Sometimes, when Fremantle is asphyxiating some poor wreck of a team and Ross Lyon is giving a mouthful to one of his assistants, one’s mind turns to hypotheticals. How will this man react if he wins a Grand Final?
Mark Williams conducted a mock hanging with his neck tie. Mark Thompson stomped on a table. Malcolm Blight sprinted onto the MCG and soared above the celebrating huddle. What will Lyon do? Smile wryly? Ponder the Inside 50s differentials? Start planning for next year?
We know how he reacted to the losses. “Any danger of kicking our fucking goals?” was first thing he said to his players following the 2009 Grand Final. Later, at the after-match function, where everyone was drunk and hollowed out, he put the entire playing list on notice. In 2013, he forced his vanquished Fremantle players to watch footage of Hawthorn’s celebrations before they could go off on holiday.
At first, he cut a less than imposing figure. Many of the great coaches sounded like headmasters or auctioneers. Lyon sounded whiney. He had an ironic, world-weary smirk; a boppy, almost mincing gait. He’d sit in the box gnawing on a pen, pivoting every couple of minutes to berate his line coaches. He chewed through boxes of pens and a stack of assistants. He destroyed countless phones.
Who is this peculiar man, we thought. He revealed himself quickly enough. A workaholic. The most unsentimental man to ever wield a clipboard. He certainly wasn’t one for overt displays of emotion. The day after his sister died, he arrived at the club, conducted a match committee meeting, a player’s meeting and oversaw a training session. He delivered a presentation to a major sponsor. He told no-one. “We don’t care how you feel,” he would tell his players, “it’s how you act.”
But there was something about him. In press conferences, his eyes would dart this way and that. He missed nothing. His face was full of mischief. There was something conspiratorial about him. He had the knowing grin of someone who is in on the joke. He’d begin his answers the same way Paul Roos did: “Ooor…..” he’d say. “Ooor, look, you know….” “Ooor” allowed him to structure his answers, to get himself on a sure footing. Defence, after all, was his default setting. “It’s easier to destruct than to create,” he said last year. There, in seven words, is a neat snapshot of Lyon and his teams.
Indeed, his teams are instantly recognisable. There’s a militancy, a missionary zeal, a brutal honesty about them. They are, to run with his favourite word in the dictionary, uncompromising. His 2009 Saints were miserly, drilled to within an inch of themselves, unbeaten until August. They were the perfect mix of superstars, scrappers and blokes punching above their weight. For various reasons, several of them ranked among the most unpopular footballers of their generation. But they were Ross Lyon players to a T.
For three or four years, they were the subject of salacious scandal that no sane person could have dreamt up. Lyon built a force-field around them. ‘The St Kilda bubble’ he called it. They were unlucky in the 2009 Grand Final. Their best player went in injured. They missed sitters. It was one of the great Grand Finals. It is still exhausting to watch it. In the press conference afterwards, he was gracious, expansive, forthright. Several days later, alone at the club, he shed a few tears.
At his opening press conference at Fremantle, the local press were incredulous. They had all missed the scoop. One of the most respected sports broadcasters in Australia had called him “deceitful, duplicitous and distasteful.” Lyon stared them down. He had acted in his best interests. Several years earlier, he’d moved back into his childhood home after an investment went belly-up. The money mattered. He didn’t care what anybody thought.
True to type, he walked in and changed everything. On the night of the 2012 Elimination Final against Geelong, hardly anyone turned up. It was freezing cold. In Melbourne, Fremantle were still considered flaky. Their absurd theme song blared, the song that goes on for ever, sung to the tune of an old Russian back straightener. The players ran through a banner that read “Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.” 15 minutes later, they were five goals up. The Dockers were finally relevant.
A year later, on the day of the federal election, they mugged the Cats on their home turf. There’s footage of Lyon addressing the team on the ground immediately after the siren. It had been a spiteful game and the players didn’t know whether to celebrate or keep scrapping. “Pull your fucking heads in,” seemed to be the message. Ten minutes later, he said pretty much the same thing to a reporter who’d asked a perfectly reasonable question. Fielding questions from the other journalists, his eyes would track the nettlesome questioner. He was in finals mode. He was deflecting attention away from his players. He was loving every minute of it.
Lyon has won nearly two thirds of the games he’d coached. But he comes with an asterix. He’s taken sides to four Grand Finals without a win. He could, with an ounce of luck, have won two or three of them. Be he’s nobody’s loveable loser. To many, he stifles the fun out of the game. While you wouldn’t necessarily cancel all plans to go watch one of his teams play, they’re better to watch in the flesh. When they’re in full flight and everyone is doing what they’re supposed to, there’s a horrible beauty to them. Rob Murphy likened it to “watching a disease spread and attack. It’s both frightening and inspiring.”
Coaching has changed. A generation ago, you could throw drinks containers, demolish whiteboards, slam players up against the wall, call them every name under the sun. You could do anything, really. If a player was suffering from depression or anxiety, they were told to wake up to themselves. These days, if you went the full Denis Pagan or Ron Barassi to a Gen Y player, you’d probably have the police at your door. Lyon pushes the envelope. He’s the last guy you’d backchat. But he is no hot gospelling lunatic. Every word is measured. Every bake. Every scorching stare. He doesn’t just review a game and move on. Weeks, months, years later, he’ll use an incident or stat against a player, to pick at their scabs, to needle, to motivate.
He’s certainly not a man to be trifled with. He delisted Colin Sylvia, who was partial to the social pages and who was totally at odds with the Ross Lyon way. He sacked him with complete and utter contempt. Years before, one of his St Kilda fringe players wanted to sit a fireman’s exam on the Friday before a VFL game. Stuff the exam, Lyon told him, you’re a footballer, not a fireman. The kid defied him and was never heard of again.
Football these days is colder, harder, grimmer. It’s very much a vocation. And it’s a coach’s game. Ross Lyon, for better or worse, is modern football. But he needs a flag. First, he needs to beat Hawthorn, a side he has never quite got a handle on, a side whose coach knows a thing or two about uncompromising football.
There’ll be two dozen laptops on his box tomorrow night, spewing out every football statistic and KPI known to man. The ultimate footballing pragmatist, Lyon knows that for all the increasing complexity, the equation remains deceptively straightforward – a win Friday night and a win the following Saturday afternoon.
Two wins, but one major monkey off the back.
