Long road proves better for rival coaches

It is the thing modern football continues to struggle with - the more you do something, the better you get at it.

When it comes to AFL coaches, the game keeps on trying to pluck them from the ranks of freshly-retired star players, rather than looking for those with the best grounding.

This is despite recent history telling us that while a long apprenticeship is no guarantee of success, doing no apprenticeship is fraught with danger.

Brisbane hired Michael Voss on the basis of his record as a player and one of the most disastrous trading expeditions in history doomed his tenure.

Essendon hired James Hird on the basis of his club legend status and the legend oversaw a scandal of unprecedented proportions in the AFL.

Conversely Ross Lyon and Ken Hinkley, the coaches in tomorrow night's semifinal between Fremantle and Port Adelaide, did their hard yards in the coaching school of hard knocks and are now flourishing.

Lyon's grounding after a 129-game playing career mainly at Fitzroy came over 11 years at three clubs: Richmond from 1996 assisting Robert Walls, Carlton from 2000 assisting David Parkin and Denis Pagan, and Sydney from 2004 assisting his friend and former Lions teammate Paul Roos, before his coaching break came at St Kilda in 2007.

Hinkley, who played a handful of games alongside both Lyon and Roos at Fitzroy before his best football at Geelong, retired after a third grand final loss in 1995 and 132 games, embarking on a great country coaching career which netted premierships for home town Camperdown and Geelong suburban club Bell Park, before Mark Thompson lured him to the Cats as an assistant in 2004.

He excelled in every aspect of coaching except for the ability to land a senior position, interviewing unsuccessfully for jobs at Richmond, Geelong and St Kilda.

A couple of years into his assistant coaching tenure at Gold Coast, Hinkley seemed destined to only ever be a senior assistant, albeit a very good one.

Roos, a close friend of Lyon's and an admirer of both men, says they are proof of how far football has to go when it comes to finding the next great coach.

"We are still pretty raw, everyone, in picking coaches," Roos said.

"Common sense tells you that the more you coach the more qualified you are. Kenny is a great example, who we are so pleased got an opportunity because going back a few years ago most guys who had gone for two jobs and not got them, their chances of getting a third crack were just about impossible.

"It is a step forward for the industry. Just because you run second for one job doesn't mean that when the next job comes up you are not the best person for the job.

"It has been really good for Kenny to be successful and it has probably opened up a whole new process for other guys that might have missed out once or twice."

Roos admits he never saw the senior coach inside either man when they were together at Fitzroy and in fairness, he says, they probably did not see the senior coach in him either.

Hinkley was a "super-talented" but quiet youngster who arrived from the country and probably needed the "rocket" of leaving a club to bring out his best.

"He was a typical, talented young country kid and I guess like all of us when we arrive at a footy club, you are pretty young and naive and you don't know what is going to happen and then you get hit with pre-season training and that whacks you between the eyes," Roos said.

Lyon was also very talented but troubled by groin and back injuries for much of his career.

"When he first arrived he got really frustrated by the injury," Roos said. "Ross trained really hard but in those days you probably needed to be a natural athlete more so than you do now because they didn't have the training programs to bring the lesser athletes up to speed.

"The absolute professionalism that exists today allows you to bridge the gap a bit with diet, recovery, all those sorts of things which didn't exist back then when you went to training and then went to work or school or whatever.

"He always trained really hard and ran as hard as he could. He just wasn't as naturally fit aerobically.

"They have both taken similar paths. Rossy started with Wallsy and it took him a fair while to get an opportunity.

"Kenny was probably a bit the same, he got overlooked by a couple of clubs and then he went up to Gold Coast and thought this is pretty much it, I don't think I will be a senior coach and then suddenly an opportunity came for him.

"I think the fact that they both had really long apprenticeships - there is a real similarity between the two and that has probably helped rather than hindered them, no question."

If Hinkley had all but given up on the opportunity to be a senior coach, Roos is not convinced that the thought of being one had crossed Lyon's mind until he was approached about the St Kilda job at the end of 2006.

"I think it came out of the blue," Roos said.

"The St Kilda job came up and there were a number of candidates and then someone rang Rossy, who hadn't even applied for it.

"I think it sprung out of nowhere and while I don't think he had seen himself as a senior coach, when the opportunity came about then he started thinking about things like - what is my presentation going to be like, what is my game plan, what do I stand for?"

That said, the type of coach Lyon is, and the success he has had is no surprise to Roos.

"I know him extremely well. He is a really honest guy," Roos said.

"He was always going to be very focused and set in the things that he wanted to do and that he wouldn't waver from those things.

"Everyone gets criticism as a senior coach, it doesn't matter how good or bad you are, but I always thought that he would be true to his values and true to what he wanted from his game plan."

Roos tips a "tight, tough" final on Saturday night, impressed by the defensive mechanisms of both clubs.

"The team that takes its chances is the one that is going to win," he said.