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The accidental coach
Rohan Connolly | July 11, 2008
Some people choose their vocations. And others have their vocations choose them. Such was the case with Geelong coach Mark Thompson.
The reigning premiership coach leads the Cats for the 200th time this afternoon against Fremantle at Skilled Stadium. It's his ninth season in the job, his team a hot favourite to make it two flags in a row. Yet, but for an accident of timing, none of it might ever have happened.
Thompson, a triple premiership back-pocket at Essendon, had famously skippered the "Baby Bombers" to the 1993 premiership, but by the end of 1995 was tired, sore, and wanted to retire.
Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy talked him into playing so that he would reach his 200-game milestone. Thompson stood down from the captaincy and, literally, dragged his ageing body across the line. He retired almost immediately, mid-season. Then fate intervened.
Thompson was going to go back to running the electrical business he shared with his brother Steve. More than happily. But at the same moment, Essendon reserves coach Mark Williams accepted a job as an assistant with the newly formed Port Adelaide. Suddenly, the Bomber seconds were without a coach, halfway through a season.
Thompson stepped into the breach. Enjoyed it. Spent the next two years as an assistant to Sheedy. He then worked under Denis Pagan in 1999 as part of a Kangaroos' premiership campaign. Come the end of that season, the senior job at Geelong was his.
"I was lucky, really," he remarked in an extensive interview with The Age back in 2000, just five games into his now near decade-long tenure. "I had no plans, I was going to get back into the business, just work hard there and have a spell from footy. When they asked, I thought I might as well give it a try."
Given that Thompson is now Geelong's second-longest-serving coach, behind only the legendary Reg Hickey, the Cats are eternally grateful he did. Not that this milestone seems to mean much to the man himself.
"It means nothing, really," he said earlier this week. "This game should all be about just the players, I reckon, the ones that put on the show. The coaches don't put on the show."
Fair enough. But could Geelong possibly be putting on as spectacular show as it has these past 1 seasons were it not for the philosophies now embedded so deeply in the Cats' playing culture, and displayed week after week by a playing group, nearly all of whom have spent their entire careers under Thompson's tutelage?
Today is also Geelong assistant coach Brendan McCartney's 200th game with the Cats. He met Thompson when they coached against each other at reserves level in 1999, Thompson with the Kangaroos, McCartney with Richmond.
One of the first men Thompson picked to join him on what has become a highly successful journey, McCartney has long been his boss's right-hand man, the pair, according to fellow assistant Brenton Sanderson, are "as thick as thieves".
Asked to pinpoint the cornerstones of Thompson's success, McCartney nominations a fiercely competitive drive and a tremendous capacity to cajole the best out of young people.
It was a capacity Thompson himself recognised very early in the job, commenting during that 2000 interview: "I've just found it to be so rewarding that you can actually help other people. You get young people's faith just by talking to them and with encouragement and a bit of explanation into how you want them to play. It's just a tremendous feeling to think that you've helped in that process."
And eight years on, the coach has that process down to a very fine art. "The strength of his coaching has always been an ability to teach the game to young people," McCartney says. "To teach them a method of play that (a) they can identify with, (b) helps them build a career, and (c) fits his philosophy of how a team should function. His best coaching has always been one-on-one, or in small groups.
"You can see that visible connection with those boys he drafted back in that first draft in '99. Four of them (Joel Corey, Paul Chapman, Cameron Ling and Corey Enright) have gone on to have long-term careers and will be remembered as four greats of our club, and then the same thing happened a couple of years later (with Jimmy Bartel, James Kelly, Steve Johnson and Gary Ablett).
"He was probably the first person to ring them after (recruiting manager) Stephen Wells had called their names out. And he always had so much time for them. He was hard on them and firm with them, but he always gave them time."
Sanderson had already been a Geelong player for five seasons when Thompson arrived as coach, but took his game to greater heights still, winning a best and fairest. In his second season as an assistant coach with the Cats, he finds the same traits presenting themselves in their new relationship.
"He was on the same level as the players. It never felt like he was ordering you around, and it's the same as a coach," Sanderson says. "Even though he's head coach and has three assistants underneath him, we always have pretty healthy debates, and it never feels like he's standing over us.
