LIKE EXCALIBUR IN THE STONE, DIGIT REMAINS FIRMLY LODGED

So, from what has been said in the media, Richmond is fully committed to Terry Wallace staying on as coach, but according to RFC president Gary March, has a ‘contingency plan’ in place for Season 2009 in case he goes.

In something that didn’t exactly come as the greatest shock since it was last revealed that ANYONE was having an affair with Senator Gareth Evans, coach Terry Wallace indicated he had no intentions of resigning. Given that an argument could be advanced that Terry’s greatest demonstrated abilities were, respectively, getting a coaching job and keeping one, this is hardly out of character.

So if Terry’s got no intention of resigning, and Richmond is committed to Terry Wallace staying on as coach, why would you need or have a contingency plan allowing for his early departure?

Verily, this is what Yul Brynner aptly described in the motion picture The King and I as “a puzzlement”.

The ever-thoughtful Mr March further allowed that in his considered opinion the Richmond team was playing poorly (four losses from four games, including a stunningly disoriented display against the previous consensus choice for 16th best team in a 16 team competition might, if anything, indicate a degree of understatement in Gary’s chin-stroking, judicious summation there), and that clearly “something” needed to change.

Well, if they’re stuck with the players (and they are), and they’re not going to change the coach, one wonders what he imagines that “something” might be. Incorporating more volleyball in the training sessions, to improve reflexes? Encouraging the players to drive to training via an alternative route to give them a different perspective on things? Sitting around hoping the AFL brings back the old VFA Second Division so that Richmond can find a level of competition appropriate to their currently demonstrated abilities?

All of these alternatives seem, err, ‘limited in scope’, to be kind.

The only more terrifying thought for Richmond fans than the notion that the coach has completely lost the ability to connect with players in any meaningful way (i.e. the “way” that results in improved on-field performances) and has nothing more to offer the club – a notion seemingly not entirely unsupported by the prosecution evidence of “Rounds 1-4, 2009”, especially when compared with results achieved by the same coach and player group in 2008 – is the idea that he IS connecting with the players and that this is EXACTLY what he has to offer the club.

Either way, I’m struggling to find any available alternative to the belief that if you were a fan of this football club – and I am, but I’m trying to pursue this logically, while a skerrick of logic still remains available to a defeat-addled brain – you wouldn’t want the hierarchy to just pull the finger out and pursue the only immediate ameliorative measure available, and replace the coach whose efforts patently aren’t working, with another one who might improve matters.

I might as well be honest and say if it were me, I’d ditch Terrific Terry right now, and put Wayne Campbell in there as caretaker for the rest of 2009, on a suck-it-and-see basis. He’s there already, he did some assistant coaching type stuff at Footscray, he was a smart player – not to mention club captain and a Richmond man, the latter always being my preference re Tiger coaches – who showed a good football brain, he seems a good communicator, and age-wise he’s about right for these days (i.e. in terms of being able to relate to the player group, without necessarily being best buddies). If it doesn’t work out, you fish around for someone else at the end of the year. If it does, you’ve found your new coach, and he’s already had the best part of a season to get up to speed.

Right now, there’s nothing to lose. Literally nothing. As in, wins-on-the-board, points from all available AFL games this season to date, NOTHING WHATSOEVER. Unless he’s the only person there who can operate the office coffee machine, I’m struggling to think of a single rational reason why you’d keep Terry Wallace on as coach at this point, and wouldn’t already have said, “Well, it’s been real, Terry - be careful with that door on the way out, or it can give you a real whomp on the buttock-region.”

Otherwise everybody sits around with their thumbs up their cabooses losing game after game while Gary March and the Marchettes try to come up with that elusive “something” that will turn things around, which going on the usual performance of the Richmond brains trust, will turn out to be “something” along the lines of changing the flavour of the sausages at the sausage-sizzles. Actually, that might be too precipitous for this administration. They’d probably just try to change the sizzle.

