Bendigo Advertiser | IN his one season under Mick Malthouse, Andrew Collins recalls a coach who was not only a strong motivator and tactician, but someone who would always take the heat for his players.
On Friday night Carlton's Malthouse will coach his 715th VFL/AFL game, breaking the record of Collingwood’s Jock McHale that has stood since 1949.
The last of Collins’ seven seasons in the AFL was under Malthouse at Carlton in 2013.
“One of the biggest things I took out of that year under him was he will do anything he can to take the heat off his players,” said Collins, who is now coaching Bridgewater in the Loddon Valley Football League.
“Apart from the tactics and being a very good motivator, he is close with his players and he’ll do whatever in the media to take the heat off the players or the club.
“Quite often there would be players who would be out of form and he’d defend them to the hilt.
“The other thing was he was really big on not putting a limitation on your ability.
“He used to talk about a bug in a coffee cup... if a bug got stuck in a coffee cup and thought, I can only jump as high as this coffee cup, then it’s putting a ceiling on its ability.
“So he’d always talk about not living in the coffee cup, that you could spring up as high as you wanted to and that the sky is the limit.
“He was very good at instilling belief in his players.”
Collins says he has tried to bring a small piece of Malthouse - whether it’s his training drills or his sayings, such as the bug in a coffee cup, to the Mean Machine in the LVFL.
“On Friday night he will have coached more games than anyone, so why wouldn’t you try to use some of what you learned from him,” Collins said.
“I’ve tried to take a bit out of all my coaches right back to juniors, but he was the last senior coach I had, so he’s the one at the front of my mind, so I use quite a bit of his stuff.”
Collins has coached 22 games of country footy with the Mean Machine and boasts a perfect 22-0 record.
He struggles to fathom the longevity of Malthouse’s coaching career, which started with Footscray in 1984 and has also taken in West Coast, Collingwood and the Blues.
“I can’t even begin to comprehend how he’s done it for so long when you consider the constant concerns you have with just local footy coaching,” Collins said.
“But he’s won three premierships and they are good times, and any time you’re involved with footy you are involved with good people and he has been lucky in that way.
“Even though it was only a year, I consider myself lucky to have played under him.”