"I think he's very caring about individuals. He's interested in players' lives outside footy, and also with the people he works with, it's not just about footy with him. That might not be obvious to people outside the bubble we work in, but it's about all those buttons you've got to press with people to get them to play good footy, or make them comfortable around their work."
Says McCartney: "He's been fantastic to work for. He gives you the confidence to do your job and guides you along the way. He's able to impart his views on the game without ramming them down your throat. It's a really good managerial style. And he has a lot of fun. Doesn't take himself too seriously."
The fun part has been made a lot of lately, with the Cats seemingly on auto-pilot, and much replayed footage of the coach daring to laugh in the box during a game, and, horror of horrors, chomping down on a salad roll.
McCartney is quick to qualify on both that front, and the suggestion that this champion team is practically coaching itself at the moment.
"You shouldn't be fooled by the demeanour," he says. "He still coaches this team very strongly and hard.
"He has certain standards he expects, and he makes sure it gets done."
Geelong captain Tom Harley is the on-field lieutenant who ensures Thompson's jobs get done.
He, Matthew Scarlett, Darren Milburn and David Wocjinski were the only Cats already at the club when the coach arrived.
Like McCartney, Harley has watched Thompson grow into his role, but from a playing perspective. And like McCartney, he, too, is often bemused and, sometimes, he says, irked by the public misconceptions about his boss.
"He gets misrepresented in the media, I reckon," Harley says. "You've heard people say he doesn't care enough about the team, and that he's too laconic and that things just roll along, which is just totally wrong, because he's very serious about his footy.
"I can assure you that he's extremely professional and absolutely ruthless and committed to winning.
"He does have a ruthless, competitive streak, and I think he's a perfectionist, too, crosses all the 't's and dots the 'i's."
Which made the nightmare season that 2006 proved to be even harder to take.
Reams have been written about the Cats' slide two years ago from a popular premiership contender pre-season to also-ran.
About whether or not Thompson was close to getting the sack, and about the post-season review that revamped the club's football department, turning upside down the fitness regime, expanding Steven Hocking's role, bringing Neil Balme into the mix as football manager and relieving the coach of some of his less-football-oriented tasks.
The bottom line, says McCartney, was a coach with more time and energy to focus on what he did best, bringing the absolute best out of the players at his disposal.
"He certainly relaxed, gave the players more responsibility, and I think became really confident with the people working around him, able to know he could just go on with building a team capable of having success knowing he had people around him who would get the job done for him."
Geelong as a club and a team, clearly has.
And looks likely to go on getting it done for some time yet.
As for how long its "accidental coach" will be overseeing that process, well, that's anyone's guess, even for his closest coaching confidant. "I know 'Bomber' very well," says McCartney, "but there's not many people in this world that know all his thoughts. He's like most people in that high-pressure environment, they do keep certain things close to their chest."
What McCartney does know, however, and what Sanderson and Harley also agree upon, is that their boss, in the first year of a new deal with his now long-term "client", is doing his job better than ever.
The fire is still in the belly, says Harley. So, adds McCartney, is the competitiveness. "You don't do what he's done in footy if you're not a fierce competitor, and he is."
Mark Thompson was a great player, but one who eventually only staggered past the 200-game mark.
And while he might have stumbled into the coaching caper, this time around it's a milestone by which he is positively flying.
Analysis
ONLY five of the other 15 AFL coaches have been in the business longer than Mark Thompson. They are Collingwood doyen Mick Malthouse, the Brisbane Lions' Leigh Matthews, the Western Bulldogs' Rodney Eade, Richmond's Terry Wallace and Port Adelaide's Mark Williams.
It's pretty select company.
But while Thompson's passing of the 200-game milestone has received attention this week, another significant landmark has slipped by virtually unnoticed. At the beginning of 2008, his ninth year in charge of Geelong, Thompson had a winning percentage of 54, behind only Matthews, Malthouse and Williams.
But with 13 wins from 14 games this season, the Cats' mentor has crept past his Collingwood rival to 56.2%.
It's a tremendous return for a coach of that long a tenure, and the way Geelong is going, who is to say he couldn't soon be challenging Matthews (58.4) and Williams (58.5).
And it's also a vindication of a philosophy and game style that was being challenged in all quarters by the end of that nightmare season of 2006.