(The Hobart Mercury had a somewhat less expansive, but nonetheless pungent analysis of the Richmond coaching situation, as can be seen below.)

wallace-and-vomit.jpg

REELING IN THE YEARS – THE DENIS PAGAN STORY

Denis Pagan has put his paw up and said he’s ready to be an AFL coach again. Quick imaginary straw poll of everyone who thinks this is a brilliant idea. Likely positive response – 1 (D. Pagan). Size of survey – 20 million.

Denis Pagan is absolutely ready to coach again at AFL level, and to great success as well, provided the side he coaches is full of experience-hardened, high quality North Melbourne players who he’s known all of since pups, and every other team in the league commits to playing late-90s football with late-90s players. Putting a guy of Pagan’s age in charge of a current AFL team of young guys he’s never dealt with on a football or personal level – well this seems to have ‘genius’ written all over it, much like building a multi-million dollar new home and lacing it with asbestos.

How well did he go last time with a team of non-North Melbourne, non-proven, non-star players? How would he likely go now when we’re all a few more years down the pike, and football is as well? The most charitable interpretation you could put on it is that it’s hardly a safe bet.

I know this is the AFL where it’s always “Anything Can Happen Day”, and everyone ignored all precedent to give Carrara a second crack, but if we accept that, even in such a truly Bizarro World kind of context, there must be some sort of limit, I think we might have just about reached it here.

Maybe it’s a coincidence but you may have noticed that in the last five grand finals, there was only one coach even vaguely approaching Pagan’s age, and that was Leigh Matthews back in 2004, and his side lost. This may represent something of a trend.

(Before that, there were three grand finals in a row featuring older coaches, but one of them in 2002-3 was Matthews, arguably the best coach of the last 20 years at that point, and the other was Mick Malthouse, who lost. The odd man out was Kevin Sheedy, and he was in the middle of a dynasty type of situation at Essendon, in that he was on a McHale-plus length run and virtually unassailable as coach at the time. And in football terms, 2001-2003 is a long time ago now.)

I’m sure there are tons of discarded former coaches who would like nothing better than another crack at the top level, but most of them have the sense to keep their mouths shut about it, or more particularly the sense to sense when time has passed them by.

Denis Pagan is known for his work with young footballers (stemming from his very successful days as a coach in the old Under-19’s competition) and can probably coach juniors until he’s just too worn out to do it anymore, and decides coaching the roses in his home garden would be a preferable option. Why he’d even put his hand up to coach in the AFL serpents’ nest anymore is beyond me, but somewhat like the idea of a personal teleportation device to beat that morning public transport crush, it’s just doesn’t seem a realistic option right now.

VALIDITY OF POINT NOW DEPENDENT ON IDENTITY OF SPEAKER – IT’S OFFICIAL

When I went to The Age website early this week (Tuesday, 21/4/2009) I read this, by Caroline Wilson:

“[Eddie] McGuire was quoted in Friday’s Australian thus: ‘It is more a philosophical concern about the future of the game. We are not sure who is in control of the direction in which the rules and interpretations are taking us. Who is in charge? Is it the football department, the commission, the umpires, the laws of the game committee?’ He was speaking about his club’s agenda for tomorrow’s talks on his concerns for football’s future. Fascinating. It could also be described as Collingwood calling yet another meeting to whinge about umpires. Not that the Magpies are alone.”

I know Caroline’s gimmick * is personalising stories, breaking news, and, for want of a better description, not being entirely backwards in kicking up a stink. That’s all fine, of course – that’s her approach (and hardly hers alone), and there’s more than enough other parties in the footy media playing the straight bat, keeping untidy matters neatly swept away from the public eye, and otherwise showering the football public with a fair amount of blandness, eyewash, and a confetti of statistics.

However, it tends to mean that she’s not as focussed on a deeper or more meticulous analysis of the football issues raised as a result of the general uproar (sometimes one she herself has helped kick up), in terms of a detailed exposition of the various viewpoints raised, let alone evaluation thereof. This may be one example.

