It’s one of the most famous speeches in football history.

With Michael Cordell’s cameras rolling as part of the Year of the Dogs documentary, former Footscray coach Terry Wallace unleashed on his players after a particularly disappointing loss to Collingwood in round 17 of the 1996 season.

The “I’ll spew up” speech has since become part of footy folklore, and Bob Murphy and Adi Brown have taken an extra close look at the now famous documentary in this week’s Freedom in a Cage podcast, and the speech in particular comes under close examination.

But Murphy has a different take on it, and in his mind it goes back to what the then young coach said on his way out to his players after the siren sounded on the three point loss.

Calling back to an unnamed official as he purposely strolls out to the middle of the MCG, Wallace can be heard saying, “I’m going to get up them in a positive manner.”

Get up them. In a positive manner.  It almost seems to be a contradiction.  But Murphy suggests Wallace may have succeeded.

“I think he actually pulled off the impossible,” Murphy.

"I'm going to get up them in a positive manner.  Now, when you first hear that you think, you can't do that, that's two opposing horses. 

“But I think he does it.  If you're in that room as a player... the other line is ‘you have the ability’, so he changes his tone, so that's the balance of it.”

The Dogs charged from 15^th place in 1996 to finishing just two points short of a grand final berth the following year.

“1996 is a disaster, everything goes wrong, and ‘Plough’ takes over,” Murphy said.

“The next year it's within a whisker of the grand final and possibly/probably winning the premiership, so I wonder if in retrospect, Dogs win in the next year, is that speech viewed differently?”

This week’s guest, current Club development manager and 300-game veteran, Rohan Smith, who was then in his fifth season, said the players knew they were good enough, and Wallace was the coach they needed to get to the next level.

“It was probably him and in that speech you're talking about giving the players belief because we were good enough, we had a talented team,” Smith said.  “I'm looking around going, 'we've got some good players in here', we're better than this.”

“We probably needed to train harder, probably need to work that little bit harder and ‘Plough’ really installed during that pre-season, we just got flogged.

“We went back to training on the fourth of October so it was six days after the grand final.  It was probably about four weeks (earlier than normal). But it was good.  We knew we'd done the work and '97 played out the way that it did.”

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