Eels Blogs

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/exclusive-book-extract-the-rise-and-rise-of-the-bloods-brothers-how-the-sydney-swans-dominated-a-decade-of-afl/story-fni0cx12-1226685190465

I have always thought that the Eels problems have not just been on the field but throughout the whole club, A culture issue that needs to be addressed.

We can change Managers, Coaches, Players or Admin staff but unless the issue of culture has a whole is addressed I fear that we will just keep bashing away at brick walls with our heads and continue with more 3 wins a season situations

Read the article it might expain this better than I can, but I have dealt with this type of issue through work in the past and understand that unless the "Company" culture is ammended things become extremely hard when trying to take things forward.

Be great to get some opinions on this?

AT the start of the 2005 season the Sydney Swans had not won a premiership in 72 years. Since then they have picked up two titles.
The Rise of the Swans takes a look into the heart of the club to see what has changed and what has inspired this turnaround.
Twenty years ago, no one spoke about culture in football. That it has become a buzzword in the modern game is because of the Sydney Swans and Ray McLean, a schoolteacher from Ballarat, in central Victoria, 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 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 commonplace at other football clubs, scrawled on dressing-room walls and spouted in team meetings year after year. The difference with the Sydney players is that 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, who was 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. McLean started all this acting alone, but the Leading Teams organisation he set up some years later with friend Kraig Grime now has a nice office in Jolimont, in the shadow of the MCG, and a dozen staff. Leading Teams was at Geelong through that club’s greatest era, when it won the 2007, 2009 and 2011 premierships. In 2013 McLean’s people will be at Sydney, Fremantle and Collingwood, Nathan Buckley having called them back into the fold after a previous, difficult relationship under Mick Malthouse’s coaching. Several other clubs that have previously used McLean’s model consult with the company on an ongoing basis. Leading Teams has been at Adelaide (with Neil Craig), at Melbourne and at the Western Bulldogs. Of the past eight premiership teams since 2005, only one (West Coast in 2006) did not consult with the company at some point.
McLean is a secondary schoolteacher by vocation, who played unremarkable football in his hometown of Donald, in the central Victorian wheat belt, around 30 years ago. In the 1980s he went to Adelaide to work as an educator in the armed services, and it was there that he formed the kernel of his ideas about leadership in group situations. Around 1991, he made contact with Ray Stewart, then coach of the Central Districts Football Club in the South Australian National Football League (SANFL), and they formed a union that helped turn the fortunes of the downtrodden Bulldogs around. Stewart broke Centrals’ finals drought soon after, and the club quickly became regular finalists. In 2000 they won the premiership, and in recent years they have become the dominant force in the SANFL. ‘I was just fortunate that Alan Stewart was brave enough to say, “We need to strip this back,”’ McLean says.
Invigorated by a measure of success at Centrals, McLean wrote to St Kilda’s coach, Stan Alves, in 1994. He was still living in Adelaide but was watching the Saints, who would finish 13th that season, Alves’ first at Moorabbin. McLean saw in St Kilda a club that was ‘crying out’ for his ideas.
As it happens, Alves was at his wits’ end. ‘The St Kilda footy club didn’t have a culture conducive with success,’ he said in a speech at a 20- year tribute dinner for Ray McLean in 2012. ‘Having been associated with a great era at North Melbourne, I came to realise that in the great success stories, everybody’s united. St Kilda were a divided club. The football club and the social club were at war. Football wasn’t a priority, the playing group wasn’t a priority.
‘It was, “How are we going to survive?” When I sat down and talked to the playing group it became patently obvious that these kids had been indoctrinated with the idea that they didn’t have what it would take to be successful. One of them said, “Stan, why are you telling us this? We haven’t got the cattle.” This was a club that didn’t understand team success. There were two groups of people: the so-called superstars had a set of rules for them, and [there was] a set of rules for others.’
