In an exclusive interview, Clarkson speaks to afl.com.au about why his side fell behind the rest of the competition after winning the 2008 flag, his retooled game plan and his hopes for the side in 2011.
The coach also reveals:
- Why he thinks the Pies need to be wary of a premiership hangover
- How captain Luke Hodge's recovery from an Achilles injury is progressing
- Ruckman Max Bailey's current status as he comes to grips with knee swelling
- The thinking behind cutting ties with Leading Teams to formulate their own leadership structure
- Why he feels the club can improve on its seventh-placed finish in 2009
If it's on player availability, then we're in a really good position. We haven't been as healthy as this going into a season for some time or probably in all the time that I've been here, so that's exciting.
Our players are fit, they've had a really good block of training and we've made a fair adjustment to a lot of things that we've done. We really believe we're well positioned to have a crack in 2011.
The Blues have worked on their aggression and the Saints have worked on a taller forward line - has there been a particular theme to your pre-season?
There are a number of themes that have run through it, but our greatest emphasis has been to get back up with the better sides in the competition in regard to the way the game is played.
For a fair period, we thought we were the pioneers in a lot of stuff in 2007 and 2008 that allowed us to win the flag at the end of that year. For a fair period of time after that, we thought the methodology that we used in '07 and '08 was going to hold us in pretty good stead.
Unfortunately for us, if the game had been telling us otherwise because of the way we performed, it would have been easy to make some adjustments to the way that we went about it.
But because we had so many injuries for a fair portion of 2009 with Croad missing a lot, Campbell missing a lot, Dew missing a fair amount of footy, Gilham, Ladson, Young [and so on], it really masked a lot of changes that were going on in the game that we thought were just personnel driven when, in actual fact, they were game plan and method driven.
It took us a long time to realise that and, in actual fact, we still trained over 2009 and 2010 with similar sorts of principles that we saluted with in 2008. We came to a pretty rude awakening in about round five or six last year that those methods were no longer going to be successful with the way that the game was being played.
We instigated some changes and some were as simple as interchanging and rotating more to keep our players fresher and others were subtle changes in how we moved the ball and defended the opposition's movement of the ball.
We feel we're in a much better position going into 2011 to really compete hard and hopefully make the pointy end of September.
The skipper hasn't made an appearance in a pre-season game just yet. How's he tracking?
A: He's had a niggling Achilles for probably five or six weeks that we thought was just going to be a week off the track, but tendons are very volatile things. Sometimes they settle very quickly and sometimes they just grumble along. Hodgey, unfortunately, has had one that's just grumbled along.
We're reasonably certain that he's going to play in round one, but the difficulty with that, is that he's probably going to have only played maybe a Box Hill practice match before it. He may play this week, but [that is] probably more unlikely than likely. If he plays a game it will probably only be a Box Hill trial game leading into round one.
That's not the ideal preparation, but he's such a fierce competitor that as long as he's available for round one, then we'll take him in with no preparation at all. He's the captain of our club, he's a furious competitor, he's our best and fairest winner and he's a quality bloke, so we want him out there as often as we can have him.
Max Bailey - I think everyone wishes him a turn of good luck - how's he going? He played in that intra-club game but we haven't seen him since.
The difficulty with him is with the damage he's done to his knees over the journey is he's always going to have some post-training or post-game swelling. We're now getting to the situation where we need to adjust to life where there's going to be swelling in his knee [regularly].
I don't think swelling is a great thing. It's probably an indication that something's not quite right, but because Max has had troubles with his knees, it's just got to be about managing that swelling. At what point can he still train? We've taken the view that as soon as there's been any swelling at all, we'd back him off from his training, but we probably need to modify that a little bit to say 'Well, how can we manage it where he can still train and compete when there's still very, very minor swelling in his knee?'
We'll embark on that path over the next four to six weeks, but we're expecting he might play some more game time, practice match-wise, as soon as this weekend.
We're delighted that he's hung in there and we're just hoping that the curse that's struck him for the best part of four years will finally release itself this year because no one deserves an opportunity more than he does. It's not just Hawthorn supporters that think that - no one in the competition likes to see someone struck down like Max has [been]. Hopefully he gets a good run at it for five or six years.
There is a lot of optimism around the Hawks - you're a lot of punter's tips to go further into the finals series this year - what gives you reason for optimism ahead of this season?
I think it's our block of training that we've had. We're really confident with some of the changes that we've made to the way that we want to play, but also the conditioning that's been put together by Andrew Russell, who's been doing it for six or seven years now at the Hawks and previous to that, at Port Adelaide and Essendon. He's a very experienced campaigner and very good at his craft, so our players are well positioned but we've also recruited particularly well for our needs we feel.
We've brought in David Hale, really, on the back of not being absolutely certain whether Max is going to get up or not and we think Haley's got his best four or five years of footy ahead of him.
We really like his experience along with the flexibility that Cameron Bruce brings to the Hawks as well. We think that he can play for another two or three years. Kyle Cheney is another guy who perhaps didn't get the opportunities at Melbourne that we thought he could have had. We think that he could be a great little player for our club.
Then we've recruited some good young lads, but also a couple of mature-aged guys in Puopolo and Smith, who have been around for some time playing state league footy and country footy and we think they're well positioned to emerge pretty early this season and add some value to our side.
With that optimism comes expectation of course - does that create a heightened sense of pressure for you?
Not really. There couldn't be any greater sense of expectation [created] than winning a flag in 2008 and the expectation of the whole footy world and indeed our club and those within the club, who obviously had the view that if we've won it in 2008 with a reasonably young group, [we can win it again].
I think we went into 2009 with the youngest list in the competition on the back of a 2008 victory and I don't think that had ever been done before. Obviously, that meant that if we'd won it with a pretty young group, then this is just going to continue to happen and that will be a significant challenge for the Pies this year. They've got a young group, they've just saluted last year and everyone just thinks it's going to happen again but it takes a lot of hard work to get to a finals series and certainly to the top four and then a lot more work to actually win a grand final.
We believe that that expectation and pressure is there every year no matter what. It's just a part of the game that you need to cope with as you go through.
You've changed things up right at the top with Hodgey, but you've also changed things up with the way you go about your leadership structures as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what you hope to achieve with it?
We'd had the Leading Teams model for six years at our footy club and that had served us really well, but it probably came to a stage where the Leading Teams model was tired of us and we'd tired of it.
I think that's sort of a natural thing in a footy club from time to time, particularly with those types of programs. Craig Grimes and his group had done a great job, but we just felt that we needed to change it up a little bit.
We've put in place a system this year where we wanted to address the development needs of our whole playing group in terms of their leadership rather than more specifically a group of six or seven guys that had probably been the more significant focus for us in the last little while.
Chris Fagan has probably been the architect of that leadership program. It's only very, very early days, it is a little bit different, but we're hopeful some key players will emerge for us that will really add value to our side this year.
Just in closing, Clarko, do you have a message you'd like to convey to Hawks supporters ahead of the season?
We've got a large number of them. We've had over 50,000 members at our footy club over the last two years and we're obviously hoping to better that record again in 2011.
We just feel [optimistic] with our group, with the way we've recruited, the way that we've adjusted to the way the game is played, and the four or five-month [training] block, that we've got a lot of players available, fit, hungry and ready to play.
I think it's going to be a really exciting year for our footy club so [I'd like] for all our supporters to join up and get on the journey [because] I reckon it's going to be a great ride throughout 2011.
