I vividly recollect Mick Malthouse whenever the journos at a presser would talk about whose missing from ‘the best 22’ MM would always quickly snap back in his usual curt manner and say ‘the best 22 is the 22 taking the field this week’.Pies4shaw wrote:I don't know, qld - but my guess would be yes. What I have noticed is that Collingwood seems to have done very well over the last couple of seasons picking players because they had to. I admired Malthouse's coaching but always dreaded what would happen if we had to make more than two changes to the team - for whatever reason, our team then didn't adjust on the run the way it does now (even though the players Mick was able to put on the park were probably, taken as a whole, "better" than the ones in our McRae sides). Mick frequently built up the debutants but quite a few of them simply didn't live up to the hype.
Psychological support is critical in any competitive setting. It's amazing how much better people perform at whatever they are doing if they think the organization genuinely has their back.
As for Fly not wanting to set up young blokes for failure, I reckon it’s getting harder to avoid that in the current injury crisis. Can’t see how in an ideal world he’d want Will Parker debuting after 5 games in four years (or whatever it is). Credit to our conditioning staff for whatever they’ve done to get him to this point in such a short time.
