Mitchell's boys to be on best behaviour
December 04 2008
Western Force coach John Mitchell has said his side's behaviour will be vastly improved after a controversy-plagued 2008 Super 14 season.
As honest as ever Mitchell admitted that certain mistakes had been made in the handling of off-field incidents, which had affected the player's belief.
Last season started on the right note, several wins seeing the Force make a decent start to their campaign. However, the second half of the season was not so successful as they slipped down the table and missed out on the play-offs.
Added to that there was the problems between Matt Henjak and Haig Sare, which caused major unrest in the camp, and all this after the 'Quokkagate' controversy that had rocked the side at the end of the previous season.
The Henjak saga ended with the scrum-half being sacked, and at the end of the season there were rumours of unrest and a possible revolt against Mitchell and his coaching staff.
Western Force's culture has come under scrutiny after a number of off-field incidents, but Mitchell said a post-season review had been excellent and "very open and honest".
"We are communicating far more effectively as an organisation, we've clearly identified that we want to change our behaviour and look at the right behaviour I guess all good teams and successful teams achieve," Mitchell told AAP.
"That comes through the leadership from within.
"I think there's probably a couple of mistakes we made in the first three years, not intentionally, but we had to be pretty urgent in a lot of decisions that we had to make.
"At times we probably could have been a little more thoughtful in some of our decisions but urgency sometimes forces those decisions and the culture, the boys I'm sensing are really looking to drive it from within."
Mitchell said on Wednesday at a SANZAR Technical conference in Sydney he hadn't been disappointed "at all" by suggestions of a player revolution, which senior Force stars had publicly denied.
"Not at all, at the end of day it created honesty and openness and ultimately when people communicate they tell you what exactly they think, there's no grey ideas," Mitchell went on.
"You can look to move on. As a head coach, at the end of the day I'm there to help and to produce an environment that is conducive to growth.
"People know me well, I will continue to challenge individuals and I will challenge the group and the organisation to become the best it can possibly be.
"In the four years I've been living in Australia and in the west since this club has been conceived, I guess there's always people knocking the belief box on what you can become and I can guess last year a little bit of our belief box got rattled a little by speculation and by some of our own actions.
"We had to endure quite a lot last year in terms of off the field, I sense a real hunger and a real want to move forward as a group."
With speculation over Matt Giteau's future still raging Mitchell added he expects the player to honour his contract, adding his team-mates are looking forward to his return.
Mitchell revealed the Force were still looking to import another tighthead prop and had searched both hemispheres looking for a suitable player.