The 2009 season was a disastrous campaign for Hawthorn no matter which way you look at it.

Complacency, injuries or youthful immaturity, there have been countless suggestions posed to explain why the Hawks went from a premiership side in '08 to outside the eight just 12 months later.

But Jarryd Roughead, who was just 21 years of age when the Hawks upset the Cats on that fateful day in 2008, has proposed another idea that led to his side's sudden downfall.

"What came in was the vision of behind the goals came in halfway through 2008," Roughead told FoxFooty.

"So, teams got to actually get every single game and work out what we were doing - they’d work out the zone that Clarko was implementing and where our running patterns were and stuff like this.

"Ross Lyon sat back and copied and, if not, did something better with his zone just by being able to watch ours."

Derm? Dipper? Hodgey? Answer these questions to find out which Hawk you are!  

Roughead said there was a valuable lesson to be taken from the initial stages of this revolutionary equipment.

Clubs were suddenly able to scout their opposition with much greater efficiency, growing an understanding of both their offensive and defensive patterning much more quickly. 

"We didn’t evolve as quickly as other clubs did," Roughead said.

"That’s what probably hurt us in the long run.

"We probably tried to think we could run out the same game plan, year after year, and think it was going to work.

"But we needed to change and we learned pretty quickly that we had to evolve yearly."

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