Thompson's assistant Brendan McCartney is an unabashed admirer of his boss, particularly of the way he stuck to his guns under considerable fire and with some heavy hitters at Skilled Stadium starting to feel more than a little wobbly.
"His ideas on how the game should be played have stood firm and stood tall and, to his credit, he's stayed with them," McCartney says.
The Thompson coaching credo, in a nutshell, says McCartney, is "hard and competitive, and to be accountable to teammates so they always take responsibility for an opponent, and then when the time comes, let their talent come out, to show the reason they were recruited in the first place".
The disaster of 2006 and the soul-searching clarified many things for the Cats, but, says the assistant, only served to reinforce for Thompson that his way was the right way. "I think he got clear in his own head that the way he felt the game should be played was in fact the right way the game should be played, and the stats will show that footy has come back to contested ball and tackles and a hard-nosed style of play."
But, importantly, with that capacity to allow the more naturally talented among the line-up, in Geelong's case the likes of Gary Ablett, Steve Johnson and Paul Chapman, the freedom of expression to help take the Cats even further.
It's almost the perfect blend of hardness, skill and speed of ball movement, noted by opposition coaches who marvel at the Cats' stockpile of talent, but also note Thompson's part in having first identified then nurtured the players now delivering the goods with such devastating effect.
"I think the dramatic increase in rotations off the bench has probably helped him, too," says one senior rival.
"I don't think in the past, positional switches and making moves was a real strong point for him, but he's got better at it, and that part, given the number of interchanges now, probably isn't quite as important as it was."
The statistics say Geelong handles the ball far more than any opponent, but uses it more effectively as well, showing its capacity to hit targets given the Cats are still the second-longest kicking side in the competition.
They're third for tackles, too, behind Sydney and Brisbane — the Swans having made the in-close contested game a speciality, the Lions simply chasing tails a lot more than the ladder's top team.
First for inside 50s, second for scoring, Geelong, most importantly, tops the charts where it really counts.
Impressive figures from a phenomenal side well-coached, and whose leader — the way things are going — could end up with an individual success rate as impressive as any we've seen.
Rohan Connolly | July 11, 2008
Some people choose their vocations. And others have their vocations choose them. Such was the case with Geelong coach Mark Thompson.
The reigning premiership coach leads the Cats for the 200th time this afternoon against Fremantle at Skilled Stadium. It's his ninth season in the job, his team a hot favourite to make it two flags in a row. Yet, but for an accident of timing, none of it might ever have happened.
Thompson, a triple premiership back-pocket at Essendon, had famously skippered the "Baby Bombers" to the 1993 premiership, but by the end of 1995 was tired, sore, and wanted to retire.
Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy talked him into playing so that he would reach his 200-game milestone. Thompson stood down from the captaincy and, literally, dragged his ageing body across the line. He retired almost immediately, mid-season. Then fate intervened.
Thompson was going to go back to running the electrical business he shared with his brother Steve. More than happily. But at the same moment, Essendon reserves coach Mark Williams accepted a job as an assistant with the newly formed Port Adelaide. Suddenly, the Bomber seconds were without a coach, halfway through a season.
Thompson stepped into the breach. Enjoyed it. Spent the next two years as an assistant to Sheedy. He then worked under Denis Pagan in 1999 as part of a Kangaroos' premiership campaign. Come the end of that season, the senior job at Geelong was his.
"I was lucky, really," he remarked in an extensive interview with The Age back in 2000, just five games into his now near decade-long tenure. "I had no plans, I was going to get back into the business, just work hard there and have a spell from footy. When they asked, I thought I might as well give it a try."
Given that Thompson is now Geelong's second-longest-serving coach, behind only the legendary Reg Hickey, the Cats are eternally grateful he did. Not that this milestone seems to mean much to the man himself.
"It means nothing, really," he said earlier this week. "This game should all be about just the players, I reckon, the ones that put on the show. The coaches don't put on the show."
Fair enough. But could Geelong possibly be putting on as spectacular show as it has these past 1 seasons were it not for the philosophies now embedded so deeply in the Cats' playing culture, and displayed week after week by a playing group, nearly all of whom have spent their entire careers under Thompson's tutelage?
