“As Coxy said, we have to stare it in the face … and then hopefully when we get back, or even any big games, we’re able to produce what we learned.”

The bad news? Since they failed to apply this year what they learnt from their 2022 grand final shellacking against Geelong, nobody outside the four walls of Sydney’s swanky Moore Park headquarters will believe in this team until they get back to the AFL’s biggest stage and win.

That is the cold, hard reality the Swans now face, and the hope is that a change of coach can be the circuit-breaker they need.

Longmire made the surprise decision last week to step down a year early and enact his succession plan with Cox, who had worked under him since the end of 2017.

While the Swans’ playing style will stay true to what Longmire had been working on, Cox says he plans to change “a fair bit” tactically, and those tweaks will be rolled out at training over the coming days and weeks.

But one of them was easily spotted on Tuesday: key defender Tom McCartin, still only 24, was training as a forward.

“Tommy’s been phenomenal for us down back for periods of his career so far, but he started as a forward,” Cox said.

“We want to build flexibility in our team. We want to also make sure that Tommy’s been around for a while, and he gets a look ahead of the ball at times. When he does that, he creates something completely different for a dynamic of our forward line. We’ll do that with midfielders, we’ll do that with forwards and also some defenders will change places. That’ll eventuate over the whole summer.”

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Also high on Cox’s to-do list is getting a deal over the line with off-contract star Chad Warner, and fighting off the huge interest in his signature from the two clubs in his native Western Australia.

The 23-year-old reportedly went golfing in Perth recently with former Swans types Don Pyke and Kieren Jack, who just happen to be employed by the West Coast Eagles as chief executive and head of strategy and innovation, respectively.

Former Geelong champion Cameron Mooney said on SEN last week that such a meeting was a “bad look” for Warner, and that he’d be “filthy” if he was his teammate.

Cox said: “He’s certainly known Don and Kieren from his time here. We take it at face value on that.

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“For us, we’ve got to control what we can. It’s about trying to create a football club that Chad wants to be a part of going forward. With players coming out of contract, [negotiations] happen a long way before the actual last year of their contract. That will be the same with Chad. It’s just constant dialogue with Chad, his management group and the footy club.

“Hopefully, something can get sorted.”

Keeping top talent at the club is an all-hands-on-deck effort, too, as Mills noted.

“We want to create the best high-performance environment we possibly can. Hopefully, Chad sees that,” he said.

“We don’t do it all for Chad. We do it for everyone within the building. He’s obviously a really vital part of our team, but we do this for everyone.”