Scarlett's Web, with champion full-back Matthew Scarlett
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I'VE GOT to say, it's the middle of the home-and-away season, and I'm going well – I'm feeling especially good after a few days off.
We've just moved into a new house, so I spent most of last week, when we had a few days off, packing the house up.
Having to do a heap of work around home might not sound like it's a real mental break, but it's good to get away from the club and not have the daily grind of the meeting and all the usual stuff. It's just great to be home for a few days and spend some time with the family.
We had about five days off, and it's just gold. It really refreshes you so much – my body felt fine, and I didn't really need the physical break, but the mental break is the most important one for me. Its good fun playing footy, don't get me wrong, but you do get a bit sick of all the meetings.
It's also good to get away from all the boys – you see them so much it's good to have a bit of a break from them. Well, not ALL the boys – Corey Enright lives around the corner, and he came around and helped me with the new house, so I saw him nearly every day, but it really is good to have a break from everything and everyone else.
Given the battering we take during games, and how much training we do these days, people might find it hard to believe that it's the mental side that wears you down, but mentally, it's a really hard game to play, footy. There's so much concentration, and as I said earlier, the number of meetings is phenomenal – reviewing the opposition, all the tactics and game plans we have to know – and it does tire you out, probably more than the training does.
Every player will tell you that we have too many meetings, but really, I think you have to – you have to really prepare meticulously for each opposition team, so there's no way around it. We pride ourselves on knowing the opposition really well, so what choice have you got? But you still get sick of them.
Even as a backline we'll have our own meetings – they won't take too long, but we'll talk before our main training session about what we expect the opposition forwards to do, who'll start on who, that sort of thing.
We're back off to Perth again this weekend – even with split-round, it's a bit strange to be going straight back. It took a while to really recover last time, and it was a big talking point between the players, just how the players based over there must feel. I guess you'd get used to it a bit, but travelling every second week from over there is a pretty good effort, and you can see why they might struggle to win over here sometimes.
They say it takes two or three years off a player's career doing all that travelling, and I can easily see how that could happen – I was tired for three or four days when we got back from Perth last week.
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