Today is also Geelong assistant coach Brendan McCartney's 200th game with the Cats. He met Thompson when they coached against each other at reserves level in 1999, Thompson with the Kangaroos, McCartney with Richmond.
One of the first men Thompson picked to join him on what has become a highly successful journey, McCartney has long been his boss's right-hand man, the pair, according to fellow assistant Brenton Sanderson, are "as thick as thieves".
Asked to pinpoint the cornerstones of Thompson's success, McCartney nominations a fiercely competitive drive and a tremendous capacity to cajole the best out of young people.
It was a capacity Thompson himself recognised very early in the job, commenting during that 2000 interview: "I've just found it to be so rewarding that you can actually help other people. You get young people's faith just by talking to them and with encouragement and a bit of explanation into how you want them to play. It's just a tremendous feeling to think that you've helped in that process."
And eight years on, the coach has that process down to a very fine art. "The strength of his coaching has always been an ability to teach the game to young people," McCartney says. "To teach them a method of play that (a) they can identify with, (b) helps them build a career, and (c) fits his philosophy of how a team should function. His best coaching has always been one-on-one, or in small groups.
"You can see that visible connection with those boys he drafted back in that first draft in '99. Four of them (Joel Corey, Paul Chapman, Cameron Ling and Corey Enright) have gone on to have long-term careers and will be remembered as four greats of our club, and then the same thing happened a couple of years later (with Jimmy Bartel, James Kelly, Steve Johnson and Gary Ablett).
"He was probably the first person to ring them after (recruiting manager) Stephen Wells had called their names out. And he always had so much time for them. He was hard on them and firm with them, but he always gave them time."
Sanderson had already been a Geelong player for five seasons when Thompson arrived as coach, but took his game to greater heights still, winning a best and fairest. In his second season as an assistant coach with the Cats, he finds the same traits presenting themselves in their new relationship.
"He was on the same level as the players. It never felt like he was ordering you around, and it's the same as a coach," Sanderson says. "Even though he's head coach and has three assistants underneath him, we always have pretty healthy debates, and it never feels like he's standing over us.
"I think he's very caring about individuals. He's interested in players' lives outside footy, and also with the people he works with, it's not just about footy with him. That might not be obvious to people outside the bubble we work in, but it's about all those buttons you've got to press with people to get them to play good footy, or make them comfortable around their work."
Says McCartney: "He's been fantastic to work for. He gives you the confidence to do your job and guides you along the way. He's able to impart his views on the game without ramming them down your throat. It's a really good managerial style. And he has a lot of fun. Doesn't take himself too seriously."
The fun part has been made a lot of lately, with the Cats seemingly on auto-pilot, and much replayed footage of the coach daring to laugh in the box during a game, and, horror of horrors, chomping down on a salad roll.
McCartney is quick to qualify on both that front, and the suggestion that this champion team is practically coaching itself at the moment.
"You shouldn't be fooled by the demeanour," he says. "He still coaches this team very strongly and hard.
"He has certain standards he expects, and he makes sure it gets done."
Geelong captain Tom Harley is the on-field lieutenant who ensures Thompson's jobs get done.
He, Matthew Scarlett, Darren Milburn and David Wocjinski were the only Cats already at the club when the coach arrived.
Like McCartney, Harley has watched Thompson grow into his role, but from a playing perspective. And like McCartney, he, too, is often bemused and, sometimes, he says, irked by the public misconceptions about his boss.
"He gets misrepresented in the media, I reckon," Harley says. "You've heard people say he doesn't care enough about the team, and that he's too laconic and that things just roll along, which is just totally wrong, because he's very serious about his footy.
"I can assure you that he's extremely professional and absolutely ruthless and committed to winning.
"He does have a ruthless, competitive streak, and I think he's a perfectionist, too, crosses all the 't's and dots the 'i's."
Which made the nightmare season that 2006 proved to be even harder to take.
Reams have been written about the Cats' slide two years ago from a popular premiership contender pre-season to also-ran.
About whether or not Thompson was close to getting the sack, and about the post-season review that revamped the club's football department, turning upside down the fitness regime, expanding Steven Hocking's role, bringing Neil Balme into the mix as football manager and relieving the coach of some of his less-football-oriented tasks.
