From the Pocket: Hawthorn’s flair and flexibility are key to their success amid much grander plan

Sam Mitchell has caught lightning in a bottle. After the years of drift, the racism scandal and the shambolic exits of Alastair Clarkson and Jeff Kennett, Hawthorn are a team to fall in love with again. For neutrals, there is something we dared not say out loud until last Friday: why can’t this team, a team that was still 13th after 19 rounds, win the premiership?

Mitchell and his former coach barely talk to each other any more, but they share certain personality traits and footballing philosophies. “Be rigid in fundamentals and technique, but flexible in scheme,” was something the great American football coaches Bill Belichick and Nick Saban built their success upon. Clarkson was similar. His great Hawthorn teams could play ugly or with Swiss precision. But there was no deviating from his core demands – his players had to be excellent kicks, and they had to be prepared to eschew individualism for the collective.

The current Hawks coach’s non-negotiables are slightly different and tailored towards a generation of athletes who simply won’t respond to the dictatorial approach of Clarkson in his early years. But there are similarities. Every draftee and every player they target from other clubs, many of whom struggled under their previous coaches, possess above-average skills by foot and hand.

Mitchell is more hands on than most senior coaches in teaching the craft of the game – on where to hold the ball, on how to weigh and check passes. He taught himself how to kick with stubby holders, balloons, socks, anything that was lying around the house. At training and before games, he would name and attempt to master all different kinds of kicks – the inswinger, the outswinger, the inside-out torp, the tumbler, the undercutter. In games, he would use his left foot for long kicks, and his right foot for shorter, more precise passes.

But the most important thing, he says, is to be equally proficient handballing on both sides of the body. It’s one of the first things he looks for in potential draftees. And it’s pivotal to how his Hawthorn midfield operates. They’re not one of those midfields, unlike Western Bulldogs and Port Adelaide, that handballs out the front of stoppages. Instead, they invariably handball laterally and backwards to extricate themselves from packs, to buy time and to open up space.

But there’s flexibility too. Emotionally, there’s the way he responded to the tut-tutting when one of his players went to the boozer on the night before a final. One shudders to think how Clarkson circa 2005 would have handled that scenario. Even Mitchell the footballer, who he admits was “self-absorbed” and “lacking in empathy” in his early years, would have taken the hard line as well.

But crucially, there’s flexibility in scheme. Mitchell’s Hawks are always trying new things, always throwing curve balls at the opposition, and always willing to adapt according to the opponent, the occasion and the current trends in the game. This isn’t a coach who says things like “if we win at the contest, we win the game”. This isn’t a coach who fosters an “us against the world” mentality to bring them to an emotional pitch.

Earlier this year, they had 55 marks in the first quarter (only two of which were taken in the forward 50), sent half the crowd to sleep, and watched Melbourne skip away to a five-goal lead at the first change. It was one of those games to never speak of again. But it demonstrated something important: his group was coachable, yes, but also crying out to play with flair. They had 117 marks last week – usually high for a final – but the way they move the ball is so much more propulsive now.

As the young Hawks found their groove throughout the year, they honed in on the basics – on sticking their tackles, hitting their targets, and getting front and square. Their high-performance manager, who oversaw conditioning at Richmond, has trained them to be power endurance athletes, and they run like hares.

But there’s unpredictability too. This is a team that has adapted after losing its full back James Blanck and full forward Mitch Lewis to long-term knee injuries, and whose best midfielder Will Day is still unavailable for the finals. You can see it in individual passages of play – in their violent, full ground switches, in their appetite for risk, in the relish and speed with which they attack using every inch of the ground, in the freedom they’ve clearly been granted. You see it in the way their hybrid forwards rearrange themselves and open up space. They’ve found the perfect balance of strengths and limitations, of talent and application, of fun and work.

Their opponent on Friday, Port Adelaide, is one that plays on emotion and energy. When that’s absent, they are dire. Hawthorn is being spoken of in a similar vein – a team that’s riding a wave, a team the feeds off its crowd. But there’s so much more to them than that. Even if they lose on Friday, and we always get seduced by elimination final winners, they give every indication they’re here for the long haul – a protean gameplan suited to the modern game, a club sensitive to the anxieties and quirks of this generation of athletes, and a team built for September.

This is an extract from Guardian Australia’s free weekly AFL email, From the Pocket. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions