As a longtime coach of youth footballers in Australian rules football working with players aged under seven to under sixteen in the Queensland State Schoolboys team at the Australian National Championships, I want to share with emerging coaches some of the reasons why some of my teams lost games that maybe they should have won. Sometimes it was a mistake I made in planning, while other times a player may have failed to follow team rules.

In three Australian Championship games against Western Australia, my Queensland schoolboys team was performing well and in a position to win the game when the players made mistakes which encouraged Western Australia to improve their game after scoring two or three easy goals. through our simple goal. preventable mistakes. In Tasmania in 1967 we played them in our first game. On two occasions the referee awarded a mark to one of his strikers who appeared to have been touched by our defender playing in front. Our defender stopped and appealed to the referee to no avail. Meanwhile, the striker continues to play and scores a goal. The same player didn’t learn from his first mistake in not blowing the whistle and allowed it to happen a second time soon after.

In Darwin, our central midfielder broke our team rules during the second quarter when we had the game under control. The twice breaking team rule involved a defensive strategy. If a defender had the ball but did not have a free goal, he was to kick the ball towards the wing of the stands on the defensive side of the field. Instead, he kicked the ball into a midfield contest that allowed an opponent to pounce on the ball and hand it off to a teammate who easily scored. We lost the game then and not in the final minutes of the game when both the goal and field referees made two blunders that led to a point being awarded when our fullback had clearly scored the ball in front of the goal line. He kept playing and we had the football beyond the wing clear to put the game out of the question. The memory cost us a goal and the game. But if that simple team rule had been obeyed, the sandgropers would not have been back in the game.

In 1970 at Chelmer Reserve in Brisbane, in the last five minutes of the game, the Western Australian captain was allowed to open wide into the uncontested front pocket to take a mark at the boundary line. He kicks a great goal from fifty meters. His opponent didn’t realize his talent and allowed him to do two more times to create a win for his team. A runner, one of our players, came out to give the message after the first goal. But he didn’t convey the seriousness of the situation to that defending player.

Back in Darwin, when we played Victoria, we had a chance to win at three-quarter time, but the Victorians finished strong when we gave away six careless free throws in a row. These free kicks led to several Victorian goals. This meant that we had no chance to score as we couldn’t keep or get the ball.

In 1968, at Collingwood, we played Victoria. In this game that came to half time we were winning and playing well. Then one of the better players on the wing in the space of a few minutes had marked the ball twice ready to kick the ball back to our striker only to kick the ball back to the man on mark. This resulted in the Victorians kicking two easy goals and winning by a much smaller margin than in previous years.

Now let me look at an under-10 game that I coached in 1980. It was a preliminary final. The reason we lost was my mistake. With high school players, they will accept the reasons you move them to try and win a game. This is not the case with children under ten. At three quarters, I moved one of my midfielders forward on the wing as an attack and defense strategy. He had been one of our best players up to that point. He dropped his bag and his opponent went on a rampage. To make matters worse for our supporters, he tagged a football on the back of a package, he played only to have it canceled with a free kick awarded to an opponent. Yes, the referee had made a mistake. That happen. But the biggest mistake was made by me.

The last one I’ll mention happened with a regional team I coached in the Queensland State High School Boys Championships. They had two tall, talented players who could play center forwards and dominate. One was a left footer. So I put him right half forward hoping that when he got the ball he would turn to his left foot and swing towards the goals and kick a few. However, what happened was that they simply got in each other’s way. So our attack kept missing. Unfortunately, I persisted with the tactic hoping it would work. But he didn’t. (As an aside, the other player was relatively unknown to me since his school played in a different competition than mine. He made the state team and was later recruited by Collingwood, where he became a top-tier player.) That was one of the dangers associated with regional teams because you have very little time to get to know the players.

These are just a few significant mistakes I made early in my coaching career. There were many others, I’m sure. What you need to do as a developing coach is to review each game by observing and noting the successes and failures, keeping a record of each one and reviewing your notes from time to time.