That's false bravado I reckon Carn... all good when it's going well, but when it gets tough he's not up for it and you can see it on his face.
Yep. Let’s compare Dusty and Danger on GF day when they perform a successful action and when they make a mistake.
This will be open for interpretation of course, and it’s always troublesome to comment on what might be going on inside someone else’s mind, but I think it’s interesting nonetheless
Success:
Both Dusty and Danger kicked a goal in the 2nd quarter. Their post-goal reactions were night and day. Danger doesn’t smile or show any positive emotion whatsoever; he looks entrenched in the mentality that his actions mean nothing unless they end up with the final result.
Dusty‘s natural reaction in the moment looked immediately mindful of his teammates’ emotions and belief levels at that point in time. (and this might be confirmation bias, but to me it looks like he’s doing it for the love of his teammates)
You can make your own interpretation of their post-goal reactions.
Mistakes:
Both players made embarrassing mistakes. Their reaction afterwards were night and day.
After Dusty’s banana floater, you can see him flash a smile to Jack (?) and it looks like he’s making a joke about himself. I think you can see the calmness under the smile, and there isn’t a hint of false bravado about it, but I’ll let others decide that for themselves.
After Danger messes up, it’s classic false bravado. It’s up for interpretation of course, but I think intuitively you can see his mind is at sea underneath in the moment and history suggests it changes the way he plays in the moments afterwards. However you’d like to describe it - it’s very different to Dusty’s reaction.
My interpretation is most elite athletes put enormous pressure on themselves to deliver a required outcome, and in this case, Danger contributed to bringing additional pressure upon himself by publicly hinging everything on the outcome in the media during the lead-up.
Richmond’s success has been built on many different things, one of them being a mountain of work to mitigate this omnipresent performance reducer that exists for everyone. Pressure affects everyone, but it affects us less.
The first thing I can learn from watching this club is you control what you can control. You can’t directly control a future outcome such as winning a premiership. But you can control the moments that lead up to and influence that outcome. So control those moments.
We either let a future outcome dictate to the mind (Danger), or we train the mind to dictate to the moment (Dusty).
The lesson outside football is don’t let your mind live in the future. Be like Dusty, instead!
But however you want to describe it, there was a huge difference in thinking between Richmond and Geelong on Saturday, and the result of that fluffy abstract stuff was on full display in the night and day performance gap between each team’s best player.
