We’ve had a really good training block probably for the first time since this current coaching group has been involved with the club. We made a fair few bold decisions about our recruiting [strategy] and brought in guys like Dowler, Muston, Ellis, Thorp, who we knew in their first 12 months, either through school commitments or injury, weren’t going to make too much of a contribution. But we thought they could, very much, be long-term players for our footy club and as a result of that it’s taken some time. So this is the first pre-season where many of that group of players has actually been able to complete the bulk of the pre-season.

From that perspective, all you can control at this point of the year is the conditioning of your playing group and the volume of training they get. As of round one, unless we have hiccups in the next two to three weeks – which is likely I might add – we should have nearly every player on our list available to play.

The guys who have prepared for the season have had a really, really good training block and a really good volume of training and they’re raring to go, so hopefully that will give us a greater dilemma going into games in terms of selection, a greater availability of players, give us more depth at Box Hill. The Box Hill side will hopefully perform a little bit better than what they have and put more pressure on some of the senior guys for senior places.  

So those young players you mentioned is where your improvement is going to come from this season?

I think that’s fair to say. We’ve got six or seven guys who were drafted in the first or second round to our club over the course of the last three drafts. Renouf, Muston, Bailey, Ellis, Thorp, Rioli … all those players have hardly even scratched the surface in terms of the contribution they’ve made at AFL level; some of them haven’t even played a game as yet.

When we drafted those lads, we drafted some of them injured or with 12 months left in school, but we thought they were going to be long-term players for us, so we’re really excited those guys are now starting to get their bodies to the stage that they can really try to put some pressure on the guys in the senior side for games.

When we get those guys up and going and playing some footy - that’s where our improvement as a club will come from I’m sure.

Chatting to Beau Muston recently in Tassie, he certainly gave the impression he’s ready to have a huge crack this year.

Yeah, well, that whole group, Jarryd Morton’s another one … Garry Moss … they’re guys that are highly-rated at the club. But it’s such a demanding game; we place such enormous demands on these lads at 17, 18 or 19 years of age, to come into a system and be taken away from family and friends in a lot of cases.

It’s very, very demanding and so for the vast majority of players it takes them two to three years of being indoctrinated into the system for them to get a full appreciation of what’s required to play. We try to be as patient as we possibly can in that environment because if we are patient and do allow their bodies to grow then they’ll be long-term players for us.

You mentioned getting some years into those kids. Have you got your playing list roughly where you want it now in terms of that preferred profile or model for success?

We’ve worked really hard over the last three years after we identified at the end of 2004, as harsh as that was, that we weren’t going to deliver the club it’s 10th premiership with that group of players.

We had to make some really hard calls on, in some cases, some really decorated Hawthorn people like Nick Holland and Mark Graham, who had been such a big part of the fabric of the club for a long period of time. Rightly or wrongly, our view at the time was that they were going to struggle to participate in Hawthorn’s next premiership so we had to bring in a lot of young kids.

We had a really heavy focus on trying to fix up the spine of our club because we knew that Hay, Barker, Holland, Graham, Benny Dixon …were going to fall out of our side sooner rather than later and we needed to correct the spine of our club. We needed to recruit guys like Franklin and Roughead and Gilham and Murphy and these sorts of blokes … Birchall … and we’ve got a really good group of players [now].

We still got a little bit of work to do in terms of the structure of our list, but we’ve worked really hard over the past three years to put in the types of players that we think can go on and deliver our club its 10th premiership.

The popular view is that Hawthorn’s premiership window is open; is that a theory to which you subscribe?

We’ve been delighted with our progress and we don’t want to put any ceiling on the progress of our group. We’re going to be going as hard as we possibly can this year, there’s no doubt about that, but history will tell you that it takes a lot longer than the three years we’ve been going about it.

We want to play finals again, but while I’ve never been one, too often, to look back in history or to use that as a model; in a lot of cases you can’t disrespect what’s happened before you in terms of the historical reasons for success.

So many [premierships] have got to do with having a stable administration, a stable playing group, a group of players who have come into the club over a similar time-frame together, have got a really good brotherhood and a real appetite for success as that group. They need, in a lot of cases, on average, across the 22 that might play in your premiership side, seven years of AFL experience.

We’re still the second or third youngest team in the competition. Now, there’s also been evidence littered throughout the course of history of young teams actually saluting and we’re hoping to be one of those. But we’re also realistic enough to understand that the vast majority of sides have been built over a period of time.

Port Adelaide came into the competition in the mid-to-late 90s and didn’t salute until 2004. Geelong under Bomber [Mark Thompson], Frank Costa and Brian Cook’s administration, commenced their whole model of bringing in the type of players that they thought could deliver Geelong’s elusive flag … back in ’99 and they saluted in 2007. Along the way they had plenty of hurdles they had to overcome and none more significant than at the end of 2006, but they stayed stable as a club and delivered success 12 months later. That’s the most important thing to look at; just keeping everything in perspective.

Having said that, we’re doing everything we possibly can to ensure that we give our players and our supporters every chance of delivering our 10th flag as quickly as possible.    

There is a high level of excitement and expectation among Hawthorn supporters leading into this campaign; do you try to curb that or play it down? 

No, [it’s understandable] on the back of our progress over the past 12 months in particular. We knew within our football club that we were making significant progress in ’05 and ’06, but our win-loss ratio wasn’t necessarily suggesting that. But we were making progress as a club and it just seemed like it was all of a sudden, to the outside football world, that we’d made some progress.

It’s important for our supporters to be excited with the progress that we’ve made because we’d like to think that we'll continue to make progress and hopefully that will mean a step up in ladder positions this year. We’ll contest some more finals and, if all goes well, to go deep into the finals.

But the harsh reality of the competition is that it’s very difficult; just because you’ve played finals the year before doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to do it again. There are so many variables that can influence that, but we’re excited; big crowds, big membership, people talking about our club in a positive fashion is a really good thing for our football club.

It has generated enormous hype and activity down in Tasmania as part of our major sponsorship as well as the hype around the south-eastern part of Melbourne and the amount of brown and gold you see around this region now.

It’s really exciting, so we don’t want to harness that excitement of our supporters and fans in any way whatsoever.

Check back next week for parts two and three of our exclusive interview.