Eddie McGuire’s point about “the direction in which the rules and interpretations are taking us” is something that has worried me and plenty of other football fans (and probably commentators, coaches, pundits, players, ex-players, talkback callers, and maybe the kids who sell the ice-creams as well) for some time. “Who is in charge?” Good question. On the evidence to hand – i.e. the matches themselves and how they wind up being umpired as a result of “who is in charge” – WHY those people are still in charge is another valid question.
And Caroline, with nose firmly to the grindstone – and it’s particularly grinding on this occasion – determines out of all those possibilities, that the real issue can be summarised as:
“Fascinating. It could also be described as Collingwood calling yet another meeting to whinge about umpires.”

And, from the broad, sweeping possibilities of everyone finally getting their heads around the dismal blancmange of a miasma of a problem that the administration and application of the games’ laws has become, and maybe DOING something about it, we devolve to a little personal name-calling about Collingwood. **

Not that everyone other than Collingwood fans doesn’t enjoy a little of this practice, but to me this seems like the thin edge of the wedge on this occasion. Now let’s see. We could take on a major problem that’s blighting the game itself, and is urgently in need of addressing, or we could ignore all that and just bag Collingwood.

It seems like the easy way out, to put it mildly.

It’s not even a decent, solid bagging. Not when you follow up “Collingwood calling yet another meeting to whinge about umpires” with the classic each-way bet of “Not that the Magpies are alone.”

Ah, so it’s not a Magpie-specific issue now? Something fundamentally changed in between one sentence and the next, apparently.

Maybe if a lot of people are having a go at how the game is being umpired – and admittedly, this is a longshot – there could just barely be some sort of a problem with how the game is umpired.

Maybe instead of “whinging”, Eddie McGuire was raising legitimate concerns about both the process of how the rules and those vexed and widely loathed “interpretations” are arrived at, administered, and how they are allowed to play out in practice. In that, I’m going to take a wild guess that he would certainly not be ‘alone’.

But knocking the whole debate down to whether Collingwood is whinging again is certainly a handy way of stifling those concerns entirely.
——————————————————–
* [I use “gimmick” here not as a pejorative exactly, but more in the language of pro wrestling, to describe the extent and nature of a public persona or characterisation, and that person’s work, because it’s an exceedingly convenient piece of jargon which has ready application throughout the media.
Derryn Hinch’s “gimmick” is that he exploits news items to try and “get himself over”. (More pro wrestling speak, but I think you’ll gather what it means from the context. Or as John Blackman aptly put it in Hinch’s more prominent, and nominally more public-spirited days, Hinch’s gimmick is that he’s the “Fire-hydrant of the underdog.”)
Tony Greig’s gimmick, in the Channel Nine cricket broadcast context, is to act antagonistic towards the Australian team and inflame the fans.
Mike Sheahan’s gimmick in print is that he frequently raises various – and often rather odd, and/or difficult to define ‘major issues’, tries to put them over as ‘major issues’ apparently because he’s the one that raised them, and then ponderously comes to some supposedly bold and forthright conclusion, which is not-infrequently undercut and undermined by him having an each-way bet all the way through the article.
My gimmick is that I knock stuff and go for laughs.
I suppose I’m using “gimmick” as a jargon-oriented synonym for “approach”, but as, in its pro wrestling coinage – derived from the more general ‘carnie’ speak that most pro wrestling language is, no doubt – it takes in both the public persona and the resulting work, it does seem such a useful and apt term.]

** [I find the “Fascinating” there so tremendously cheesy and patronising. If you’ve got something to say about Collingwood, don’t leave it stuck in your muzzle, let fly with both barrels. If the points raised by McGuire were valid – and no matter who raised them, they were, and emphatically so – they deserved a little better than being squatted on firmly, and covered with a load of “Fascinating.”]
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————