HE CAN do no wrong, ‘Roosy’.
The Melbourne Footy Club is alive again. Opposition teams no longer blow the Demons away. The members section of the MCG is packed for Melbourne games.
Players who seemed to have little or no future last year are crucial facets of what lies ahead.
Paul Roos’ resuscitation of the Demons is just 11 matches old and a long way from completion, but the revival is genuine.
Even matches in which his team can manage to score only three goals are viewed as positives, given the opposition, Collingwood, kicked only five more.
And when he speaks out against a perceived poor direction of umpiring and umpires, absolutely everyone in the industry listens, and acts.
Melbourne’s challenge now is to convince Roos to formally accept his contractual option on the 2016 season and then to entice him to add a couple of seasons beyond that.
Roos appears open to the 2016 part but has stopped short, publicly at least, of locking it in.
Roos is a rebuilder. Maybe that is all he has set himself to achieve at the Demons. Maybe he will consider his job to be done by the end of 2015, and that, by that stage, he will have righted the Demons to the point where he will have the confidence in someone else to take the club to the next level.
If the chief executive officers of some other clubs, including Richmond, Carlton, Essendon, and the Western Bulldogs aren’t at least privately discussing with their boards about what Roos might be doing in 2016, then they are not doing their due diligence.
Might Roos the rebuilder end up at another struggling club, doing to it what he is currently doing to Melbourne?
The bottom line is this: there is a gun for hire. The challenge, as great as it is, is to go and get him.
Roos-coached teams perform from the moment he takes over. He won six of his first 10 matches at the Sydney Swans when he assumed control midway through 2002, including the final four of that inaugural season.
Even in his final year in charge at the Swans, 2010, after it had been announced he would be relinquishing control to John Longmire, he won an elimination final, and lost a semi-final by just five points.
While only three wins have come his way in 2014, only one defeat – a 93-point round two loss against West Coast - was akin to the beatings that Melbourne experienced seemingly on a weekly basis since 2007.
Too often a coach’s legacy in the AFL is measured only by premierships, and Roos has one of those, and was desperately unlucky not to secure a second.
His work at Melbourne is already legacy-shaping.
Demons’ CEO Peter Jackson is well aware of this. He made it a personal crusade to secure Roos’ signature from midway through 2013.
It took a lot of time, energy and money, and it seems as though it will take more of all of that to get Roos to sign again, for 2016 and beyond.
The gun for hire can’t lose from here.
Twitter: @barrettdamian
