The Sports Factor

Leigh Matthews has been a powerful force in Australian Football, from his days as a star player at Hawthorn, through to his stunning achievements as a coach at both Collingwood and Brisbane AFL clubs. He's a hard act to follow, so how do you assess the legacy of a legend.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Mick O'Regan: Hello and welcome to The Sports Factor, here on ABC Radio National. I'm Mick O'Regan.

This week on the program we're considering beginnings and endings.

And the focus of our Zen moment is of course Australian Rules Football, which this week saw the end of one of the game's outstanding careers, when the coach of the Brisbane Lions, Leigh Matthews, stunned the sporting community by announcing he'd had enough.

Leigh Matthews: I'd found over the last twelve months or so, I was asking myself the question of when I would finish, how I would finish, when would be the right time. And I guess I sort of found that it was Saturday probably. I asked myself one last time, and I thought, No, I'm asking myself too often, so it's time. So I made the decision Saturday afternoon basically, that that would be the last game I would coach. Didn't communicate it to anyone at that point, but that was the point I decided this was a good time.

There's no definitive black, white, you've just got to follow your gut; as someone said to me once, 'Assess all the information best you can and follow your gut, and follow your set of beliefs'. On that basis, it just seemed like, you know I feel a little bit like I'm breaking an addiction really, you know, you know you've got to do it, but it doesn't mean you feel fantastic about it, but I know it's the right thing, or in my view anyway, it's the right thing, and that's I guess ultimately what you've got to base your decisions on.

One of the things that's always difficult in the post - and I saw it at Hawthorn really, in the post-premiership era, the coaches that tend to coach post-premiership era have got no hope, because almost inevitably they're going to suffer by comparison to the premiership teams. And I saw it happen, so I thought Well, not that I had anywhere else to go, it's not as if I was - so let's not get carried away with all that. But it was also important to me that you were involved a little bit with the retirement of some of these great players which was kind of that inevitable cycle in the mid of this decade.

Mick O'Regan: 'Lethal' Leigh Matthews, the now unexpectedly former coach of the Brisbane Lions AFL Club, announcing his decision to retire. Of course former club champion Michael Voss is now going to be the new coach in Brisbane.

Leigh Matthews is a figure of enormous significance in Australian Football, a multiple premiership winner both as a player at Hawthorn and then as a coach at Collingwood and Brisbane.

At the former club, he famously ended a 32-year drought, and of course in Brisbane, well he took his side to a premiership treble.

Someone very familiar with Leigh Matthews' contribution to the game is David Parkin, like Matthews, a former Hawthorn champion and a premiership-winning coach with both Hawthorn and Carlton.

For Parkin, while he wasn't expecting the announcement, he isn't surprised that Leigh Matthews has decided to go.

David Parkin: I was convinced having seen a comment made by him that he talked to the hierarchy and they had decided he would complete the final year of his contract. I thought it was done and dusted prior to making the announcement he did.

Mick O'Regan: Did you hear his announcement? Did you go to the press conference?

David Parkin: No I did hear the actual announcement only recorded afterwards, which was a bit surprising, but I think, Mick, when you look back in history with Leigh, he's had the capacity like no other person I've met in football, to make an unemotional, very objective decision about where he is a) firstly as a player, b) the same scenario existed at Collingwood when he made that decision after 10 years, and I think when the writing on the wall became even more apparent, that after ten years that he probably ran his race with this group of players.

He like nobody else, and you've got to know Leigh to understand, that to make an unemotional and accurate decision about his role within the organisation he happens to be serving at the time. It's just a great capacity; most of us get caught up in our ego and who we are and what we think we're doing, and that usually over-rides the objectiveness of making a decision at that time.

Mick O'Regan: Indeed, he was famous as a player at Hawthorn in the '70s and '80s, of being able to read the play. It's almost like he can read the game too, because there does seem to be major generational change happening at the moment.

David Parkin: Oh yes, and it's a good thing. I think Leigh would understand too. I think for a long time and I was a part of that, the history that kept recycling older coaches who had had some success in the past, and they kept getting jobs, what the game has finally realised, there is a place I think for the older guys who can mentor and manage the coaching group, but we have an outstanding group of young coaches, as we've had players. Some players were never given the opportunity and didn't get a chance to develop and become I guess potentially the skilful people they were because coaches didn't allow it, and I think the same thing's happened with coaches.

