Matt Smith shared a winning dressing room with the likes of Thomas Broich, Besart Berisha and Matt McKay – this is how Brisbane Roar won three Grand Finals.
Welcome to the A-League Grand Final – this should be the most special day of all, right?
Actually it should be anything but, at least until the final whistle goes and hopefully you have become a champion. Until that point, this day should be as unremarkable as possible.
If that sounds counterintuitive, I learnt from playing in a series of finals under various coaches – and alongside some big characters – that the more normal you can make grand final day, the greater your chance of success.
It began in 2011, at the end of Ange Postecoglou’s first full season as head coach. We had won the Premiers Plate with the brilliant brand of football he created, and in the end – after some heartstopping drama – we landed the double.
BUY TICKETS TO THE GRAND FINAL HERE!
But from that and subsequent grand finals in 2012 and 2014, I really understood the one word which should be the bedrock of preparing for what could be the biggest game of your life.
That word is consistency – by which I mean consistency of preparation, consistency of behaviour, consistency of performance. The more familiar the context is, the more repetitive your routines are, the more likely you are to produce the football that has carried you to the grand final – instead of freezing on the day.
As a senior player and then as captain, I was very aware of how the older boys could set a vital tone through what we said and how we behaved. Other players will pick up on anything that is out of character, and can begin to feel that this game is different, more pressurised, with more at stake.
As a club, Brisbane Roar would always make sure that the inevitable disruptions of grand final week came early; the media commitments, the commercial things we had to do, fan opportunities. In 2011 Ange told us explicitly – sort your friends and family tickets, speak to relatives who want to wish you luck etc, get all of that done at the start of the week. Don’t be trying to arrange five more tickets on the day of the grand final. And then once all that is out of the way, everybody works hard to make the atmosphere as familiar as possible.
If that sounds obvious, in some ways you’re pulling against human nature. A few days before a grand final you’re desperate not to get injured – so instinctively you might pull out of a tackle, or jog rather than sprint a lap. But everyone around you sees that, and suddenly things are different.
At Brisbane we usually had conditioning day on a Wednesday, so you can be sure that would be the same in a finals week. The analysis sessions would be the same length as normal, the warm-up drills utterly familiar.
The point is that you know it’s a Grand Final, everybody does, and there will be a buzz in the air; but these familiar patterns mean it’s more likely that you can that all in your stride.
Funnily enough I always had more nerves in a semi-final week; you were desperate not to miss out on the opportunity of playing in the actual Grand Final. And we always found ways of setting ourselves targets, to concentrate the mind; in 2011 for instance it was winning our first title, in 2012 it was maintaining that crazy unbeaten run. One year, Mass Murdocca stood up at training and talked to us about moments in his career and what he wanted to remember and achieve.
On game day, the dressing room is full of emotion; that’s unavoidable. But Thomas Broich would often read a book before a game, so to see him in there staring at the pages was another signal of normality.
Some players do want to embrace the occasion, be driven by it. Players like Besart Berisha and Matt McKay were passionate and intense, lifted by the occasion.
That in itself is reassuring as the games unfold, because you know that they will drive themselves and others right to the end. We never scored a goal in three Grand Finals before the 82nd minute. In all three we were losing. And we won all three, thanks to the extraordinary feats of some amazing footballers.
I was proud of them and proud of myself, proud of what we built collectively.
