WHAT does an assistant coach do on game day? 

Speaking on the morning of Carlton’s Round 14 clash with Richmond, Ash Hansen provided his insight when chatting on RSN’s Breakfast Club.

On the back of a six-day week for Carlton given the short turnaround to Thursday’s game, Hansen said that space is very much given to the players in the lead-up to tonight’s fixture.

He said official proceedings from a preparation aspect ended the day before a match with Michael Voss’ address to the players.

“We definitely don’t go around changing anything [on game day],” Hansen said.

“It’s all been set up yesterday with the players, to ensure clarity of that messaging and to give them peace of mind. We won’t touch that again.

“We finished the day yesterday with ‘Vossy’ giving quite a powerful and emotional meeting at the back-end of the day. We leave the players alone.

“Once game day comes around, it’s all around supporting the players in executing what we planned. The consistency of returning to the themes and the aims going into the game is really important.

“The only anxiety you have as an assistant coach is you hope you see the game really well so you can relay that to the players and give them clarity on what’s going on. That gives them the empowerment to go out and play their roles.”

A well-known nuance of the AFL fixture is teams playing opposition clubs twice even before playing a different team once.

That will be the case for the Blues, who will have their first return fixture of the season on the back of their Round 1 triumph over Richmond. 

In terms of how it shapes Carlton’s plans for the upcoming contest, Hansen admitted it formed part of the team’s planning, but certainly wasn’t the be all and end all.

“There are really clear areas of the game which won it for us last time, and we show the players what they did really well because it’s powerful showing the current playing group what they did only [13] weeks ago,” he said.

“We do reference what we did because it is so close, but we’ve got a great opposition analyst in Brent Manson who does a fantastic job. He digs into the Tigers over the last month and identifies what has suddenly changed in their game.

“They’ve evolved since then in little facets that we have to be aware of.”