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Ranking the AFL coaches (part 3)

Roar Rookie
21st January, 2014
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Roar Rookie
21st January, 2014
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1157 Reads

Rankings – where every man and his dog can rank whatever he feels like, from which players are the best to which waterboy most efficiently disperses water.

Incidentally, I would rank Melbourne waterboys as the best; they have so many intervals after the opposition has kicked a goal to efficiently disperse water.

Also, it means Melbourne are number one at something for once.

Having ranked the 12th to ninth best AFL coaches in part one and eighth to fifth in part two today I reveal my top four AFL coaches.

4: Chris Scott – Geelong (record: 73 games – 56 wins, 17 losses)
He should’ve retired after winning a premiership in his first season, just so he could go around talking about his 100% strike rate of seasons coached to premierships won.

You missed your opportunity to become immortal Chris! Statisticians in 100 years would reverently speak your name as they saw your perfection, and you threw it all away.

Anyways, Scott has done a masterful job in continuing to build on the Mark Thompson Cats dynasty, winning a flag in 2011 and making the finals in the last two seasons, despite having to absorb the losses of countless premiership heroes and the departure of the great Gary Ablett Junior.

Scott, and the whole Geelong coaching staff, should be given extra credit for the way they’ve managed to successfully integrate new players into the squad, meaning the Cats can contend for finals and maybe even flags for the next five years, rather than experiencing a drop-off like most great teams do when older players leave en masse.

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This year will be a big challenge for Scott and the Cats, as they deal with the loss of more premiership stars, improvements in teams below them and the fact Joel Selwood may leave the game to ply his trade in acting.

If they can make the preliminary finals again, chalk it up as a masterful coaching performance by Scott.

3: John Longmire – Sydney (record: 74 games – 48 wins, 24 losses, two draws)
The Sydney Swans aren’t like any other club, and not least because they have an extra 10% in their salary cap to prevent their players earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from living on the street.

Unlike other clubs, Sydney has managed to pull off a coaching transfer so seamlessly you sometimes forget they pulled off a coaching transfer.

It helps that the person they got to replace Paul Roos was involved as assistant for nearly a decade at the Swans, and is an exceptional coach in his own right.

Longmire managed to win a premiership with a team widely considered to have some good young prospects, but a core filled with players other clubs had no use for and wily veterans who were a few years past their peak.

The Swans of 2014 are a better team than the 2012 Swans were, with the introduction of Buddy Franklin and Kurt Tippett to form an overpowered forward line, as well as the continued growth of youngsters like Dan Hanneberry and Garry Rohan.

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If John Longmire can get Buddy on-side and convince him to play the high pressure brand of football the Swans have made famous, expect another premiership to head to Sydney Harbour.

2: Alastair Clarkson – Hawthorn (record: 213 games – 129 wins, 83 losses, one draw)
Clarkson has now lead the Hawks to two premierships, an outstanding achievement after taking over a club that hadn’t anything spectacular since the great Hawks sides of the 1980s.

He successfully oversaw smart drafting policies so he could mold the team in his own image, successfully crafting a team with the best foot skills the game has ever seen and revolutionising defensive strategies with the stifling pressure of the ‘Clarkson Cluster’, which has since been adopted by almost every team.

And he’s done it all playing an exciting style of football that has been a joy to the neutrals.

A pretty great resume, but the number one position was always going to…

1: Ross Lyon – Fremantle (record: 169 games – 109 wins, 55 losses, five draws)
It had to be Mr Lyon, also known as Ross the Boss, the Freo Messiah, the Wizard of the West and, this name brought to you by St Kilda fans, the ‘F*%!ing traitor’.

Ross Lyon took over the AFL’s most pathetic team, one whose greatest moments involved winning local derbies against the Eagles, and turned it into a ferocious, hungry squad with an incredible will to win, and the best defence since… the Ross Lyon Saints of 2009.

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What Lyon may lack in inspiration with regards to offence, he more than makes up for it with his defensive schemes that stifled the life out of countless defences last year.

The preliminary final against the Swans was one of the finest displays of total team defence in AFL history, as every Docker fanatically tackled, smothered, bumped and applied pressure to a besieged Swans team (as the Channel Seven commentary team helpfully pointed out on no less than 10,000 occasions).

The Swans match was amazing, but it may not have even been Ross’s best coaching job of the finals series, with that honour going to his coaching in the Dockers win against all odds down at Simmonds Stadium against Geelong.

Lyon is clearly one of the best coaches going around, all he lacks is that one premiership to lift him up to be regarded as one of the game’s coaching greats.

This Fremantle team on paper isn’t as good as the Swans or the Hawks, as while they have an exceptional and improving midfield and a number of very good key position players, their 16th-22nd best players just aren’t as good as those of the Swans or the Hawks.

But they do have Lyon, who managed to get St Kilda within two lucky bounces of the ball of two premierships while carrying Raph Clarke and Brett Peake on the roster.

If anyone is going to lead the Dockers to that long-awaited premiership, my bet would be on Ross.

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