THE PATH to persistence.

AFL Senior Coach Michael Voss wouldn't shy away from the ambition that both he and his football team holds heading into the 2025 campaign. However, the message was very clear: it simply wouldn't be achievable without putting in the work.

Speaking to AFL.com.au's Riley Beveridge as part of the Your Coach series, Voss gave a comprehensive preview on the year ahead: the below is just an excerpt of the full chat.

To listen to the full 25-minute interview, head here.

On the key focus of this pre-season:

“One of the big projects, if you want to call it that, is how do we be consistent as a football team? It’s not just about the performance, it’s looking at things like our program and how we support that so the players can go out there and perform at their very best. It’s worth acknowledging, because for large parts of the season we had a lot going in our favour - we had a great run between Rounds 10-16, but then for some reason we lose personnel and form and momentum went the other way. To finish where we finished and to finish in that way, it was really disappointing.

“But we’ve got to take the lessons out of it and work out how we get better, because the gap that needs to be bridged is we need to be better than what we are. We’ve poured a lot of energy into that, and we’re not going to know that until we get through the year: trying to project it now, we can’t, but what we get to look at is the players and the amount of pre-season they’ve completed compared to previous years. We’re on track with that, doing really well actually.

“We need a little bit of luck. Some of the controllables around soft tissue we’ve had some success with, but it’s never not going to be there either. We all appreciate that the environment we live in, you are going to get injuries, that’s the nature of it - but can we control the ones we want to control? The ones that are a bit more traumatic, we don’t get much control over those… but the soft tissues and how we manage that, what’s in our program, how consistently we play and perform throughout the whole year will be a big conversation for us.”

On utilising strengths and identifying weaknesses:

“The big challenge coming back from last year was how we raise the standard in everything we do. You’ve got to acknowledge what’s working and what’s not. You don’t get in that position if you don’t have things that are going for you, but there are things we need to be able to address as well.

“Sometimes they can be really obvious and large things, and sometimes they can be in the real marginal detail that we need to get better at. In the end, it compounds over time and it shows up sometimes when you don’t want it to. The reality is we got to the end of the year and we weren’t in peak condition, we need to be in better condition than that to be any chance to be able to contend.

On the main differences from a fitness perspective:

“If you’ve heard the boys talk about contest and pressure, speed and power has come out a lot. It’s the new three words I reckon - speed and power! They’ve taken to it, they’ve enjoyed the freshness of it. A lot of the work that was done was in the off-season: to the players’ credit, they took that on board and we’ve been able to have a successful pre-season on the back of it.

“When I say successful pre-season, it’s looking at players that have trained: we’re really heathy. We’ve had a couple we wouldn’t like to have, like losing Nic Newman was disappointing. Otherwise, mostly everyone has had a full pre-season and doing okay.”

On embracing expectation:

“We talk about ambition. I’m quite okay to talk about ambition. But I’m also pragmatic, that if the work doesn’t get done that nothing shows up. Without diving too deep, the reality is by going off and talking about the nice and shiny things, we lose the detail of the work. We lose the detail of what we need to do every single day to build the consistent habits that we need to have to support us through the whole season.

“I’ve got no problem talking about ambition and wanting to have an impact on the season and feature strongly at the back-end of the season: we’re here to qualify as high as we possibly can. I’m bringing energy to that, I’m bringing excitement with that, I hope our fans feel that. I want to play in a manner where the boys are excited by the opportunity to be able to do that and see that as a real privilege.

“There’ll be absolutely no shying away from what we need to do, but I’m also really pragmatic that we’ve got work to get done. We’ve completed stage one of that work.

“We’ve completed it well, but now we’ve got to move into stage two - we’ve got these practice matches to get a bit out of and we get to put some modifications in place, some positional changes you might see. We get to see that against opposition in the next few weeks, and then you start to get a benchmark of where you’re at.”

On how the Blues become more consistent:

“I’ve always said that this is not about the ceiling. It’s about raising the floor: that floor comes with consistency and persistence. That’s what we’ve got to embrace. Some people call it the grind, some people call it something else, but we haven’t experienced that.

