Coach Is Clarkson a supercoach or did he just get lucky at the Hawks? Has his time come and gone?

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He's been there 18 months now. I find it bizarre they let McKay go and didnt replace him. KP stocks are awful.
Relying on Zuhaar as the second fwd also seems crazy.

I realise its not easy to recruit good KPPs
Pop quiz! Which is Ben McKay and which is the awful player we replaced him with?

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It only goes to prove that you can be a good coach even with ordinary players, but if you don't have great players you won't become a great coach! Fans need to remember that behind every one of these super fit finely tuned athletes is a wrathful coach with a hair trigger temper showing them all what temporary insanity is all about. Clarko flies off the handle all the time and maybe his "supercoach" powers have come and gone?
 

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Luck can play a part in winning a flag, but you can't win a flag then a three-peat years later and call it luck.

Each time there might have been elements of luck as there are in any premiership through the season, but this is probably the stupidest OP title I've seen.

He could well be past it now, or he might not be, it's too early to say, but it doesn't change his achievements at the Hawks.
 
2008 it was hardwick and viney that made the premiership winning moves on grandfinal day

2009-11 a few injuries and hawks were hopeless

2012 got shown up by a fairly average Swans side
2013 lucky freo couldn't kick straight

14-15, dominance, but surely anyone could've got those results with that talent

16 onwards he spent too long trying to stop a drop, rather than coaching for the future. Gameplan wasn't working and refused to make changes (sign of a not so good coach)
 
I'm not flat out disagreeing with you but if what you said was the full story then how do you explain Buckley out, McRae in and shazam???

I think all elite sport is a matter of fractions of a percent. The right coach for the right group of players at the right time can be the difference between missing finals and a premiership. Incredible but I think the facts back this up.

Pies had made finals 18-20, then finished 17th in 2021. They still had an experienced core. I don’t think anyone was expecting such a quick bounce back but they had a lot more to work with than North in the same period.
 
2008 it was hardwick and viney that made the premiership winning moves on grandfinal day

2009-11 a few injuries and hawks were hopeless

2012 got shown up by a fairly average Swans side
2013 lucky freo couldn't kick straight

14-15, dominance, but surely anyone could've got those results with that talent

16 onwards he spent too long trying to stop a drop, rather than coaching for the future. Gameplan wasn't working and refused to make changes (sign of a not so good coach)
Can't tell if this is your genuine opinion or you're sarcastically ridiculing the premise of this thread.
 
Can't tell if this is your genuine opinion or you're sarcastically ridiculing the premise of this thread.

Bit of column a, but of column b.

I think he was tactically ahead of the game with zoning. I think he was lucky that he had a core group to work with when he started

2008 it was hardwick and viney on grandfinal day that made the big moves that turned the game, but clarko go us to the big dance.

2013 we were lucky freo couldn't kick straight early, but they were kicking poorly due to working their arse off for a shot
 
I’ll keep posting it as 10 wins out of 87 is ridiculously bad, and Clarko was walking into a side very much at ground zero, way less to work with than when he got to hawthorn in 2005.

It’s going to take a long time, and I’m not sure Clarko has the stomach for it now.
 

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I'm not flat out disagreeing with you but if what you said was the full story then how do you explain Buckley out, McRae in and shazam???

I think all elite sport is a matter of fractions of a percent. The right coach for the right group of players at the right time can be the difference between missing finals and a premiership. Incredible but I think the facts back this up.
Clarkson had a better list than Buckley and Mcrae and won many premierships reflecting that.

In a way is Clarkson a bad coach like Thompson?? Thompson should have won more, should Clarkson have won more?
 
I don't think any supporter can have an opinion on who's a great, good, fair, crap AFL coach. We're not in the inner sanctum seeing how they go about the job.

Having been around team sports and coaches in my time however, I know one thing though for sure. The ability, character, individual and collective accountability, and the connectedness of the playing group, is much more important than a coach. If a roster doesn't have those factors within its playing group, then a coach isn't going to do much. In my opinion, the praise, critique, or downright bollocking of one player to another, has more impact on players than the coach.

I've seen a guy who I believe was the best coach I've worked with, miss finals two years in a row and get the punt because he didn't get results. On the other hand, I've seen two guys who were the most ill-prepared and average coaches, win premierships and still get the punt because they were just shit coaches. The difference in the results was down to the playing group.

I think the impact of a coach is made in recruiting the right players for their team. A lot of coaches don't tend to get that opportunity. Clarkson did with Hawthorn.
 
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Yeah, this is what I came here to say. That flag was absolutely Clarkson's flag, and it was a massive achievement.

Because Hawthorn went on to win a three-peat five years later, people forget just how massive an upset that was (barring the Geelong supporters who were there like I was :'( ). Geelong started that game as massive favourites, and just kept pinging it into the forward line like flies going into a spiderweb.

The plans around corralling Ablett Jr and Steve Johnson were genius, too. Two of the most damaging footballers of their time had 68 touches between them, and somehow we still lost.

The rushed behinds were absolute genius. Not only did they take the sting out of our defensive pressure, they also unsettled us because it wasn't pretty.

People like Malthouse and Lyon saw, what happened, and that Grand Final changed football forever.

If you've only started watching footy in the last 15 years, I cannot tell you how much the sport changed in the five years around that era.

Yep Geelong 08 losing would have been like Essendon not winning in 2000.
 
It only goes to prove that you can be a good coach even with ordinary players, but if you don't have great players you won't become a great coach! Fans need to remember that behind every one of these super fit finely tuned athletes is a wrathful coach with a hair trigger temper showing them all what temporary insanity is all about. Clarko flies off the handle all the time and maybe his "supercoach" powers have come and gone?

Entirely possible. Though I don’t think anyone is doing anything much with current list north, they just have to grin and bear it for now.

They have a chance against hawthorn this week after a horrific draw first 5 games.

Ross Lyon has an experienced enough list to maximise what St Kilda have and make them tough to beat, North don’t have that at all.
 
He’s been a very good coach but wouldn’t shock me at all if the game has passed him by a bit.

That’s not to say he can’t coach anymore, just that the rest of the league has caught on to what worked previously and maybe Clarko hasn’t evolved much.

Same thing happened with Mick Malthouse at Carlton. He insisted on playing dour boundary hugging footy while the rest of the league had changed.

Still though a coach is only as good as the personnel they have available. Obviously there have always been coaches always able to overachieve with the talent available but generally they still have some fairly good players.

The North side as it currently stands is awful. Their best player is probably Sheezel who is in his second year and nowhere near a complete player yet. Then in terms of other guys who are a bit more mature and have shown genuine ability it’s Larkey and LDU. Larkey seems to be struggling this year with how little talent is around him inside 50. LDU isn’t involved nearly as much as a gun midfielder needs to be. Outside of that the side playing is pretty much a bunch of inexperienced kids and mediocre mature aged guys.

In terms of his time at the Hawks, they had some absolute guns obviously but he always seem to get a lot of pretty mediocre players and he also helped turn some unknown guys into really good players. I don’t think that was luck on his part.
 

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Coach Is Clarkson a supercoach or did he just get lucky at the Hawks? Has his time come and gone?

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