What separates the great teams from the broken ones

July 2, 2026 — 3:45pm

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Firstly, a confession. On Tuesday night, I desperately wanted to leave my daughter’s netball game at three-quarter-time. It was late, cold … and her team was getting smacked.

I tell you this for three reasons:

It’s cathartic to get stuff like that off your chest;

My daughter doesn’t read The Age, and;

It’s a loose segue into this column.

I’m not a proponent that you have to have played the game to coach it, talk about it or administer it.

But I have a sense that you have to have played the game to understand something that isn’t recognised enough. That is, how easy it is to play in a winning team and conversely, how hard it is to play in a losing one.

When I say winning and losing, I don’t mean the occasional win or loss by a few goals. I mean consistently winning by good margins, or regularly being thumped. Think Fremantle – on a 14-game win streak – at one end of the scale, and Essendon – who have won just once this season and not since May last year before that – at the other end right now.

Fremantle would be feeling in sync, confident and........

© The Sydney Morning Herald