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Come Saturday evening, Alastair Clarkson may well be a member of a very select group of men to have coached four VFL/AFL premierships.
Through 19 decades, just 11 men have notched up four or more flags.
Collingwood supremo Jock McHale leads the way with seven, Melbourne great Norm Smith won six, while Frank Hughes (Richmond and Melbourne) and John Worrall (Carlton and Essendon) captured five.
The remaining seven led their sides to four premierships.
A win by Hawthorn in this week’s decider against Fremantle would see Clarkson complete a hat-trick, following on from his maiden win in 2008.
To date, only four men have secured a hat-trick, while McHale led the Magpies to four successive flags in the 1920s.
Win or lose this year, at 47 years of age Clarkson has plenty of time to add to his résumé.
Of the four-time premiership coaches, only Dick Reynolds did not coach beyond his mid-50s – Kevin Sheedy (65), Ron Barassi (59), Allan Jeans (58), Tom Hafey (57), David Parkin (57), Leigh Matthews (56).
Clarkson, like all great coaches, has the ability to reinvent himself, and by extension his team.
I can remember sitting alongside former Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett at a luncheon a few years go, discussing Clarkson. He pointed out a little-known fact that ahead of the 2008 season Clarkson flew to Perth several times to pick the brain of inaugural Fremantle coach Gerard Neesham.
Looking back now, Neesham’s coaching philosophy – borrowed from his second sporting love water polo, and based around a chip-and-draw style – is now commonplace across the AFL.
When Neesham tried to implement the style with the early Dockers squad he lacked players with the requisite skill base to regularly perform such a high-possession game under pressure.
Clarkson saw something in the Neesham philosophy and realised he had the players within his group to execute it. His belief culminated in a premiership in 2008.
The following year the Hawks dropped out of the eight, a bitter pill for those at the club to swallow. It was time for Clarkson to again recalibrate the team’s playing style.
He now commands a team that is a joy to watch, with a mix of attacking and defensive abandon when the situation requires.
The success of this Hawks era was built from the ground up. In Clarkson’s first two years at the helm the club finished 14th and 11th, and the decision was taken to rebuild through the draft rather than enter trade battles to find quick-fix experience – a trap many clubs have fallen into.
From the enigmatic Cyril Rioli to the hard-nosed reliability of Josh Gibson, the team possesses the full gamut of players required to succeed.
Each of his premiership-winning teams has achieved success as a result of a series of calculated tweaks.
Each offseason Clarkson wends his way overseas, where he visits other successful sporting clubs in an attempt to pick up what he can and mould it to the game of Australian football.
An MBA and a Bachelor of Sports Science are testament to the energies Clarkson puts into his job.
Like Jeans, Hafey and Denis Pagan, Clarkson was not a star on the field in the mould of Matthews, Dick Reynolds or Malcolm Blight. His 11-year, 134-game playing career with North Melbourne and Melbourne resulted in just five Brownlow Medal votes.
He showed during his time as a player that he possessed a ruthless streak, something very much displayed in the infamous ‘Battle or Britain’ post-season game at The Oval in London in 1987, between the Kangaroos and Carlton.
A king hit on the Blues’ Ian Aitken left him with a broken jaw and Clarkson with a four-week ban.
His temper has at times earned him unwarranted headlines as a coach too – a $15,000 fine for confronting and threatening Essendon’s Matthew Lloyd after an on-field incident involving Brad Sewell, and a four-week ban as a runner for his young son’s football team as a result of abusing a teenage umpire, having the day before punched a hole in the wall of the MCG coaches’ box.
But while his temper may sometimes get the better of him, he has the ability to remain cool and calm in the heat of battle.
His players – past and present – speak glowingly of him, as do many of the men who have shared the coaches’ box with him.
Like Hafey and Jeans, he has helped spawn the careers of many current coaches.
Adam Simpson spent four years as an assistant to Clarkson, and will coach against him this Saturday in the season’s grand finale.
The man adjudged by the AFL Coaches Association as its best this season, the Bulldogs’ Luke Beveridge, is yet another disciple of Clarkson.
Clarkson boasts a 62.2 per cent success rate in home-and-away matches, but more tellingly his success rate in finals is 71.4 per cent.
The latter number, according those who frame the markets, will increase further after Saturday. If it does, Clarkson will move a step closer to greatness as a coach.