We've had a massively strong group of young coaches coming through, who are very professional, very well-educated, understand the modern game in the way that it's played, deal with it strategically with the changes that come, and finally I guess the industry is accepting that, and Mick we now have - each one of them I think, I can't think of one in the last four or five years that having come into the game, hasn't delivered a really good performance as a coach in the initial period of his coaching.

Mick O'Regan: In your opinion, what are the key characteristics of Leigh Matthews' coaching legacy?

David Parkin: Well he's been able to, I think some people will remember it as delivering a premiership for the Collingwood Football Club against the tide, in the real sense, that for a long period of time nobody believed that they had the playing potential to do so. So the Collingwood clan will I think remember with pride that particularly, and of course it was against Essendon, so I guess that counted for more. But he's just had an uncanny ability, the group that he put together at Brisbane, he's got to take some credit for the recruitment of probably the best group, they certainly had some assistance along the way at that stage in the method that it was set up by the AFL, but with what he had he delivered extremely well, according to the ability.

They were a bit stiff in the finish, but after three years of being able to maintain them on the field without injury, which is very hard to do in our game, the fourth year they were got very heavily by injuries and were never probably going to win. So they optimised the talent over a four year period with a single group. We're now watching Geelong and Bomber Thompson to see whether he can do the same with a maybe not potently as good a group in the sense of the actual overall talent, but certainly the best group at the moment, and the best group Geelong have had, whether he can do the same.

And I think as a player from go to whoa, he had a consistency, minute-by-minute, quarter-by-quarter, and game-by-game that few have been able to deliver, and I think as a coach, the consistency of his teams in terms of their approach to playing almost always saw them optimise their talent; Mick in the finish, I reckon that's when he started to think about it, this is probably the first time for a long time that the talent he had for a while appeared to be delivering, and at the finish, didn't, and I think that was the nail in the coffin probably when he looked back at what had happened in the latter part of this season, that team probably did not play according to its ability.

Mick O'Regan: It's a remarkable career that you can win four premierships as a player with Hawthorn and then go on to break Collingwood's 32-year drought, and then a treble with Brisbane. It's not many players who become as famous as coaches is it?

David Parkin: No, and it's an interesting argument. Now he's one of the few, and I probably with his nature and personality, I wouldn't have picked him as being a great coach in the modern period of the game. Leigh was not so much a loner when he played but he wasn't the hail-fellow-well-met sort of person, Leigh was a quietly and considered person in what he did. I didn't think he'd have the drive to go down that pathway, let alone the passion in that area to produce. But he's proved me wrong in all aspects of him as a person and him as a coach, and I applaud him.

We talk about the Whittens and the Barassis, and the Sheedys in their life in football both as players and coaches, but I have absolutely no doubt when we look back in time ahead to Leigh Matthews, he will be classified very comfortably into that group of people, Whitten Barassi, Sheedy and Matthews deserve to have that I think position in our historical thinking about impact on Australian footy.

Mick O'Regan: Well just a final question. In the way that Ron Barassi seemed to cement the AFL culture and playing tradition in Sydney when he came up with the Swans, or took over with the Swans, the role that Leigh Matthews might take on now, do you see a formal role for him in, say, developing the code in places like Western Sydney or the Gold Coast where a figure of real authority could help cement those clubs?

David Parkin: Well I'm deep-down hoping that he can remain - I'm not sure whether he'd want to come back; I know his grand-children are in Melbourne and that might be a terrible draw for him here, I could understand that being a grandfather, but if Queensland I think in particular, Western Sydney I hadn't thought of, but certainly Queensland, where his reputation is so strong and he's well known, if he could be convinced to play a role in the planning, setting up of the new team on the Gold Coast, I think that would be a fantastic thing for footy. Now whether Leigh sees it as a fantastic thing for Leigh Matthews I'm not sure, but I certainly, if I had any influence within the AFL, would be going all out to convince him that there was a role to play in the expansion of the game in that area, and Leigh Matthews better than anybody else I can think of, would be the right person to oversee that.

Mick O'Regan: Hear, hear to that. Former AFL coach and player, David Parkin.

And the Gold Coast club which will join the AFL competition in 2011, is going to be wearing a red, gold and blue strip, but so far the club is without a nickname. I have to say I still like the Gold Coast Developers, and all playing in white boots. Unlikely, I know.

