Pyke pledges tough review
ADELAIDE coach Don Pyke has started dissecting his club’s failed year but says a full postmortem will wait until season’s end.
A year after being beaten grand finalists, the Crows will miss this year’s playoffs and Pyke is pledging a thorough review into the reasons.
“We will start to now think through that ... to make sure that we give ourselves the very best chance next year to bounce back,” Pyke said.
Adelaide’s training program, which resulted in a series of soft tissue injuries, and any need to alter his club’s game style would be focal points of the review.
Pyke ruled out another mind training camp after previously admitting Adelaide’s January camp of that nature was a “fail”.
“We may have a camp but it may be a different camp, it will probably be more a physical performance camp than, say, the one we did this year,” he said.
“I haven’t said we are going to go completely away from that space. Every club in the AFL is now looking at how do we actually help with our players’ mental resilience, wellbeing, all those sorts of things.
The third-year coach said game style would be his review starting point.
“In terms of the way the game is now being played, the game evolves and changes so our style and system will probably be the first thing we will consider: do we need to make any tweaks to that?” Pyke said.
“Do we need to make tweaks to how we’re training some of those components of our style of system? Do we need to make tweaks to our conditioning and strength program around that as well? It’s a big bucket that we look at.”