As an AFL fan of some sixty-odd years its natural that your emotions do tend to flow with the ups and downs of a season but also you become a direct reflection of your chosen coach, which in my case is Ross Lyon.
If you’re a Collingwood fan, you’re blessed to have the positive energy of Coach McRae or if you’re a Brisbane fan you its easy to feel a sense of contentment having the humility and calmness of Coach Fagan.
As a St Kilda tragic, Coach Lyon has taken me on an exhilarating ride of powerful footy, woeful inconsistency, nail biting wins, inexplicable losses and press conferences that go from smug to prickly and downright disrespectful.
He’s hard to like and it frustrates me that his football intellect is the only over riding factor that keeps him in a job, makes him credible and terrifies the media.
He’s never won a flag but he never seems to receive the same level of attention other coaches do when The Saints lose. Lyon is highly respected by his peers but is treated like teflon by the media and never seems to be challenged assertively when we struggle.
His teams run a fine line relying on dour and exhausting defence which transitions into an explosive rebounding attack. Combine that with what appears to be his constant search for perfection and history has shown that at The Saints and The Dockers his message has a three to four year expiration date.
I hate it when he tells us how hard he works because it simply dismisses what the other coaches do. No one denies he’s all over his business and everyone else’s for that matter but maybe that’s been an issue for him, delegating and people management?
Ross’s first stint at The Saints produced some of the most exciting footy I’ve seen us play. Like any Saints fan the disappointment of 09/10 still haunts us but I didn’t expect the coach to disappear into the night in 2011! It was tough not to question his character.
His return to the club at the expense of Brett Ratten and another payout, was like the return of a past girlfriend who had dumped me for someone else in the past!
Unlike Ross’s first tenure, he’s inherited a talented young team in need of developing. In his first year in 2023, we unexpectedly made the elimination final. Ross clearly set his expectations to within the player’s capabilities, they bought in and over achieved.
2024 was a different story and there was that ‘year 3-4 look’ that we had seen previously raising its ugly head prematurely. Suddenly the teeing off at assistants and prickly press conferences came back to haunt us.
That edginess has continued this year. I spent two hours on the bus and train from Ballarat on my 62nd birthday to witness the debacle versus the Suns. Thankfully I was able to catch up with my eldest daughter so it wasn’t all bad!
Lyon’s comments regarding the ‘Nepo Baby’ were a classic ‘Rossism’. He never says anything off the cuff. It’s always rehearsed and delivered with purpose. His timing is usually critical to the delivery and in this case it just happened to be prior to the AFL presidents meeting which was being chaired by the Saints president.
Other times Ross defers to ‘Captain Smug-mode’ and treats journalists and fans with utter contempt. If he was a young coach I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, but not anymore. His ‘Nepo Baby’ comment left the opportunity for Damien Hardwick to retaliate with his retort regarding the 13,000 crowd that attended the game.
Following Ross for this many years now can be infuriating but never boring. I’ve put together a Ross stream of consciousness just for fun or madness…not quite sure.
“I don’t live in the 100+ point games, overarching strategic plan we’re on, it’s their high end players, it depends on what mindset I’m in, we’ve had 25 list changes in 2 years, from 5th oldest to 5th youngest, the strategic vision we’re executing on, I get texts all the time…Barry Breen…stay the course, break the glass a bit nexus, highlights the maelstrom of the comp, opinion doesn’t become fact does it?, we know what the promised land looks like, how much do you know about stay ahead mids?, swivelling and turning?, hemmed in skinny, I live in a world of action right?, we know where we’re at and we’re not deviating, I don’t sense or feel anything, the getters get and the runners run, it’s system it’s pressure, we wanna build from the inside, we can go into semantics, our environment sits in the top quartile, that’s not in the public domain is it?, I don’t need to respond, I’m not sure what you want me to say to that, what is a litmus test?, I’m not here to validate your opinion, that’s a long winded question and an inappropriate one, look at what you stand for as a journalist.”
Ross, you’ve got the bulk of our next premiership under your stewardship right now. Can we please have less subterfuge and more action you so readily proclaim?
There is an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David and friends attend a wedding where the groom dislikes Larry and the feeling is mutual. After the groom charms the ladies and swans past the group, Larry states, “Ladies and gentlemen, what we have just witnessed is a whirlwind of smarm”. I think of it every time I hear Ross.
No matter how smarmy Ross gets, if he delivers our next flag, it will all be forgotten. He can do this!…hopefully. Go Saints!
