Choko

That's not entirely true. You can make some judgment based on their media interviews, what players say about them (or don't say about them), the way their line performs, who else has or would give them jobs, etc... A good example is Ratten. I don't claim to be inner sanctum, but the players spoke to glowingly of the manner in which he communicated and his knowledge and credibility. They said they had no doubt he would be an AFL coach. Then he was. I thought it was abundantly clear that West was not a good/highly regarded assistant coach, and that Wellman was highly regarded and effective.

Agree. We should take the corporate open door policy to a new level and have a no Dawes policy.

Yes, the world moves on. I would rather have lost Scully than paid way overs for him, which is the position we were in due to the system. Now, call it defensive, evil, fatalistic or whatever, but I hope his knee is good enough to have a happy life, but not good enough to ever become half the footballer the 2 draft picks we get will be.

I'm now thinking that since we scored a massive coup in Mission, we would be better served with a Laidley (number one), Mark Harvey or even a Gary Ayres as director of coaching. We don't want too much of an overlap between Craig and Mission, in which case Craig's value diminishes.

Shocking. Appears to be a freak occurrence. Really feel for all involved.

Shane Valenti is Kevin Rudd. No-one was saying such nice things when he played for us. It's only once he's gone that people think they really liked him all along and were mad to let him go. How quickly we forget. We are striving for excellence. Valenti has some excellent attributes. AFL footballer isn't one of them.

My keyboard is no good.

Well before we declare a shifting of the guard, we should probably give it a few years to see how it goes!!! I do think that what you are saying makes logical sense - coaching is indeed a very different skillset to playing. However, there is an element of coaching that clearly would benefit by playing at the highest level. That is, if two candidates were absolutely identical, but one had played 100 games of AFL and one had played SANFL, I know who I would choose. Of course it's never that mathematical. I think a real risk for the untried coach who hasn't played AFL is that if things go badly, which they will at times, they will have more detractors, sooner.

There is no doubt at all he will re-sign.

Yeh, but broadening your horizons to a first timer when you are with a premiership coach whose club is well and truly still in its window seems like a backwards move to me.

Still not funny B) that bloke makes my blood boil!

If Sumich still has senior coaching ambitions, he does need to leave WC. As such, he may be a great pickup. From the way Neeld acquitted himself in the press conference, I have no doubt we are going to have a far better coaching group that we have ever had, in order to support Neeld.

Have to wait until their season is over, but it would be great to get him. The only thing is, he may be in the running for the Saints or Crows jobs anyway, and if he misses those jobs, why wouldn't you stay with Clarko?

Edit that post again to get rid of Terry Wallet. He would be THE WORST appointment.

Nothing yet on assistants, it seems....

No. My fault. I'll write slower

Sometimes winning the grand final could be seen as failure too. Sack all 17.

Sorry, you missed my point. I was responding to the comment above as to why we needed experienced assistants to support Neeld. I agree with what you're saying.

Because experience counts massively. It's very hard for Neeld to make big decisions, whether it be hiring and firing, re-structuring, football related, because being in the big chair is totally different to being an assistant. So if you have a strong assistant who you can use as a sounding board, who has been there and who can do some of the heavy lifting for you due to their credibility, it helps immeasurably.

If that's the case, then we have done awesome and I am fired up!!!!

Getting a first time coach just means we couldn't land a big fish. With the way our club is run at the moment and our finances, that's hardly a surprise. I have no problem with Neeld, in fact I am excited and I think he will be super. But he will fail unless we get him a strong team of assistant coaches. We have to get Craig, or Eade or someone else with real cred to support Neeld. Because at the end of the day, being an assistant to Malthouse at the most resourced club in Australia is a far cry from being the main man at Melbourne.

Yet we spoke to his management to ask him if he was interested..... and what did the Dockers do?

Was fantastic. I thought that both the Dockers and Ross acquitted themselves superbly. Ross was very harsh on Harvey, but equally, you get the impression that if the same happened to him, he would be similarly circumspect. Other than that, Ross exercised an option, Saints didn't lock him in early enough, and the dockers took their opportunity. The one hole in it all that wasn't explored by the journos (who were venomous in their tone!) was that Rosich said everyone's contracts were honoured. Harvey was paid out, but it's not true to say that his contract was honoured, unless the new definition of honoured is paid out.

LOL exactly.

SUCH loser talk. I'm not saying we should have approached Lyon that way, but the reality is that Freo earmarked their man, and got their man. Therefore Thomo is right that he was there for the taking, and someone else got him. If you/others confine the thinking to the conventional ways of doing business, then you dismiss the aggressive and potentially successful other ways of doing business. Now it may be that we are more keen on being "ethical" than effective, because we believe in the end values will get us where we want to go. But that's unlikely our rationale, because we did offer Clarkson a contract whilst he was in contract, and we did ass our former captain. But the fact remains that we sacked Bailey when there were games to go. If we had MM, why would Garry say we had enquires recently as to RL? So presumably, we don't have a coach. We could have had RL, possibly. But we enquired through management, the conventioanl route.