Courtesy of the Gold Coast Bulletin- 11 May 2010
True Bluey- AFL with Guy McKenna
IT was very interesting to hear a comment from Brownlow medallist and now TV commentator Gerard
Healy at the weekend. He was providing special comments on the Sunday AFL clash between Adelaide and Richmond, who were both winless heading into the game at AAMI Stadium.
For those who missed it, it was a tight match until the final term when Adelaide kicked away to win by 50 points after eight final-quarter goals. I was at home doing some work and in the background I heard Healy put a question to Glen Jakovich: "Explain to me why Richmond have fallen away." It made me think that is where we at the Gold Coast Football Club are currently at. What I mean by that is we have the under-21s playing the under-25s at the moment.
For example, if you talk about the size of fuel tanks then we are playing sides with a 10-litre fuel tank. We have an 8L fuel tank so at some stage we won't be able to hang on. But I couldn't be happier with how we are progressing. From a win-loss side of things, we have only one draw to our name. And from the outside it might took like doom and gloom. But I just can't stress enough how impressed I am with the physical development of these boys.
It is about getting these boys to gel as a team and we are rotating four or five boys a game, which makes it difficult. And heading into the AFL season next year, we are going to turn over another 45 per cent of the list as well. All those challenges are fantastic and internally we are really happy with where we are at. The match against Bendigo at the weekend was on the ABC in Victoria and we got a great comment from Phil Cleary and David Rhys-Jones. They were saying that if you were an uncontracted AFL player and you saw the Gold Coast playing, you would want to come and play here.
That was the first time they would have seen us so it just says something about how our boys are going about it. We are not winning at the moment but we are having a serious crack. Many young athletes, for example, are conditioned to run 800m and we are getting them to run 1500m. With the conditioning work Andrew Weller has been doing, we can't go and train them at 1500m straight. The result of that would be injuries so we have been measured and what we have tried to do is get them up to say 1300m, and as these boys mature, hopefully we can pinch another 200m as the season goes on. It is quite confronting when seven boys cramp in the first round, which was unheard of. Those numbers are dwindling because they are getting conditioned to wrestling gorillas on the weekend. With the changes we are making, we think our second half of the season will be better than our first.
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