IT NEVER ceases to amaze me how football history continually repeats itself.

Last third of the season, a coach with an uncertain future whose team suffers a 100-point plus thrashing followed by the senior coaching position changing hands.

The Crows and Neil Craig last week, Melbourne and Dean Bailey this week.

There might be very different issues in play at the two clubs but the end result follows the precedent that has been well set over the years.

Only one position changes, the senior coach.

Every senior coach knows that his position is where the buck stops and nothing will ever change that fact, but the reality is the micro-management control function of the coach is very different to what it was even a decade ago.

Where coaches were once at the authoritarian end of the management scale, now the increasingly large football departments and formalised player leadership groups have forced a much more collaborative decision-making process.

I remember the overriding theme when as the new coach I first met with the Brisbane Lions players at the end of 1998.

The club was coming off a fractured year on and off the field and my simple message to those involved was that from then on I expected coaches to coach, players to play and managers to manage.

Ultimately, while each group needs to help each other, concentrating on your core role and having faith in others to do theirs is the most important building block to being a good team.

It was a non-negotiable for me, but it wasn't that unusual at the time.

Back then every senior coach knew that the buck for team performance stopped with him. If you didn't live up to expectations then yours would be the position that was changed.

I only stopped coaching three years ago, but even in that short time the senior coach is now less hands-on responsible for the end performance of his team than he was.

With the growth of the off-field coaching operation and the delegation to assistant coaches, conditioning coaches and the like, the senior coach is largely now head of an off-field operation of 10 to 20 people.

At the same time we've seen a trend towards more powerful and more organised leadership groups, with senior players encouraged and empowered to be heavily involved in decisions that affect the playing group.

The theory for this progression is valid enough - with increased encouragement and empowerment should come greater ownership and responsibility.

But with ownership and responsibility should also come accountability.

And while all coaches understand that final accountability will eventually and inevitably end with them, the many assistant coaches and senior players who have contributed to the team situation that led to the demise of Craig and Bailey will again hide under the anonymity of group involvement.

It proves that it's not whose fault it is that matters; what counts is who gets the blame.

In recent years the Leading Teams model of player empowerment has been adopted to some extent by all teams and every club has a formal leadership group heavily involved in matters traditionally left to coaches and administrators.

Let's remove the cloak of anonymity and name names.

The Adelaide leadership group comprises captain Nathan Van Berlo, Ben Rutten, Michael Doughty, Scott Thompson and the now retired Scott Stevens.

The Melbourne leadership group comprises captain Brad Green, vice-captains Aaron Davey, Jared Rivers and a reinstated Brent Moloney, plus youngsters Nathan Jones and Jack Grimes.

If I had space here I'd also list the coaching support staff members at Adelaide and Melbourne. For they, like the senior players, were happy to enjoy the delegated empowerment yet are now content to slip quietly under the radar after their former coaches have moved on.

To me, the lack of accountability demanded of player leadership groups and players in general comes partly from the myth perpetuated by some commentators that game plan rather than player performance is why games are won and lost.

The problem is that players, board members and fans can become convinced that the coach's game plan is responsible for the failures, not the players' execution of it.

While an effective game plan is important, it will be useless without players executing well their basic skills, working as a cohesive team and pressuring the opposition into error.

Bad matches happen, but I've always believed that a complete annihilation comes from a lack of on-field leadership.

Strong effective on-field leadership is the fabric that holds teams together in tough times.

And while acknowledging that even great teams with great leadership will experience an occasional big loss, there can be no denying Melbourne's record this year.

Their average losing margin in nine losses is 66 points.

That simple statistic tells me the Demons on-field leadership has been absolutely deplorable.

It collapsed completely at Geelong on Saturday when the Melbourne team looked like a bunch of individuals simply wearing the same jumper.

To my knowledge the Melbourne player leadership group led by captain Brad Green remains unchanged even after the weekend debacle.

From my experiences and observations, the formal leadership group model is merely a framework that depends totally on the players who are being empowered having the wherewithal to justify the empowerment they are given.

Working with former Geelong premiership captain Tom Harley on Channel Seven, it is clear he is an outstanding young man who clearly justified being empowered to be a big part of the decision-making process at the Cats.

Also, I've had enough to do with Collingwood captain Nick Maxwell to be certain he, too, has what it takes to justify this important leadership responsibility.

Similarly, from my coaching days it was evident that even before the Leading Teams model had come into vogue there was no doubting the qualities of Tony Shaw, our premiership captain at Collingwood, and Michael Voss, our premiership captain at the Lions.

Like Tom and Nick, they were captains who could more than justify being involved in key decision-making processes over and above their primary role as players.

The concept of empowering player leadership groups to help run their own teams is justified if they are capable of the responsibility and it does not adversely affecting their core role as on-field performers.

If they cannot the results can be disastrous.

Basically one size does not fit all and a good dose of authoritarian coaching style might be just what the Demons need at this stage of their development, because their player leadership group is just not getting it done.  

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