I met Mick Malthouse once. Purely by chance of course but what started out as an unmitigated disaster, ended up quite convivial.

In 1999 I flew to my home town of Perth to present at a work conference and Mick was the guest speaker. 1999 would be his last year at the West Coast Eagles and there was a strong rumour in Melbourne that he was headed to Collingwood for the 2000 season.

He spoke very passionately about his impoverished upbringing in Ballarat and spending his childhood outdoors in the bitterly cold Ballarat winters. It was very much a motivational talk honing in on overcoming adversity which didn’t seem relevant to an audience of comfortable salespeople working for a rich global company, but I and the other footy lovers enjoyed it..

At the end of the talk it was lunchtime so he invited anyone to come up the front for autographs or questions.

I genuinely admired Malthouses defensive coaching so I planned to ask him for perhaps a few bullet points around his strategies.

I got in the queue and when I finally got to him I could sense time was of the essence. I nervously said something like, “Hi Mick. I was wondering if you could share some of your defensive non-negotiables with me?”

He immediately gave me that look he often gave the press and said, “I think that’s been well documented. You should look it up.”

I was shattered and retired to the buffet. I was in my fourth year of coaching back in Melbourne and unlike today as a crusty, cynical old fool, I was like a sponge listening and reading all I could about the art of coaching.

 Suddenly he appeared next to me as I was loading a few kilos of food onto my plate and I gave him a filthy look. I sat down at a shared table with my colleagues when the master coach sat directly opposite me.

He looked straight through me with his piercing eyes and started asking me about my footy journey and about life in general. We chatted for twenty minutes or so and I remember trying to sell him my old coach Donald McDonald as a prospective assistant when he went to Collingwood.

He probably felt sorry for me but I appreciated him making the effort all the same. I found him extremely intense but paradoxically warm. An interesting man.

I remember seeing an interview with Malthouse post his time at Collingwood filmed at his rather palatial home in East Melbourne.

He was asked why the only football team photo in his study was the 2002 Collingwood team that lost to Brisbane.

In an interview with The Age in 2010, Malthouse said, ““There is one photograph in particular [of the 2002 team] I keep up on the wall at home as a great reminder to me of what can be achieved by people who are dedicated, who are selfless, who have got nothing but teammanship in their mind,”

It’s a great sentiment from a man who coached over 700 games of AFL, and won four premierships. It demonstrates that winning premierships isn’t everything in footy.

The 2002 Collingwood team weren’t the most talented especially when you weighed them up against their opponent that day, Brisbane, but they were brave, selfless and made every contest count.

As a coach that’s all you want.

Yesterday we saw the Gold Coast win the VFL premiership, defeating Werribee by nineteen points. The VFL structure with twenty one teams on the eastern seaboard is designed that way to allow AFL teams to have their extended lists play in a competitive environment.

That has been happening since 2000 however there were restrictions on the numbers of AFL listed players who could play each week over the first twenty years or so of aligned teams.

That no longer exists, and Gold Coast ran out in a grand final with twenty full time players versus twenty three students, chippy’s, accountants, labourers and marketing managers.

These part timers from Werribee won seventeen games on the trot to make the grand final overcoming VFL teams loaded with full time athletes every week. What they achieved in 2023 is nothing short of extraordinary.

They may not have taken the premiership, but everyone at the club from the committee to the past players, volunteers and families are incredibly proud of what they have achieved.

They will no doubt be hurting today as they kick back in a sunny beer garden somewhere but time does heal. I’ve lost four grand finals as a coach and only visit the therapist fortnightly now!

The best is yet to come for these young men and I’m not just talking about their footy careers. It’s the experiences they’ve shared and the friendships they’ve made that will withstand the test of time.

Amongst a huge gathering of past players and officials cheering the boys on yesterday, there was very little talk about footy. The conversations these days are more about family, life and the future with what time we have left on this mortal coil.

Yes there is plenty of piss-taking mostly due to some physical changes that may have occurred over the decades but the fun is mixed with quite deep conversations.

These connections come from the years of spending three nights and a game together a week.

As Donald McDonald said to the Werribee players in pre-season 2022, “There is too much emphasis on premierships. The best thing about the game are the people you meet along the way. Make the most of those relationships, because they are what matter most”

Thanks and congratulations to the Tigers of 2023 for an awesome ride and best wishes for 2024.