Well, while one career is about to be tallied up and talked about, others are just beginning.

A new book, written by Emma Quayle and published by Allen and Unwin, called 'The Draft' follows the progress of a group of young Aussie Rules players as they took that big step to senior football last year.

Of the 1200 or so young men who nominated for the draft, only a small minority get selected. One of those players is Ben McEvoy, who hails from country Victoria and was drafted by St Kilda. He had the remarkable experience of running on in his first senior game alongside the St Kilda veteran and champion, Robert Harvey, who was almost double his age.

Ben McEvoy: Robert Harvey's quite an exceptional one. He actually played his first game before I was born. So I think there's only a handful of people who've done that in history, but more importantly, he's an absolute superstar and one of the best people you'd meet, and it was amazing to be able to play with him just for that one game. It probably more hits you afterwards when you think about it, because you come to know the likes of Nick Riewoldt, and Robert Harvey and Lenny Hayes, you come to know them as people before I actually got to play with them. But when you think about it afterwards, it's still quite amazing for someone as young as me to think that I did get to run out on the ground with those blokes.

Mick O'Regan: When you are in the draft, just take the audience through that process. So you've obviously been a successful schoolboy and under-age footballer, and I presume you always played in the A team right through your school and club games. Would that be right?

Ben McEvoy: Yes, pretty much. I was a country Victorian, so I didn't start my first age group was under-14s, I started when I was 10 or 11, so I sort of played most of my junior footy at my local club, Dederang-Mount Beauty, and started playing representative footy at under-15s with schoolboys, and then represented - I played for the Murray Bushrangers in the TAC Cup as a 16, 17, 18 year old, representing them, and also played for Vic Country. So I played a lot of representative football, and it's a fairly long process I suppose. There would have been a lot of people watching me play a lot of games over many years before I actually got to draft day in November of 2007.

Mick O'Regan: And do you get to meet any of those scouts who go out to country carnivals or to watch under-age country football to look at the next generation of players. Do people come up to you Ben, after a game and say, 'Look, I'm So-and-so, and I'm here from St Kilda and I'm interested in where you might want to go'. Were you familiar with the scrutiny.

Ben McEvoy: Yes. And I can't really remember when it all started, but definitely since I was 15, 16 there would have been people watching me, and not just me, obviously, all the young boys that I played with, and you do get to know the faces and the names of the various recruiters from different clubs over a few years, and you run into them every now and then.

Mick O'Regan: Now you were the ninth choice, No.9, you weren't at the draft when the clubs are making their deliberations, but do you remember the day, do you remember either sitting and watching the television, or being on the telephone as someone told you what was happening?

Ben McEvoy: Yes, I actually tried to follow it on the internet, but couldn't get it to work because it's not broadcast live on TV any more. So my Mum found out over the phone from her brother who was listening in Melbourne over the radio.

Mick O'Regan: Is that right? The family network...

Ben McEvoy: Yes. So by the time I found out it was sort of through Mum's tears after she got off the phone. It was at 10 o'clock the draft, so it was a bit of a long wait that morning, but definitely remember that day, for sure.

Mick O'Regan: And had you hoped for St Kilda? Did you go into that process hoping that particular club would select you?

Ben McEvoy: No, not really. And I don't think anyone can do that, because at the end of the day you could get picked by any of the 16 clubs, so if you're hoping for one result you could only end up being disappointed if you get a different one. And I had some idea that I might be around the market at No.9 with St Kilda because of what they'd said and what other clubs had said, but definitely I was rapt to go to Saints, and to stay in Melbourne was a huge relief for me and especially for my parents.

Mick O'Regan: I imagine. But that's interesting, that you had an inkling of where the pecking order is, and I suppose there's lots of discussion in the media too about clubs wanting particular players, and there are trade-offs and things. But you had a sense that you'd be in the top ten?

Ben McEvoy: Yes, I did, and yes, like you said, obviously there's a lot goes through the media, but you pick up a few things just from what some clubs say, and it's never for sure, it's more just I suppose it was gut feel, and most people don't have any idea where they're going to end up. It's just the first round of draft picks you tend to have a better idea than lower down. But yes, so that was all it really was, an inkling, and yes, I was obviously pretty happy with the result.