The bottom line, says McCartney, was a coach with more time and energy to focus on what he did best, bringing the absolute best out of the players at his disposal.
"He certainly relaxed, gave the players more responsibility, and I think became really confident with the people working around him, able to know he could just go on with building a team capable of having success knowing he had people around him who would get the job done for him."
Geelong as a club and a team, clearly has.
And looks likely to go on getting it done for some time yet.
As for how long its "accidental coach" will be overseeing that process, well, that's anyone's guess, even for his closest coaching confidant. "I know 'Bomber' very well," says McCartney, "but there's not many people in this world that know all his thoughts. He's like most people in that high-pressure environment, they do keep certain things close to their chest."
What McCartney does know, however, and what Sanderson and Harley also agree upon, is that their boss, in the first year of a new deal with his now long-term "client", is doing his job better than ever.
The fire is still in the belly, says Harley. So, adds McCartney, is the competitiveness. "You don't do what he's done in footy if you're not a fierce competitor, and he is."
Mark Thompson was a great player, but one who eventually only staggered past the 200-game mark.
And while he might have stumbled into the coaching caper, this time around it's a milestone by which he is positively flying.
Analysis
ONLY five of the other 15 AFL coaches have been in the business longer than Mark Thompson. They are Collingwood doyen Mick Malthouse, the Brisbane Lions' Leigh Matthews, the Western Bulldogs' Rodney Eade, Richmond's Terry Wallace and Port Adelaide's Mark Williams.
It's pretty select company.
But while Thompson's passing of the 200-game milestone has received attention this week, another significant landmark has slipped by virtually unnoticed. At the beginning of 2008, his ninth year in charge of Geelong, Thompson had a winning percentage of 54, behind only Matthews, Malthouse and Williams.
But with 13 wins from 14 games this season, the Cats' mentor has crept past his Collingwood rival to 56.2%.
It's a tremendous return for a coach of that long a tenure, and the way Geelong is going, who is to say he couldn't soon be challenging Matthews (58.4) and Williams (58.5).
And it's also a vindication of a philosophy and game style that was being challenged in all quarters by the end of that nightmare season of 2006.
Thompson's assistant Brendan McCartney is an unabashed admirer of his boss, particularly of the way he stuck to his guns under considerable fire and with some heavy hitters at Skilled Stadium starting to feel more than a little wobbly.
"His ideas on how the game should be played have stood firm and stood tall and, to his credit, he's stayed with them," McCartney says.
The Thompson coaching credo, in a nutshell, says McCartney, is "hard and competitive, and to be accountable to teammates so they always take responsibility for an opponent, and then when the time comes, let their talent come out, to show the reason they were recruited in the first place".
The disaster of 2006 and the soul-searching clarified many things for the Cats, but, says the assistant, only served to reinforce for Thompson that his way was the right way. "I think he got clear in his own head that the way he felt the game should be played was in fact the right way the game should be played, and the stats will show that footy has come back to contested ball and tackles and a hard-nosed style of play."
But, importantly, with that capacity to allow the more naturally talented among the line-up, in Geelong's case the likes of Gary Ablett, Steve Johnson and Paul Chapman, the freedom of expression to help take the Cats even further.
It's almost the perfect blend of hardness, skill and speed of ball movement, noted by opposition coaches who marvel at the Cats' stockpile of talent, but also note Thompson's part in having first identified then nurtured the players now delivering the goods with such devastating effect.
"I think the dramatic increase in rotations off the bench has probably helped him, too," says one senior rival.
"I don't think in the past, positional switches and making moves was a real strong point for him, but he's got better at it, and that part, given the number of interchanges now, probably isn't quite as important as it was."
The statistics say Geelong handles the ball far more than any opponent, but uses it more effectively as well, showing its capacity to hit targets given the Cats are still the second-longest kicking side in the competition.
They're third for tackles, too, behind Sydney and Brisbane — the Swans having made the in-close contested game a speciality, the Lions simply chasing tails a lot more than the ladder's top team.
First for inside 50s, second for scoring, Geelong, most importantly, tops the charts where it really counts.
Impressive figures from a phenomenal side well-coached, and whose leader — the way things are going — could end up with an individual success rate as impressive as any we've seen.
