THE PRE-SEASON p33-34

When the squad assembled for training on Friday, February 11, the temperature was 38 degrees (100.5°F).
“There will be no concessions to the heat tonight!” Barassi told the players defiantly. “Heat is just another thing we learn to cope with. If we can’t beat the heat, how are we going to beat Hawthorn? They’ll put you under more pressure than the heat. So don’t whine like a pack of girls about the weather. We’re not slackening off just because it’s hot. If any of you get sick, or feel giddy, see me personally before you leave the ground for a spell. But nobody’s going to get away with being a weak sister and doing it easy tonight! We’re not going to let the heat beat us!”
This mini-oration, edged with a driven fanaticism, jolted the memory back to Brian Donleavy in Beau Geste, George C. Scott in Patton and even Ahab in Moby Dick. The viciousness of the late afternoon heat seemed to stir something mildly daemonic within Barassi. It challenged him and, confronted by challenge, there was only one way Ron Barassi could react – win!
Five of the squad still hadn’t completed the obligatory 3600-metre run in 15 minutes and Barassi watched them gasp and sweat their way around the oval, their bare shoulders and backs shining like polished metal under the raging sun. He checked Taggart on how they were running for time, and Taggart told him only John Byrne had a chance of passing. “If he holds this pace over the final two laps, he’ll just make it,” Taggart said. Hearing this, Barassi instructed Jimmy Carter (who he affectionately called the ‘Show Pony’ because of his immaculate football gear) to run the final laps with Byrne, pacemaking to ensure his speed didn’t drop. From the sidelines, the waiting players gave Byrne an encouraging shout as Carter fell into stride with him and they began the last 800 metres.
Coming up to the checkpoint for the last time, Byrne only had to maintain his present speed to pass. Carter loped along half a stride in front of him to keep the pressure on, and the 50 players waiting to begin training roared in chorus to give him heart: “Come on, Johnnie! … You’re gonna do it! … Keep it up! … Harder now! … Hang in there, Johnnie!” A group of them even took off, running inside the markers, trying to spur him into making a final, supreme effort over the last few hundred metres. Carter lengthened his stride, but Byrne couldn’t accelerate. Taggart began the countdown for time and everyone on the oval – players and officials – roared as Byrne, his face a grotesque mask of pain, lurched over the line a split second before time elapsed.
On the far side of the oval, Adrian Gallagher hung over the boundary fence, vomiting copiously. He was the first of many to vomit in the hours ahead.
Now that full-powered kicking was allowed, the warm-up included additional stretching exercises for the legs and, as the players groaned their way through the seemingly endless conditioning work, Barassi suddenly walked among them and said loudly: “Right now, you’re probably asking yourselves, ‘Why am I doing this?’” At least 30 voices concurred. “Well, remember this,” Barassi answered, “the players in 11 other clubs are asking themselves the same question … right now! They’re all forcing themselves through the same pain as you are. So don’t give in. Don’t let it beat you, because as sure as hell they won’t let it beat them!”
Picking up Barassi’s tone, Taggart kept yelling at the squad through the final, almost unendurable, seconds of each testing exercise: “Don’t give it away … Don’t be the first to give in! … Think about it! … Think about it! … Don’t let it beat you! … Think about it!” Then, at a point just before the most resolute wills cracked, he called: “Rest!” and the players slumped to the ground as if mortally struck by machine-gun fire.

THE PRE-SEASON p43-44

And there was ‘the night of the big bump’ when Kekovich reminded Barassi how brutally he, Kekovich, dealt with anyone frustrating his attempt to gain possession of the ball. Barassi had split the squad into two groups, one under John Dugdale and the other under himself, to practise rapid handpassing on the run.
Each group of 30 players divided into 15 to an end, 30 metres apart. Practice began with one player from each end sprinting towards the other, one carrying the ball while the other yelled for a handpass. As soon as the ball was passed, the receiver snapped it to the next oncoming player. This receiver, in turn, handpassed to the next player racing towards him. After despatching the ball, the players went to the end of the waiting queue until their next turn to sprint and receive and pass. Working 15 to an end, there was barely more than a few seconds’ break between each sprint.
Barassi and Dugdale centred themselves between the two ends of players – observing, encouraging and abusing the speed and precision of the passes. The ideal was to receive the ball and handpass it forward in an almost simultaneous action, too fast for an opponent to intercept or smother. And Barassi kept up an almost constant scream of reprimands: “Too slow ... too slow ... too slow!” as the players flashed past him. At times, he sounded like a gramophone needle stuck in one groove of a rapidly spinning record.
Left alone, the players would have developed an almost clockwork rhythm within minutes. But Barassi’s gadfly activities in the middle made everything unpredictable. He might let two or three passes go without making a distracting move, then shout for the ball, forcing the player with the ball to flick a short pass to him in the centre rather than to his oncoming teammate. Barassi would grab the ball and handpass it on himself or punch it back to the player who had passed it to him. He wanted to sharpen reflexes by creating an element of unpredictability. And, to complicate things further, he occasionally faked an attacking interception against the receiver or actually sprang into the air and deflected the pass. He might then shepherd or jostle the receiver trying to gather the loose ball, making him fight for possession.
Such a deflection caused ‘the big bump’. An awkwardly delivered pass had been impossible for Kekovich to catch. It bounced from his hand onto the ground. Barassi was immediately in full cry, urging speed and recovery – he’d already needled Sam about his lack of speed earlier in the session – and now he chose to make recovery of the ball difficult by blocking Kekovich’s run to the rolling ball.
In the instant – it couldn’t have been premeditated – Kekovich decided that the shortest distance between two points was straight ahead. Anything in his path must be shifted – in this case, Ron Barassi. Dipping his right shoulder as he charged, Kekovich hit Barassi shoulder to shoulder, but Barassi was stationary and Kekovich moving fast and purposefully.
Kekovich struck with an upward movement, rather like a bull hitting a torero. Instantaneously, Barassi became airborne. Both feet did a high-speed, crazy-cycling motion as he was catapulted forward. For a split second, it seemed that the immense velocity of the impact might actually pop both his eyes from their sockets – the pupils and irises seemed miniscule in the sudden vastness of white surrounding them. And his face registered almost disbelieving surprise at the shock of the thump. Then his body began cartwheeling across the turf while Kekovich snapped up the ball and fired a low but deadly accurate pass at the oncoming receiver.
Kekovich did not look back. He trotted forward to the far group of players as Barassi sprang to his feet with both his fists bunched.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, you big ape?” he roared, taking several quick steps in Kekovich’s direction. But Kekovich refused to look back and Barassi seemed to master his indignation quickly. Everyone was watching his reaction and Barassi must have known it. He spun around. The ball was still in motion between two players, but the tempo of action had slowed perceptibly.
“Too slow!” Barassi roared. “That’s too slow. What’s the matter with you guys?”.