At the time, St Kilda had some top-end talent in Robert Harvey, Stewart Loewe, Nathan Burke and Nicky Winmar – sometimes called ‘the Big Four’ – but Alves believed everything revolved around them, that there was too much focus on the top end. He was sold on McLean’s ideas of spreading the leadership load, having a trademark and encouraging open communication within the group; getting the St Kilda Football Club to come along with him, however, was another matter.
‘I spoke to the board and said, “This is what we’re going to do, it’s going to be fantastic.” They said, “We’re not having any charlatans in here! We don’t want witch doctors. Can’t you coach? Get out and do the job yourself.”’
So Alves started talking with McLean privately and making use of some of his ideas. He wrote three words on the whiteboard at Moorabbin: belief, trust, faith. He started asking himself questions and challenging his players, encouraging them to challenge each other with honest dialogue.
The following season, 1995, the board relented and allowed McLean to make his pitch. McLean still remembers it: ‘I think they wanted to hear how I could fix the players,’ he recalls. ‘I came with a clear intent to show them that “this is a bigger problem than players”. I wanted them to understand that without their involvement, without addressing issues around core values and culture, all we were going to do is tinker around the edges.’
St Kilda’s board backed Alves and allowed McLean to run his program at the club in 1995. It took two years to have a positive impact on the field, but in 1997 St Kilda went all the way to the Grand Final for the first time in a quarter of a century. The Saints lost to Adelaide – a fact McLean still regrets, for he believes that Alves would have won much more credit as an outstanding football coach had the result been different. As it happened, St Kilda sacked him just one year on. ‘He had a few flaws and he would say that,’ says McLean. ‘His time came and went, and because it was St Kilda and because it was without a premiership, they were seen as gimmicks or fashions that had passed.’ As for St Kilda, the club was never convinced. It was an idea that was literally ahead of its time.
McLean ploughed on, although he had moments when he contemplated going back to teaching; his wife, Sally, was instrumental in ensuring that he stuck with his ideas. Around 1999, the Collingwood coach, Tony Shaw, asked him to help at that club; when Shaw was sacked, his replacement, Mick Malthouse, employed McLean for two more years at the club.
Overall, however, Malthouse was not a fan of many of McLean’s ideas.
Certainly, he adopted the leadership group concept that was spreading quickly through the AFL’s clubs, but by the end of 2002 both men knew that they had come to a fork in the road.
‘We didn’t see eye-to-eye on a number of things,’ says McLean. ‘The reality was I was there for three years, he used the leadership group to consult with. He did pick the things that he wanted, and that’s okay. It was a good thing for me that we got to the end of the road. I said, “I’m really superfluous to needs now,” and then I met up with Paul Roos at the airport.’
That chance meeting, at a baggage carousel at Tullamarine during the finals series of 2002, was the genesis of the Bloods culture. Roos and McLean had crossed paths before, possibly at a coaching seminar, although they did not know each other well. Roos, who was about to be appointed coach of the Swans after Rodney Eade’s mid-season resignation, had come to Melbourne with a group of Sydney’s younger players, including a fledgling Ryan O’Keefe, to immerse them in the unique atmosphere of Melbourne during the finals, to give them a taste, so to speak. McLean was arriving home from somewhere else. They caught each other’s attention and said hello. McLean told Roos that he was working at Collingwood, and Roos was interested. ‘He said, “If I get the job, I wouldn’t mind having a chat,”’ recalls McLean. ‘But I didn’t think much more of it.’
Of course, Roos was appointed head coach on a three-year deal. He was open-minded and not ‘old-school’. Some of McLean’s ideas, like player empowerment, were part of his own philosophy. Another important factor was that Roos hired Peter Jonas as his assistant coach, and Jonas had been a Central Districts player during McLean’s time in Adelaide. He knew McLean’s work.
Soon after Roos’ appointment, he asked McLean to pitch to Sydney’s board, and they were swayed. ‘I was initially wary of outsourcing the motivational part of coaching,’ says Richard Colless. ‘But I was pretty quickly sold on it.’ Early in the new year, when the players were sent to Coffs Harbour for their annual training camp, they met McLean for the first time.

The Rise Of the Swans . A decade of success 2003 - 2012 Martin
The Rise of the Swans by Martin Blake (published by Michael Joseph)