Part-time Sage Helps Engineer Revolution At Crows

The Age

Saturday September 16, 2006

Martin Blake

Charlie Walsh is helping the Crows push the envelope in fitness, Martin Blake explains

AS A FOOTBALLER, Charlie Walsh made a good cyclist. More than half-a-century ago, Walsh ran the wings for Walkerville Primary School in Adelaide's north-eastern suburbs, until he tired of teammates refusing to kick to him. "I stopped playing when I was 11," Walsh said. "These guys down here (the Crows) will tell you I'm more than a bit ordinary."

But it's not football expertise that the Crows and their coach, Neil Craig, seek from Walsh. The famed former national cycling coach - nine times named the best coach of any code in Australia - has a part-time role as a mentor and is involved in the physical conditioning and rehabilitation of injured players, mainly using bikes.

It's unusual in the sense that Walsh comes from another sport. But it's not hard to make sense of it, either.

For Walsh, 65, it started as an interest in 2000 when he stepped down as head coach of the national track cycling team after a decade in charge, and was suddenly flush with free time. Craig, who had worked alongside him for 11 years an Australian Institute of Sport physiologist, was coaching Adelaide's midfield group under Malcolm Blight, and asked his old mentor to help out.

Soon it developed into something more than an interest. "I suppose he (Craig) thought, 'The old fool gave me something, I'll give him a bit of an interest'. But Neil totally runs his show and I wouldn't intervene in any way, shape or form. Sometimes you can get something from being outside the sport. I wouldn't be so presumptuous to even mention anything about playing."

The association continued under Gary Ayres' reign as the Adelaide coach, and when Craig took over from Ayres two years ago, he moved to expand it by asking Walsh to ride the boundary on game days.

Walsh was hooked. He loves his footy, and as a boy he recalled skipping the last part of road races so that he could race away and watch West Adelaide in the SANFL. "I can remember when they (Crows) won the 1997 grand final, I was in Paris and we weren't into emails in those days, so I rang my wife about every five or 10 minutes for scores. I ran up quite a bill."

Walsh does not like his role with Adelaide overstated, and it is true that he merely works part-time under the auspices of the Crows' conditioning men in Stephen Schwerdt and Paul Haynes.

Schwerdt and Craig have employed the highly publicised "tapering" of training regimes, partially aping an Olympic preparation in a year-round sport. When Adelaide was dominating the competition, it was all the rage. When the Crows stumbled towards the end of the regular season, observers began asking questions.

"It is possible, but it's a very delicately managed exercise," Walsh said. "Bearing in mind part of the preparation is development of the athlete so that when you come to the big ones, you're psychologically prepared, it's delicate.

"I can recall with our (cycling) athletes after, say a world championships, they would go to a meeting a week later, they've lost nothing in form, but the performance is terrible. Their whole nervous system has gone down. With football, you're asking them to repeat that for 22 weeks. It's a staggering ask."

Much of Walsh's work is done in the pre-season, although he sits down on the boundary on match days, "as far as possible away (from the coach), I reckon". He's not likely to switch Mark Ricciuto into the midfield, but he might offer a word of advice to a player who has broken down.

The Crows have a well-deserved reputation for pushing the envelope with regard to sports science and conditioning, but through Walsh's influence, the club has some down-home methods, too.

Take Norton Summit, for instance. Not long after he started with the Crows in 2000, Walsh introduced the players to the 10-kilometre stretch of road at the start of the Adelaide Hills that had become infamous among his cycling groups over the previous 20 years. "It's not super-steep," Walsh. said "But it's one where people learn to persist and endure a little bit of pain."

He's not kidding. Multiple world track champion Shane Kelly confirms that it is the place of much torture handed out by Walsh, who was known to make his cyclists repeat it three times in a day. "I know it well," Kelly said. "If you ask anyone who's done it, they'd cringe."

It used to be said that AFL footballers were a world away from being elite athletes, and Walsh was aware of this. Nowadays, he says, the gap has narrowed "hugely".

The difference, he says, is that an AFL player cannot train as hard as, say, a cyclist, because he has to stay fresh for 22 weeks plus the finals. Aside from that, there is the physical contact factor and the likelihood of injuries.

Walsh believes the top cyclists, for instance, are "more pure" in the athletic sense because they are able to train harder. "An 18-year-old cyclist who comes into a national program compared to a footballer who comes in, it's chalk and cheese," he said.

"The cyclist is so far ahead. They go through an individual sport, they go through an institute program. They learn about goal-setting, they learn about their body. They know what sort of demands they have to put on themselves and what sacrifices they have to make, and if they want to be the best in the world, they have to work in every area.

"Football is certainly heading down that path, and if I looked at the Crows players, I know they're significantly advanced in that area and that's one thing Neil has had quite a focus on."

Still, AFL football has some exceptional athletes. One whom Walsh is watching is Nathan van Berlo, Adelaide's talented utility. "If he (van Berlo) was a cyclist, he's the sort of guy you'd take one look at and say, 'He'll be world champion'."

Sitting down on the boundary line, Walsh hears the big hits and sees the speed and watches in wonder. "It's an absolute eye-opener," he said.

"When you see these guys - under huge pressure - first try to get the ball, then when they've got it, with huge guys ready to squash you into the ground, to see somebody deliver the ball ahead with exceptional skill, I just shake my head at times.

"To me, the skill level of an AFL footballer is quite staggering."

© 2006 The Age

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