After his team’s devastating loss to Port Adelaide, Sydney coach John Longmire took immediate action to “mentally refresh” his players. With over a century of AFL/VFL history now standing in the Swans’ way of a title, Longmire decided to give the players more time off.
The task for the faltering ladder leaders has been made harder by last Sunday’s 112-point pounding, the biggest loss in Longmire’s illustrious coaching career. No team has ever lost by more than 100 points during the regular season and gone on to achieve grand final victory.
The 1945 Carlton squad, which defeated Essendon by precisely 100 points in the third round of the season but barely made it to the finals in fourth place before, ironically, defeating South Melbourne—the team that would eventually become the Sydney Swans—in the grand final, suffered the greatest defeat by a premiership-winning team.
In an attempt to pull his squad out of the mud before of Friday’s pivotal SCG matchup with Collingwood, Longmire gave the Swans players a training break following their fifth loss in six games.
In the days following the defeat, Longmire expressed his desire for the disappointment to “wash through” and refuted the notion that his players had “hit the wall.” He also acknowledged that he needed to get into “solution mode” quickly since the Magpies, who are still in the hunt for the championship, needed to win in order to be in the running.
Pragmatically speaking, Longmire stated on Tuesday, “You obviously go through enormous disappointment the day after the game, and you let it wash through, and then you sort of come in yesterday, like we did as coaches, and I’ll speak to a couple of the senior players, and you just work through some of the solutions.”
