Four-time premiership mentor Leigh Matthews believes Paul Roos is the perfect candidate to succeed Kevin Sheedy as coach of AFL newcomers Greater Western Sydney.
Roos, Sydney’s 2005 premiership coach, stepped down at the end of the 2010 season and has stated his reluctance to coach again.
A report on the Nine network’s The Footy Show suggested 64-year-old Sheedy would coach the Giants for a second season in 2013 and then move into an ambassadorial role.
“Paul Roos would be ideal. You’ll replace an icon with an icon,” Matthews said on Friday.
“He’s so well known in Sydney, so that would be fantastic.
“I don’t know where he’s thinking in terms of his coaching — the fact that he’s going to coach the other Sydney team when he’s been so strongly aligned with the Swans, I don’t know whether that would sit that well with him,” Matthews told the AFL’s website.
“But from the Giants’ point of view, he would be ideal.”
Sheedy gave his strongest indication yet on Friday that this season will not be his last as GWS coach.
“I doubt it. I’ll annoy them for a while,” the 64-year-old said in Canberra ahead of the clash with Melbourne.
Present Sydney coach John Longmire, a former assistant coach under Roos, says he can’t see the laid-back 49-year-old throwing his hat back into the ring to be a senior coach again.
“His hair’s starting to grow back, but he certainly hasn’t got any grey hairs, and every time I’ve seen him he’s been down at Coogee having a coffee,” Longmire told reporters on Friday.
“I can only take him at his word, what he says publicly and what he says privately.
“But his actions — sitting back having a latte in Coogee — suggests he’s not ready for the big jump back into senior coaching.”
Roos is the head of the Swans’ junior academy and is also a TV commentator and newspaper columnist.
The former Fitzroy and Sydney champion said in an interview last month he wasn’t interested in coaching again.
“People were asking me last year and I said no then, and really, it hasn’t changed,” he said.
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