Insights from the coaching bench

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Mick Malthouse, "latter optionist" and coach of Collingwood Football Club had some insights to share with club tragics such as me  in his latest video.

Regarding the Brisbane Lions he feels that

The more they become less reliant on thinking about people who aren't in the side, that's an indicator of how sure they are of going forward.

This statement was made with football in mind, but I think somehow it goes deeper.

Discuss with reference to Malthouse's philosophical influences both acknowledged and unacknowledged.

10 Comments

  1. David Walker

    Here Malthouse shows the strong influence of Kierkegaard on his thinking.

    This Malthouse passage shows a similar influence:

    When a man ventures out so decisively as I have done, and upon a subject moreover which affects so profoundly the whole of life as does Aussie Rules, it is to be expected of course that everything will be done to counteract his influence, also by misrepresenting, falsifying what he says, and at the same time his character will in every way be at the mercy of men who count that they have no duty towards him but that everything is allowable.

    I think this was before the 2003 Grand Final.

  2. Simon Musgrave

    Before rushing to attribute influences, I think it's important to clarify one point: when Mick speaks of going forward, does he mean mounting an attack, or does he mean making progress in a more general sense? Or is this a deliberate ambiguity?

    But I am sure we can in any case see the influence of the great pomo thinker Cheney, in the emphasis on negative potentiality.

  3. FDB

    With his talk of dissecting and studying 'indicators' of the Lions' subjective attitude towards forward movement vis-a-vis Aussie Rules, he sounds like a Durkheim man to me.

    In a strange twist, The Durk himself was prone to inserting fairly blatant subliminal references to AFL into his philosophisin', viz:

    "From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain."

  4. Ken Parish

    “I often quote concepts, texts and phrases from Marx, but without feeling obliged to add the authenticating label of a footnote with a laudatory phrase to accompany the quotation. As long as one does that, one is regarded as someone who knows and reveres Marx, and will be suitably honoured in the so-called Marxist journals. But I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of recognising Marx’s texts I am thought to be someone who doesn’t quote Marx. When a physicist writes a work of physics, does he feel it necessary to quote Newton and Einstein?” (Foucault 1980, p. 52).

  5. Nicholas Gruen

    I always thought that the latter optionist in Malthouse was a more or less direct reference to Nietzsche.

    “I have done that,” says memory. “I cannot have done that,” says pride . . . . Eventually-memory yields [viz. and takes the latter option.
  6. KB Keynes

    Surely an AFL man would be talking about taking Marx all the time at any engel

  7. Simon Musgrave

    why did I type Cheney when I meant Rumsfeld? I need words of advice from Mick!

  8. philatvvb

    I'd be seeking peer review from the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolloomooloo.

  9. KB Keynes

    thats where Bruce works with Bruce

  10. David Walker

    I think that's from one of Nietzsche's half-time addresses.