CULTURE = another word.
IMO it is even more important than confidence, but they clearly go 'hand in glove'.
We need to develop a winning culture so that we don't need special motivation to fire us up. This needs to be the norm with only rare exceptions, rather than vice versa. Such a culture is elusive and multi-faceted, but it's one of the reasons that the best teams can have a bad day or even a longer-term form slump, but still prevail over the opposition.
Clearly a team needs to start winning games regularly to develop a winning culture, but what are the key factors necessary to develop such a culture? Talent and experience are a couple of obvious ones, and team depth to seamlessly cover injuries and ensure stiff competition for places in the senior team is another. Others include excellent coaching and off-field support and facilities; strong on-field leadership and widely held respect for the leaders; pride in individual and team performance including preparedness to sacrifice individual accolades for the good of the team; comraderie amongst the playing group; etc, etc.
Most of us around here would acknowledge that the Melbourne Footy Club is currently well down the 'learning curve' in many or most of these areas. When you start from a very low base like Melbourne has, the qualities mentioned above take time to develop. That's why patience is critical. However, for the first time in many years, I have every confidence that our patience will be rewarded.