Former Carlton forward Troy Menzel enjoyed playing under Mick Malthouse between 2013 and 2015.
Menzel, now 28, joined the club at the same time as Malthouse after being taken with pick No. 11 in the 2012 National Draft.
While Menzel admitted Malthouse struggled to connect with some of the Carlton playing group, that wasn’t the case for him as he felt he “got along really well” with his first AFL boss.
“I got along really well with Mick,” Menzel said on Sportsday SA.
“I was probably one of the few in my time at Carlton who had positive experiences with him.
“I clicked really well with Mick, he taught me a lot and he has an amazing football brain.
“The way he sees things and the way he explains things, you’d go, ‘I would never have thought of it that way’.”
While Menzel was a big fan of Malthouse, he did admit that the three-time premiership coach employed some interesting methods that often failed to resonate with the playing group.
“But I will say he did have some different methods,” Menzel said.
“I remember a couple of times we’d have our day off on a Wednesday and a Thursday during the week and we’d get a call or a message to get everyone into the club.
“We might have had a bit of a down month or so and we get called into a meeting room and Mick goes, ‘Alright we’re watching Saving Private Ryan’, or we’re watching another old movie.
“We’d have to sit there, watch a war movie and he’d say, ‘Go home and take whatever you need to take out of that’.
“It was sort of his way to liken us to warriors on the battlefield.
“A lot of guys walked out saying, ‘I don’t know what to take from this’.
“He had some interesting methods, Mick, but from my end, it was pretty positive.”
Menzel played 30 of his 44 AFL games under Malthouse.
Like Malthouse, he departed Carlton in 2015 with the medium forward ending up at Adelaide where he’d play four times in 2017.