COACH Paul Roos says he has “no complaints at all” about his squad’s efforts or the training facilities on the Sunshine Coast.
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Speaking from Mooloolaba Surf Club on Friday, Roos said the first week of the camp had been a success.
“You know the players are going to be working really hard, so we’ve been really pleased,” he said.
“We’ve had a terrific time. The training facilities have been great. The access to beaches, recovery and pools [has been great] and you can do some other activities like this [with the Mooloolaba Surf Club]. It’s been very, very good.
“They (the ironmen) were very good. It’s always good to see what other sports and athletes can do also, so it’s good for our guys to interact with some world class athletes.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to bed down our game plan, to cement relationships and to train in really good conditions and really good venues – and to meet other world class athletes, so it ticks a lot of boxes for us.”
Roos said the next phase for Melbourne was to go from a competitive side to a winning team.
“We’ve made a pretty big focus on mentally challenging the players, but all clubs are,” he said.
“The other part of coming away on the club is that we’ve got a lot of new players over the last two years, so you get to know people in an informal setting – not just training with them and then going home after training.
“We’ve got groups of four in rooms and we’ve got team events like we saw this morning, so hopefully the guys will get to know each other a lot better and then when they go into battle together, they’ll want to perform as a team.”
Roos said every club wanted to play finals, but he reiterated again that it was all about building the foundations first.
“Every clubs talks about it, but the reality is for a footy club is that it’s about getting the process right,” he said.
“Hawthorn just don’t make finals or win Grand Finals, because they say they want to. You have to be a really, really good football team to be able to do that and they’ve shown it over and over and over again.
“The bottom teams want to emulate the top teams, but there is a reason why you win four games and Hawthorn wins the premiership.”
Roos said his squad had made genuine strides compared to this time last year.
“If you look back to this time last year, a lot of our key players had hardly trained, so every player and every coach will tell you that the more pre-season you get into them and the more hard work you do, the better the season you have.”
“There’s no doubt from a preparation point of view, we’re a long way ahead, but once the season starts, that doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to win. It just means that you’re better prepared.
“Our greatest challenge is going to come when the season starts and the scoreboard starts ticking over and they’re the things we need to deal with better than what we did last year.”
Overall, Roos said he was “rapt” with the Melbourne supporters in 2014 and he was eager to take the club forward again this year.
“They were beaten down for six or seven years and it’s tough for the fans, but they can see some improvement club wide with [chief executive] Peter [Jackson], [president] Glen Bartlett and the board,” he said.
“We need to start delivering or at least keep improving and that’s what the fans are demanding.”
