Pinnacle: Sydney Swans fans celebrate winning last year's grand final. Photo: Getty Images
Twenty years ago, no one spoke about culture in football. That it has become a buzzword in the modern game is because of the Swans and Ray McLean, a schoolteacher from Ballarat who started a leadership consultancy in the 1990s.
It was McLean who brought the concept of the ''leadership group'' to the AFL, formalising the kind of player empowerment that David Parkin had experimented with at Carlton around 1995. McLean's ideas formalised the process and changed the game, a fact acknowledged by no less an authority than Parkin himself.
For a start date to the discussion, go back to the winners' dais on grand final day 2005, and Brett Kirk's cry of ''This is for the Bloods!'' Now, the Swans had actually been practising their so-called ''Bloods culture'' for two years by then, under McLean's guidance, but no one on the outside had noticed.
Kirk's statement to the masses unlocked the secret of ''the Bloods''.
The media became inquisitive. Why were the Swans suddenly identifying with a nickname that had been attached to South Melbourne in the distant past?
The Sydney players spoke in generalities about their new code of behaviour, referring to the need for a trademark that they could draw upon. But their reticence only piqued people's interest, especially as the Swans went to another grand final in 2006, built on a manic method of playing, rigid discipline and the best spirit in the competition. Now, club culture was on the radar for discussion throughout the AFL.
''The Bloods'' sounds like a cult, but it is not quite, although Kirk once described it as ''a secret society''. The difference is that you can extract yourself from it, as the likes of ruckman Darren Jolly did in 2009, when family reasons motivated him to return to Melbourne. Jolly was traded to Collingwood for a first-round draft pick and went with the good wishes of the administration and his teammates. As Swans co-captain Jarrad McVeigh said after the 2012 grand final triumph, ''You choose your way in, or you choose your way out.'' That's one of the key phrases of the Bloods culture. But the key to its success is not so much the words and phrases that are used, or the ideas and concepts that are discussed within the corridors of the Sydney Swans Football Club. These are common at other football clubs, scrawled on dressing-room walls and spouted in team meetings year after year. The difference with the Sydney players is they have acted it out, faithfully and consistently, over nearly a decade. They made it work.
Players came and went but the message was passed on. It started with Stuart Maxfield, elected captain in 2003, and lived on in Kirk and Barry Hall, Jude Bolton and Leo Barry, Ben Mathews and their brethren. By the time Kieren Jack and Sam Reid and Lewis Jetta arrived at the club, the message permeated the club. They became Bloods. The fact is that the players believe it works. And if they believe it works, then it does work.
As Paul Kelly had retired at the close of the 2002 season, the Swans needed to appoint a new captain. Tony Lockett, Andrew Dunkley and Wayne Schwass had also retired, taking with them almost 1000 games' worth of experience. It was a confronting time for the football team, especially as it had a new coach in Paul Roos. ''We had a blank canvas,'' McLean says. ''Coffs Harbour was a pivotal few days, because it raised a whole raft of issues. We started to draft what's become, in folklore terms, the Bloods culture. I've got a piece of butcher's paper at home that I've had laminated, so it's protected, and that was it. One of the players has written a few words on there.'' That piece of paper is the manuscript of the culture that is still driving Sydney today, but Ray McLean does not show it to people, or talk much about it. He declined to tell me what was written down, because everyone in the room swore confidentiality that day. But a former player who was there told me that the three words, scrawled next to stars, are:
HARD
DISCIPLINED
RELENTLESS
One of McLean's fundamentals is that a football club needs a trademark. These words are the Swans' trademark. In the season to come, they would be plastered up on a sign in the dressing rooms at the SCG, along with all sorts of subsections underneath - the so-called ''expected behaviours'' that are also part of the Leading Teams lexicon.
At that foundational meeting, the players wrote down a series of ideas and talked about how they wanted to be seen from the outside, then they tossed around the way they wanted to play and behave. But McLean wanted the trademark to have a name. One young player - he has never been identified - piped up with the story that the old South Melbourne club had once been known as ''the Bloods'', or ''the Blood-Stained Angels'', because of the red yolk (and, before that, the red sash) on the club's white guernsey.
This resonated with everyone, for there was a feeling prevalent at the time that the Sydney Swans were losing the connection with their forerunner, South Melbourne. By adopting the name, the connection could be resumed, and respect could be paid to those who came before them. ''We wanted to make sure we had a link to the past, something that had a bit of substance to it,'' recalls Jude Bolton. ''We wanted something that we could hang our hat on, and it's part of our history as well.'' Plus - needless to say - ''the Bloods'' sounded like a good name for a team that wanted to be known for playing relentless, hard football. ''The players wanted it to be almost like a military unit, where you can't just walk in the door,'' recalls McLean. ''You've got to have qualifiers to get into this. At that stage, I had no idea it would resonate like it has, but I had a sense that it meant something. They were really engaged in the conversation. It was something they could hang their hat on as a start point. That's all it is.
''It's no different going into any workplace and asking people and they will come up with words that resonate. But the key point is always going to be action from there.''
The players talked about McLean's ''expected behaviours'', which come under the three keywords. They spoke about notions like ''When it's my turn to go, I go'' and ''Putting the team first'' and ''Being honest with my teammates'' and ''Giving 100 per cent effort, 100 per cent of the time''. Few of these would be any different to the themes that come up in team meetings at other clubs; the more important thing, McLean argues, is how you act them out, and how they are enforced.
The players spoke about their manner of playing, writing down words that indicated how they felt they were viewed. Says McLean: ''The words were not flattering: 'We've lost five or six key players.' I said, 'How would we want it to be?' At that stage, Brisbane were the powerhouse. 'What are Brisbane like?' We did that comparison, then we tore up the Brisbane one and said, 'We create ours.' I was deliberate in tearing it up in front of the group. 'We're not here to work towards them, it's getting past them, and beyond. But let's know what the current competition looks like.'''
Along with Adam Goodes, Hall was arguably the club's most important player between 2003 and 2009, but he gave the Bloods culture its most stern test when his on-field discipline disappeared in 2008. Frustrated by the holding tactics of West Coast's Brent Staker in a round-four match at Homebush, Hall turned and smashed his left fist into the face of his opponent. The incident drew condemnation in the football community and embarrassed the club; Hall was suspended by the AFL Tribunal for seven matches.
Needless to say, Hall's actions did not sit well within the Swans' culture of strong discipline, but he did not learn his lesson. Just three matches into his return, he swiped at Collingwood's Shane Wakelin; he missed but was suspended for another match. The club also handed him an internal suspension that was indefinite. The next year, Hall almost single-handedly lost a close game for the Swans against Hawthorn at the MCG, and when he swung a left hook into the jaw of Adelaide's Ben Rutten as they lay on the turf during their round-13 match at AAMI Stadium, he had played his last game for Sydney. Roos said that Hall was behaving like a person who no longer wanted to play football.
Importantly, Hall's teammates were annoyed, too.
Their response was unusually strident, given that AFL players tend to brush over such matters.
Co-captain Kirk told it like it was: ''I'd trust him with my own kids, but I don't know if he was put in the same situation, I could say he wouldn't do it again. I think the club as a whole, we care about Barry and we support him, but what we're saying is it's unacceptable, he needs to take personal responsibility for his behaviour and it's something we have to work through with him.'' While Hall served his two-match suspension and the club pondered what to do next, he beat the gun and quit.
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