Reptilia
Club Legend
you are seriously second to none in the amount of effort you put into a post. Does it come easy to you? I have a lot of things I want to say but I just never have the time to put that much effort in. Nice work.Yebiga - as somebody who, at the beginning of this whole saga, was in favour of a senior, experienced coach, I can see where you're coming from on a number of points. Specifically, I understand your concerns about who we have surrounding the coach, and I too doubt whether there is enough support there for a rookie coach to develop and be successful. However, I do think your emotional attachment to the idea of an experienced coach is clouding your judgement a little bit.
My first point is simply that we are almost entirely in the dark about this process and the candidates. A month ago most of us had no idea who Luke Beveridge was. It's ridiculous to me that somebody sitting on the outside, having never had anything to do with him personally, can have such a strong opinion on the guy. I realise that your objection is more regarding his standing as a rookie, moreso than him personally, but your opinion is bordering on, "The club should ignore who it thinks is the best appointment and focus solely on appointing an experienced head coach." You were having a go at the club a few pages back for making decisions based on video interviews but to me your concept of rubbishing the positives of a coach because he's never been a head coach is much, much more unprofessional than an interview method that's used in a hell of a lot of organisations worldwide as an integral part of the appointment process. This is about finding the person that the club believes is the best man or woman to take us forward, and that can't be done effectively by immediately putting a line through 90% of the candidates before even speaking to them. For all we know the committee shared your views, but the experienced coaches interviewed poorly and did nothing to inspire them to believe they could take the club forward. Now if that was the case - as it seems it was - how on Earth can you justify selecting any of them? "These guys were all bad, and I don't think any of them can improve us as a side, but we have to choose one of them because they're the only available experienced coaches. Want to pull a name out of a hat?"
Secondly, there aren't a lot of quality ex-coaches around. A perusal of the poll turns up the following names: Mark Williams, Brett Ratten, Gary Ayres, Rodney Eade, Brenton Sanderson and Mark Thompson. The easy ones to remove are Rodney Eade - appointed elsewhere and it was never going to happen anyway - and Brenton Sanderson - sacked only this year because the players under him had lost faith in their direction; leaving Williams, Ratten, Ayres and Thompson. Ayres failed at two clubs and has been out of the AFL system for ten years - he's simply too far out of the loop and not good enough anyway. Thompson has a number of issues (that, according to some, have even led the AFL to caution certain teams), as well as having made it very, very clear that he's in it for Hird's job. Ratten never wanted the job. Williams appears the last man standing. Port finished on top of the ladder for three consecutive years and only got to one grand final - which they won. He was also on the wrong side of the biggest grand final loss in history, and the game appeared to go past him late in his tenure, before he was eventually sacked. I don't know about you, but none of these guys fill me with a lot of confidence - even if they are 'experienced'.
To address the concern I mentioned in the first paragraph about the team surrounding the head coach, I raise two points: 1) the club has already identified this as an issue and has moved on a number of support staff, and have also begun searching for an experienced head for the rookie coach to work alongside; and 2) this is mostly the work of the head coach himself. In my opinion this was one of McCartney's biggest failings - he was unable to surround himself with assistants that he trusted to take the workload, nor was he able to create a cohesive, successful coaching group. It's not a matter of the club just throwing random highly-rated assistants at the coach and saying, "Here, make this work;" it's very much a responsibility of the coach to find a system that works. Beveridge was appointed as the head of coaching altogether at St Kilda for next year, and has a successful history in business where organisational understandings and appointments are vital - if we appoint him head coach, I have no doubt he'll be able to find the right people to surround himself with. This is not something that Garlick/Gordon/Lowe etc can do by themselves.
I understand a lot of your concerns and even share some of them. I know you have little faith in the board and executive team given the circumstances of the past month or so and I don't blame you. I also think the likes of Gordon and Garlick have a lot to answer for and I have serious concerns about how McCartney's initial "review" was handled. But you can't argue the fact that, incompetent or not, they're privy to a lot more information than we are about both the candidates and the state of the club, and are in a much better place to decide upon the best way forward than we are.
Having an opinion on the coaching appointment is fine - but you're getting incredibly worked up and negative without really knowing a lot of the circumstances. It's just not worth it. I'm not at all sold on Beveridge, but at the same time, you've simply gotta trust the club to make the right call on this. They know much more than we do on the subject and only they can know why he won out against all these experienced guys. Time will tell, but for now, get excited by the fact that the club thinks he is the man to take us forward from here.