THE FINALS

Defeat by south Melbourne in the last home-and-away game of the season, followed by a humiliating 38-point loss to Hawthorn in the Qualifying Final at the MCG, slammed Barassi’s back hard against the wall. Typically, he came off the wall punching.
On HSV7’s Sunday World of Sport program, watched by an estimated one million viewers, Barassi accused his forwards of “waltzing around like a lot of prime donnas”, claimed that many of the previous afternoon’s performances were “a disgrace to the club” and insisted that there would be no more “covering up” for players letting down the team. Such a public chastisement took a breathtaking risk – his players would either rise to the challenge or sulk their way into obscurity. That choice, Barassi conceded, would “depend on what sort of men the North Melbourne players are deep inside”.
The press relished the outburst. Monday’s papers ran the following headlines:
BARASSI LETS FLY AT ROOS
BARASSI BLASTS HIS MEN
BARASSI ROASTS ROOS
BARASSI SLATES PLAYERS
BARASSI TAGS ROOS AS PRIMA DONNAS
Barassi justified the attack by declaring: “What separates the men from the boys in football is mental toughness. If a team cannot take a private or public exposé of the facts, there is no way known they will be able to cope with the pressure that legitimate finals opposition applies.”
In this way, he provoked direct confrontation. And at 5pm on Tuesday, September 6 – the first training night after the Hawthorn debacle – Barassi called his senior 20 from that game into a behind-closed-doors meeting. Club officials guarded both the door to the coach’s room and the outside window to ensure nothing said between Barassi and his players could be overheard. Anyone without specific duties in even the dressing-room area was ordered outside. At no time throughout the season had security been so tight. And so, in total privacy, Barassi met his team head-on.
Barassi’s resentment stemmed from his belief that North Melbourne had virtually given the match to Hawthorn. Regardless of any other opinions – individual or collective – Barassi remained convinced that North lost to a side it should have beaten. His players folded, he believed, under Hawthorn’s relentless intensity of pressure, greater determination to win and superior mental and physical courage – all prime qualities Barassi demanded of any team he coached. So the players had failed him, the club and themselves.
The meeting lasted 15 minutes, then the players ran their warm-up laps while Barassi changed. While they ran their final lap, Barassi trotted down the race and onto the oval, creating a moment of stunned surprise – for the first time in the season, the number on his guernsey was not 31. The 55 on his back struck many observers as a masterpiece of silent rebuke.
Immediately the warm-ups finished, Barassi instructed the squad to begin end-to-end passing. He called three of the previous Saturday’s reserve players – Darryl Sutton, Peter Keenan and Bill Nettlefold – to join the senior squad. This inclusion of reserves prompted instantaneous speculations among the trainers and officials about who would be dropped. Some heads, everyone agreed, would certainly roll.
But an even greater drama than selection was already developing on the field between Barassi and his players. As they worked through their end-to-end passing, Barassi watched them silently, neither praising nor damning anything they did. He appeared to be submerged in a mood of brooding resentfulness. His eyes watched everything, every move by each player, but his silence was more potent than any shouting – the quality of the players’ work deteriorated visibly. The pressure of Barassi’s silence demoralised them. The passing and marking, lacking sparkle from the start, became woeful. They looked not only like a team that had lost, but one that deserved to lose again.
After 20 minutes, Barassi, with harsh abruptness, stopped the end-to-end work and began pairing players against each other for competitive circular work. He paired Alves against Schimmelbusch, Nolan against Keenan, Cassin against Cable, Nettlefold against Jarrott, Blight against Byrne, Briedis against Davis, Cowton against Baker, and so on through the squad until everyone had an opponent. One of the paired players was then given a brown guernsey while the other kept his North Melbourne royal blue-and-white colours.
Tensely, Barassi announced the rules: only one ball would be used and the player with possession was to kick or handpass to the nearest teammate in the same colour guernsey while the opposition fought to break the chain of passes, gain possession of the ball, then create its own forward drive. It was, in effect, a moderately sophisticated version of ‘keepings-off’.
“And I want match condition pressure in each contest for the ball!” Barassi demanded as he waved them to begin circling. Fury seemed to be still smouldering inside him as he punted the ball high into the air, creating an immediate scurry for possession among the nearest contesting pairs.