AFL football has always been rife with educated guesses about cause and effect, and with bucketloads of wisdom in hindsight.
We’re all guilty of it. And the common denominator in all those conclusions is almost always on-field success, probably fair enough seeing that is supposed to be the bottom line for any AFL club.
And how many other measuring sticks do we have when it comes to a club’s key appointments, the vast bulk of whose work is done away from the public eye, the assessments of their efforts from those outside that loop at best second or third hand?
Take, for example, the appointments of club chief executives. Most of what they do concerns matters well away from the playing field. And it’s more than feasible their work has been excellent even if that of their club’s AFL side has been atrocious.
But name one CEO who has ever been thrown up as a potential rival club or even AFL boss without their club having experienced recent on-field success? No? I couldn’t think of one, either.
The business of assessing coaches doesn’t seem a lot different. If we accept the popular view that player management and psychology plays a bigger role than ever in coaching, and match day strategies and moves less, those who aren’t alongside a coach at a club see less of his most important duties than ever before.
And if, when we did see them, two coaches were given the reins of two groups of players in stark contrast in terms of ability, with predictable results on the scoreboard, could we say definitively that the person in charge of the stronger team turned in the better coaching performance?
What if they had done little but told their talented side just to go out and play, whilst the other coach had cajoled and manipulated their team in every conceivable way searching for the upset, closing the gap considerably but still not enough to get over the line?
Yet how many games can you recall where the victorious mentor was said to have been “out-coached” by his opposite number? Yep, it’s a struggle. And all that’s after they’ve been appointed to their respective roles.
For Carlton’s Brendon Bolton it was success, or the lack of it, measured purely in wins, which determined his fate even after the club so long protested to the contrary.
And so the Blues now begin the process of finding a replacement. North Melbourne, too, after Brad Scott’s departure, has a caretaker installed in Rhyce Shaw, but will also be exploring plenty of coaching options.
But for both, there’s many questions attached. What type of coach? Which of the multitude of areas the job covers do they place most importance upon? And to which advice do they listen?
With the coaching novice but club “favourite son” now widely out of favour since the appointments of Michael Voss, James Hird and Nathan Buckley around a decade ago, senior coaching types have since tended to fall into one of three categories.
There’s the “old hand” who has been there before (eg. Ross Lyon or John Worsfold). There’s the experienced assistant coach (eg. Leon Cameron, Stuart Dew). And more recently, what were but no longer seem left-field appointments, men who have been in and out of the system, but in a variety of roles besides coaching a team (eg. Luke Beveridge, Don Pyke).
With the third-youngest list in the AFL and fourth least-experienced, Carlton clearly needs a candidate who can teach and can relate to a younger generation. Is that all, though?
There’s an argument that having a support base so starved of success, and which for so long now has been urged to show patience and observe the growth of so-called “green shoots”, Carlton also needs to make a priority a coach who can do a little more straight talking directly to fans than did Bolton.
Which isn’t necessarily a reflection on Bolton, either. Rightly or wrongly, without an AFL playing background, the former coach perhaps couldn’t be as much of a straight-shooter, relentless positivity a necessity when harsh public criticism of his players or team’s performance would inevitably elicit a “what have you done?” type response.
Nor can it afford to underestimate the importance, also rightly or wrongly, of a media-friendly coach.
Again, Bolton wasn’t unfriendly with the media. But his inexperience in the level of media commitments a senior coach takes on compared to an assistant saw him still feeling his way after four years, media treated cordially enough, but the young Blues leader without the same sort of “matey” dealings with selected individuals, or savviness about which of them to cultivate.
Yes, a coach shouldn’t have to worry about such things. But if you accept that media and outside pressure can influence decisions on coaches, and it surely did that at least to an extent with Bolton, the more of them kept in confidence or at least on side, the greater the security blanket.
Damian Hardwick and Nathan Buckley both hung on to their jobs with Richmond and Collingwood in recent years despite torrid times. It’s not just coincidence both had plenty of media types in their corner, prepared to at least plead a case on their behalf.
All that, though, comes with this reminder. North Melbourne and Carlton can tick all those boxes and then some. They can do all the interviews, psychological testing, profiling and game situation replicas humanly possible of every potential candidate.
But until the successful applicant actually takes the reins not just for a few weeks but several seasons, they cannot know for sure that a coaching persona that is perfectly suited to another club will fit just as comfortably with their own club’s unique culture, standards, history, pressures and reputation.
On this matter, for the Blues and Roos, one club without a premiership now for just on a quarter of a century, the other flagless for exactly 20 years, wisdom in hindsight simply won’t cut it. But the reality is also that even with all the due diligence in the world, appointing a new coach for an AFL club will also be, still, little more than an educated guess.
Rohan Connolly is one of Australia's foremost sportswriters – a veteran of both broadcast and print media. In the era of sanitised corporate sports media his is a perspective worth exploring. You can read more of Rohan's work at FOOTYOLOGY.
