THE COMINGS, goings and stayings in the coaching fraternity is great fodder for media comment every year.

With seven coaches in the final year of existing contracts, the amount of rumour, innuendo and speculation will be rife all season.

It will be the case of ‘a team playing well should re-sign the existing coach’ and ‘a team losing a few games should think about a change’. That at least will be the normal process if history is anything to go by.

In the eyes of the fans a coach is only ever as good as his last month.

Overall the coaching function is largely misunderstood and the coaching analysis mostly uninformed.

The coaching myths and the coaching realities are poles apart.

I was part of a discussion about coaching with the 3AW Sports Tonight team last week when it was suggested that Mark Thompson would be the coach in most demand. It was a view that I disputed.

Coaching myth number one
The coach of the best team must be the best coach

Allan Jeans summed it up well when he would often say that he didn’t want to be the best coach, he wanted to coach the best team.

So let’s get it right. The most important element in being a successful coach is having a talented group of players to coach. As I wrote in this column last week, good recruiting is the lifeblood of any team.

If I had to give a percentage, a successful team is 80 per cent playing ability and 20 per cent what a coach does with them. Of the coach’s contribution, nine tenths is getting the basics right and one tenth would be devising a game plan that maximises your strengths.

The longer I coached the more I became convinced of this fact.

Judging the effectiveness of that coaching 20 per cent is very difficult for even club insiders which is why win/loss ratios and finals records are what all coaches will eventually live or die by.

I have coached against every current coach except Michael Voss and I could not tell you with any surety who is good and who is not.

What is certain is that Mick Malthouse must be a very good coach.

He has taken three clubs – the Bulldogs, Eagles and Collingwood – to top four finishes. You can be lucky once , maybe twice but definitely not three times.

The problem is that the only observable part of the coaching week is the two hours of match play.

Coaching myth number two
During a game the coach by his actions can have a significant bearing on altering the course of the match.

Occasionally yes but mostly no.

While the game itself is the obvious make or break in terms of winning or losing, and length of coaching tenure, it is a small proportion of the week-to-week, month-to-month coaching role.

It was not until I coached that I fully realised that players will attempt to play as they have been trained, what they are drilled to do and what is constantly reinforced in the performance feedback sessions.

For example, if players don’t practice their tackling technique during training then there is little chance they will do it well during a game.

Coaching is like the tap dripping water on a stone. Sometimes it takes a thousand drips before the stone is marked. Repetition and persistence to keep pushing the key themes is a necessity.

Convincing players to perform their role within the team plans is a fundamental of the coaching art.

For the Brisbane Lions in 2001 a specific game all of a sudden made this cloudy concept crystal clear. In round seven of that year Carlton inflicted a massive thrashing. It was a humiliating loss.

During the post-game review we were able to pin-point that the Blues’ lesser lights that day played a crucial role in supporting the Carlton stars, tagging and harassing  our prime movers, blocking, shepherding and clearing space for their initiators.

It was like switching a light on in a dark room.

The commitment to each player focusing on and performing their assigned role became a foundation theme of the Lions’ premiership era.

None more than Alastair Lynch and Craig McRae.

Lynchie knew his job was to provide a front-of-goal-square target for the long pressured kick forward. “Fly” McCrae knew his job was to give ground-level crumbing support to the Lynch marking contest and then work his butt off to chase and tackle if the opposition won possession.

Like I said, good players make good coaches.

I really feel for the coaches who regard themselves as a career coach. When the average salary is around half a million dollars per annum, it creates enormous pressure to maintain the job as a professional livelihood.

That kind of money just cannot be replaced outside one of the 16 senior positions and as the stats show us the Kevin Sheedy-type tenure of 20 years plus is rare indeed.

Despite these professional considerations it leads me to what I hope remains a myth:

Coaching myth number three
Coaches can be poached by opposition clubs

My belief is the senior coach must be the epicentre of the team-comes-first philosophy.

This can only be ingrained through a coach living this ideology in everything he says and does.

Any coach who bails out on one club to join another is betraying this most basic coaching commandment, of always putting the team interest first.

Maybe it is just me, but seriously considering a job at an opposition club is just not what a coach does.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.