
It seems hardly the predicament of a premiership favourite, (in fact they are on Player's seventh line of betting at $15), but already the vacuum seal is under pressure.
The Tigers trumpeted their 50,000th member yesterday as the axles on the bandwagon start to buckle. It eclipsed last year's record of 47,625 members.
Coach Damien Hardwick has sat, with all his weight, on the lid as the Tigers carved out credibility-building wins over Hawthorn and St Kilda in the past fortnight.
The club even wheeled out star midfielder Brett Deledio earlier this week. He is known to his teammates as Lids and he predictably sang Hardwick's song in trying to keep the lid stuck tight.
Prominent WA sports psychologist Neil McLean, who is preparing to head to London with the Australian Olympic hockey team, said although the lid was not a term used often in his field, its connotations presented an important part of his work.
The UWA lecturer said that in elite sport, dealing with the ebullience of winning was every bit as important as the deconstruction of a loss.
A proven past master of lid work, triple premiership coach Mick Malthouse, knows well the pressure Hardwick, Deledio and the rest of the Tigers are confronting and the theatre that comes with it.
Despite coaching West Coast and Collingwood to flags, the enormity of being a Richmond premiership player in 1980 has Malthouse eternally aligned with the club. He believes unity in thought protects performance.
He said a clinically crafted strategy was vital from the coach and football operations manager, through the club's leadership group and media manager.
"It's most important inside," Malthouse said. "There's no use having a loose mouth or loose lips. There's no use me, as coach, wanting something and then someone else gets interviewed and says things contrary to us.
"You want your members to see the positivity, but you don't want them to see it's gone to your head, and that can be a fine line.
"You have to be as cool and confident as you possibly can, while keeping things in the confines of your football club, and still put enough out there for people to know that you're switched on.
"Best-laid plans with some players are fantastic until they open their trap. You want your messages coming through players who can, fundamentally, take the heat regardless of what sort of questions they are asked.
"When it came to a Nick Maxwell, a Scott Pendlebury, a Luke Ball and that type of player, you just knew that what you'd said to them was what you were going to get."
Richmond, with momentum, could be a compelling beast on and off the field, Malthouse said.
"It's a sleeping giant, a real sleeping giant," he said. "Most of it now is in their own hands. They've created a unique opportunity that's been presented because of really good football.
"It can only tumble if they choose to take the wrong path."
McLean, who worked with Malthouse at West Coast during their premiership years of 1992 and 1994 and then at Fremantle for their 2003 and 2006 finals campaigns, said the natural tendencies for the human mind to embrace excitement was one of the biggest threats to the lid.
"The lid is comprised of a whole lot of little things; it's just the cliche that covers them," McLean said. "It captures a broad perspective, but to really understand what is happening with it you need to go underneath it to find out the dangers of being in the situation and why you need to keep the lid on.
"I'm not sure coaches are necessarily sure why, sometimes, they're trying to do it. They just know they don't want their players to get too excited.
"Do you slacken off in the intensity of your preparation, do you start thinking too much about the outcome, do you get carried away with the excitement and adrenaline and want to do things that are really a bit outside your scope or role?
"The danger of all of those are that they erode your calm task focus, which is much more about what most people are looking for.
"It's a bit like making a birdie and then over-hitting your drive on your next hole because you're so excited about what you've done that you extend yourself rather than just hitting the drive that's required for that hole at that time.
"One performance has the capacity to affect or influence a second performance and it's that sequence that coaches, understandably, get a little bit concerned about ... that the excitement that comes with winning takes people's minds off the task at hand.
"People either get carried away with the excitement and want to go outside the roles they might have been playing before because it's all a bit intoxicating and they all want a part of it, or they start expecting success because of the excitement rather than working through the processes that will get them there.
"It's often why you see in the best of three, five or seven series in basketball, for example, that the team that wins the first game often has a degree of comfort that can get in the road.
"The lid is about getting ahead of yourself, so it's more about staying in the present and what the moment's task is."
McLean said the loss of intensity in a tight, open season like this one could prove fatal for a team's prospects. A key tool in keeping the minds of athletes on a more even keel was to dissect wins as thoroughly as losses.
"In the Australian hockey team at the moment, we talk about needing to learn as much from wins as from losses," he said.
"When you have a win, do you analyse your performances effectively? I've been kicking around elite-level sport for a couple of decades and there's no doubt that when you have a loss, everybody tends to bring a much more fine-grained analysis of what went wrong and what needed to be done.
"The ludicrous thing is that you can win by two points and everybody is comfortable with that and they don't look at the performance as if they would if they lost by five points.
"When you lose, the hurt of the loss drives the intensity of the next preparation, while the comfort of a win can, in fact, blur or dilute the intensity of the next preparation.
"But what you don't want to do is lose the enthusiasm and buzz and the positives that come from winning. I don't think anyone has the absolute answer to it, but what you try and do is just keep reminding them of things that are good and what made them good.
"It's a very strong emphasis on the tasks that give rise to the outcomes rather than the outcomes themselves. That's almost a mantra of sports psychology and we have to try and find as many ways to say that as possible so that it doesn't get boring.
"But it's always essentially the same message. I remember Mick (Malthouse) once said to me that his job as a coach was to have the players believe that they could win, but to be sure they were aware of what they had to do to make that happen."
Richmond utility player Daniel Jackson this week reached for sport's tried-and-true cliche in his bid to add more glue to Hardwick and Deledio's lid. His words hailed straight from the McLean mantra.
"We sort of target every week and take it one week at a time," he said.
"Everyone says that in football, but that's exactly what we're doing. So now that we've won a couple of big games we're not getting ahead of ourselves.
"People keep asking us 'is the lid off', but no, no, it's just doing what we need to do and that's what Dimma (Hardwick) is really good at doing. It's about processes.
"We know what we have to do out on the field and if we stick to it, we'll get the result. What's good now is that we can really get some belief out of being able to knock off some of the top sides by sticking to those exact structures.
"It just gives us confidence going forward, it gives you momentum. When you've got that, you're hard to stop.
"Dimma's a realist, he always reminds us that we haven't achieved anything yet … we've got so much more to prove."
"You have to be as cool and confident as you possibly can, while keeping things in the confines of your football club, and still put enough out there for people to know you're switched on."
*Mick Malthouse * on the Richmond situation
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/sport/a/-/afl/13901373/why-tigers-need-to-keep-a-lid-on-it/