“Right now we should be feeling good about what we’ve done, there should be a strong belief that we’ve got great capacity within this football team, but we should also be really realistic that there’s a fair bit of work ahead of us.”

On Jagga Smith and the influx of young talent:

“He’s been really good. He hit the ground running, our first-year boys have been particularly impressive this year. They’re all footyheads, they’ve all got strong footy pedigree, you can sit down with them and have lunch and they just want to talk footy - there’s not many that come through like that, as a group like that!

“‘Jags’ headlines that because of where his talent has been seen and how he’s arrived at the Club, but he has figured prominently and we’ve given him an avenue to do so. He provides something unique to us, but it still comes with great patience because we’ve got someone who hasn’t played one game of AFL football yet. I’m not going to lie, he’s done a couple of things where I go ‘wow, how did he do that?’.

“That gets you excited about what he can do, but you also know that what he’s got to do is a journey and he’s not going to get there in one game or five games or 10 games. What I do know is he’s going to improve us as a footy team in the future, whenever that is.”

On the young players he’s looking to take a step up:

“There’s a couple of boys that are in the same category: the Camporeale boys have done very well, it’ll be a bit harder for them for the depth we have in our midfield. In the back end of the year, we did see some youth come into the team and that had some extra energy and excitement into our group. There are some positions there that we’ll have a look at adding that youth, losing ‘Newy’ down back is disappointing but from that comes opportunity.

“Young Cowan has had a really strong pre-season, you forget he’s only in his third year but he’s improved - and so has Ollie being able to play back there. One name that some wouldn’t have heard is Matt Carroll, we’ve been excited by what he’s done over pre-season. He’s largely been injured for 12 months, but he’s had an exceptional pre-season and I’d like to see a bit more of him. We’ll see the emergence of a few others I think.”

On the move to half-back for Ollie Hollands:

“The move for Ollie [at the end of 2024] was in some ways to get Jaxon Binns in the team. He moved there and what we liked was his constant movement, he doesn’t sit still. He’s an incredible runner, in the top one or two per cent in the competition for running capacity. He provides that movement and energy to drive off half-back.

“He brings genuine capacity into our group: he’s still got craft to learn in that role, it is different. But I think he likes the free rein it brings, rather than running the up and down of what wingers do. He gets to cross over and do other things which they tend to like!”

On Jack Silvagni’s move to defence:

“I really hope we can settle him, that’s the intent going into this. It was something he instigated and we talked about. He was asking me ‘I’m happy to stay forward, but I wouldn’t mind exploring down back’ - which means they want to go back! I was happy to do that.

“He’s shown in small periods of time that he’s able to do that. He’s got a big personality, he’s loud, he’s competitive, he’s got a defender’s gene in there. We’re going to give it a good throw at the stumps. We feel like even just the little bits and pieces he’s been able to do in the last couple of weeks, there’s something there for us.

“He hasn’t trained the whole pre-season because he’s been recovering from his ACL, but in the last weeks when he’s been down there, he’s shown something every single time. He’s another player we’ll be mindful of, but already our back six looks really different. If you go down the Silvagni path with ‘Weiters’, Haynes into the mix, young bucks higher up the field, it’s a different back six.”

On opening the door for a younger core to come through:

“It’s always a fine balance between the more experienced players and what’s coming underneath. It’s been the evolution of our list. When I first walked in, I felt like we were over-indexed in inside mids. They were everywhere, and that’s been a real plus on our list, but at the same time we had to work out what we wanted our list to look like and where was the game going.

“We’ve had to spend a fair bit of time on what the capacity is of our group and what we need it to look like, we’ve spent a bit of time on that. What we’ve also spent time on is what’s coming through next. Making tough decisions like that, it was believing that we have another group to come through that we’re willing to give exposure to. Is that depth? It certainly says we feel like some of them are ready to go. They’ve had their grounding, and now they’re ready for AFL football - hopefully they provide the depth we need.”

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