There are very few things more depressing in a footballer’s life than putting two bricks next to your runners before you go to bed.
That’s how it was for my teammates and I in 2011 after a heavy loss to the West Coast Eagles in Perth.
After three finals campaigns in a row in 2008, ’09 and ’10, the 2011 Rodney Eade Bulldogs outfit was old and tired.
The Eagles’ loss was a symbolic loss. A rebuild would soon be on the way.
It was a quiet flight home, unnervingly quiet. When we touched back down at Tullamarine we were given instructions to go straight to the swimming pool. This was unprecedented.
A 2km swim ensued, which would’ve been bad enough, but it was the mood of our coaches and fitness staff that I found more arduous.
They weren’t just disappointed, they seemed ashamed of us. It was a heavy feeling in the stomach.
At the end of the searching swim we were told, matter-of-factly, to be at Port Melbourne pier the following morning at 6am with two bricks. Gulp.
All of us that night put our training kit, a towel, a pair of runners and two bricks neatly next to our bedside table and tried to sleep, knowing that the next day was going to be brutal.
I must’ve woken during the night a dozen times, checking the time, panicking each time that I’d slept through all four alarms.
I know I wasn’t the only one who endured a similar fitful night sleep.
The ‘beach recovery’ went to script. Someone was late, we jumped into the black, choppy water from the far end of the pier and then it finished in a team circle.
Outstretched arms with bricks in hand fatigue the body quickly, and the silence we’d become accustomed to was replaced by stinging verbal barbs about ‘who would be the first player to drop their bricks?’
After a few minutes, the penny dropped for most, if not all players. ‘We must endure being uncomfortable for the benefit of your teammates and our club’.
The tension in the rooms before every game of league footy lifts and dips like a dragonfly in flight.
The range of emotions for the players matches its arc. There’s the football dreaming ‘maybe today, everything will click, and we’ll play like football Gods’, but there’s other moments too, when the mind drifts to the nightmare scenario.
We had that one play out in Perth all those years ago.
As players it’s best to come back to the thought that was so vivid on that dark and cold beach; ‘We’ve got to get uncomfortable for the good of my teammates and my club’.
That’s at least a small part of the essence of footy.
