HAWTHORN coach Alastair Clarkson is confident he now has the game plan to move his side back to the front of the pack after admitting the game passed the Hawks by in the wake of their 2008 premiership win.

In a candid interview, Clarkson said he and his coaching staff had spent the pre-season retooling a game plan that had already received a significant makeover after a horror start to the 2010 season.

The coach admitted the overhaul became necessary after the competition stole a march on his club while the evolution of the game was shrouded by Hawthorn's high injury toll during 2009.

"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," Clarkson said.

"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 … 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."

After a comfortable round one win over Melbourne last year, the Hawks went on a six-game losing skid that put their finals aspirations on shaky ground following on from a disappointing 2009 season that saw them finish outside the eight.

While the alterations made to the team's approach had only been subtle, they were successful enough to see the Hawks finish the season strongly.

They played an elimination final against Fremantle which they lost, but Clarkson is confident a strong pre-season campaign has his club poised to advance further this year.

"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," he said.

"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 feel we're in a much better position going into 2011 to really compete hard and hopefully make the pointy end of September."