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Two-minute interview

By Tim Lane
July 31, 2004

Paul Feltham, right, celebrates a victory with the Brisbane Bears.

Paul Feltham, one-time coach of the Brisbane Bears, has thrown his very different hat into the coaching ring.

TL: You're still alive. Do you still follow the footy?

PF: Of course. With 30-odd years' involvement, you never go away from a game that's been such a big part of your life.

Have you coached at all since 1989?

Not in a football sense. What I did some years ago - I had a desire to become the most qualified person around, so I set out to learn a number of things.

I went overseas and studied skill acquisition in elite athletes, things like that, and the guy that actually put me on to this road was Butch Harmon. He was at the time Greg Norman's coach, and at the time, I was playing a fair bit of golf and doing a fair bit of work in a psychological sense with professional golfers. A friend of mine in the States knows Butch and he gave me a lesson. At the time, my handicap was one and he asked me what did I think stopped me from winning, say, a professional event. My first reaction was, "Don't be ridiculous". He said: "The difference between you and Greg Norman is that he plays your best shots more often." It made me start to think about the relationship between performance and skill. I set out then on researching a book on it, which I've been doing for a number of years.

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So you think you've found answers to some of this that our football coaches traditionally haven't had?

Undoubtedly, yes. The most important thing is you've got to teach people how to think. After they've been performing their skills from the age of 10 or 11, learning the game, they've developed conditioned performance levels. Some grow up being very dexterous on both sides of their body, and will move to whichever side they need to deliver the ball, whereas other players believe their dominant side is the way they've got to go and they become predictable. You can teach people how to think about the way the game is developing, the way people move, the way the ball is moving.

How would you apply this at the elite level?

We're really no further down the track, as far as I'm concerned, with our game plan. I think I'd bring to a club an opportunity to develop a group of players to be able to play a more rewarding game than just following the principles that have been going on for the last seven, eight or nine years.

So what are your chances of convincing a club that a bloke who coached for seven games, 15 years ago, might be the man to coach their club now?

There are a couple of elements. I coached for seven games with Brisbane, but at that stage I'd done a 10-year apprenticeship, winning premierships. At one stage, I coached a side that lost one game in two years, following the basic principles I'm talking about now. And from the time when I coached the Bears until now, I've spent probably seven of those years working with some of the best athletes and coaches in the world, understanding how to get the best out of people.

What did you do to turn Brisbane around in 1989 (the Bears won five out of seven games under Feltham's coaching)?

Some of the principles I used at Brisbane haven't changed to this day. When I went there, they were averaging 18 to 20 players off their list every week in blue jumpers - that meant they couldn't train flat out. I got Cameron Lillicrap, former tight-head prop for Australia in rugby union and a physiotherapist, to lecture the players in injury repair and how long you need to go from unable to train flat out to being able to perform at your best on the weekend. The players and I set the rule: no train by Wednesday, no play. It didn't matter who it was. The mistake that was being made was taking guys like Brad Hardie and (Mike) Richardson and (Geoff) Raines and so on and putting so much effort into these guys on how to play the game. They already knew how to play it.

Bearing in mind the turnaround in their fortunes, why didn't the Bears go ahead with you in 1990?

Legally, I can't talk about the settlement with Pelerman (Reuben Pelerman, then the Brisbane Bears' private owner), but Shane O'Sullivan went to Pelerman and said if he kept me on as coach, he wouldn't have a side because I was too hard on the players. That's absurd but that was a beef between O'Sullivan and me. It had nothing to do with the development of the side. He decided that was a method of squaring up and he squared up.

So you're having another crack now?

I was watching (Shane) Crawford's video and something that Allan Jeans said, and Barass has said the same thing: "If you're someone who has the desire to do something and you don't follow it through, you're going to die an unhappy man." And he's right. It's burned me for years that I allowed circumstances to let me move away from something I'd trained myself over probably 15 years to do. So, to use Barass's oft-quoted "If it is to be, it is up to me", I thought I'll go and get a manager, and I got Peter Jess, and I said: "Put me forward. I'm prepared to take on anybody." I don't care if they're on the bottom because I have an absolute belief that the team that's on the bottom is not different skill-wise to the teams that are in the eight. And I believe I can get them there, otherwise I wouldn't take on the job. Matter of fact, it's not the eight, because I don't believe in the eight. I reckon if you're not in the top four, you haven't been successful.