Mick O'Regan: What's it like when you first head into the club, knowing that you're now part of the senior list?

Ben McEvoy: It's a bit daunting, but I think you overcome that with excitement. It's something that you dream about when you're eight years old. And then when you're 16, 17, you're sort of hoping and trying to do everything you can to realise that dream but it's still that I suppose, it's still a dream. It takes a while for reality to sink in once you start, and I still remember my first day down at the beach at Elwood, our first session, and it was all a bit daunting, and yes, it seems an awful long time ago now.

Mick O'Regan: Do you have to introduce yourself to the other players? Does someone take you around and you know, say "Robert Harvey, I'd like you to meet Ben McEvoy, he's our draft pick for this season'. Is there a formal process whereby you go and shake all their hands?

Ben McEvoy: No, there's no formal process. When you get there John Beveridge and John Peak were there, the recruiting guys that selected myself and the other draftees, and you run into a few of the guys the first time you walk in the club, and they introduce you, but it's mostly just the St Kilda guys coming up to you and introducing themselves, and that was quite exceptional. Yes, when I started out everyone was really welcoming and it only took a week before I knew everyone, because they were all so good about it.

Mick O'Regan: Well look, just finally, what are your goals now? If at the end, if I was talking to you in some number of years hence, about the career that you've just had, what would you hope your career was characterised by?

Ben McEvoy: It's a good question, and it's hard to differentiate between what you would hope and what's reality, but I'd like to think I would have played quite a few senior games with the Saints, in the next two to three years, and really be contributing to team success and hopefully will be playing finals.

Mick O'Regan: Sounds like a good plan to me. Ben McEvoy, thank you very much for being on The Sports Factor here on ABC Radio National.

Ben McEvoy: No worries, thanks Mick.

Mick O'Regan: One to watch, Ben McEvoy, one of last year's AFL draftees, whose progress is profiled in Emma Quayle's new book 'The Draft'.

One of the key features of this year's AFL comp has been seeing a player kick 100 goals during the regular season.

Lance Franklin, 'Buddy', to his friends, is the third Hawk to do it, flying in that illustrious flight path of Peter Hudson and Jason Dunstall.

Franklin is also the first indigenous footballer to kick 100 goals in an AFL season, though I imagine there's any number of listeners who could tell me of other players in other leagues who've achieved that feat.

As is well known, indigenous players are an important element within Australian Football, comprising a tenth of the playing numbers in the AFDL.

Which brings me to a short piece in the current edition of The Monthly magazine, on the Aboriginal influence on the game. Written by historian John Hirst, it takes up that ongoing argument between those who see a connection with indigenous games, such as Marn Grook, and those who argue there's just no evidence to support the claim.

I asked John Hirst what had prompted him into print.

John Hirst: Well I've got increasingly interested in Australian Rules Football, and I go with my family which is a good Melbourne thing to do, and last year, no, the year before last, I had a student at La Trobe University very interested in this question of whether Aborigines contributed to the Australian game. So he turned my attention to this question and then of course, the AFL published its official history this year, which very definitely said there was no Aboriginal influence, and so there was a great controversy following that.

So that drew me into it, and I'm more of a historian than a sports historian, but I thought on some of the things that were being argued, I might be able to say some useful things.

Mick O'Regan: Well John just on the sheer numbers, it's obvious that there's an important role played by indigenous players in the AFL in that league alone, I think there's 10% of players are indigenous given the 2% in the broader population. Is that the reason for you that we have to sort of go back and acknowledge a link if one exists?

John Hirst: Well it's one of the prompts I suppose. They do seem to be natural players, and they seem to play in a slightly different way from other people, which makes their contribution so fascinating and exciting. But I think, as a historian, the thing that turns my attention to this question has been the descriptions of the Aboriginal games which we now are much more aware of, and the similarities between the Aboriginal game and the Australian Rules game as it developed, not as it was originally, and that's one of the many puzzles in this question. But over time, there did develop this similarity, and then the question arises, Well is this just coincidental, or can we find some connections and some evidence to support the connection?

Mick O'Regan: Right, because one of the Aboriginal games that was played, known now as Marngrook, I think involved a stuffed possum skin sewn with kangaroo sinew, and it seemed to be a game that didn't rely on a winner-loser relationship, but rather just people playing, in the way that you describe in the article, a bit like people playing frisbee; there wasn't an obvious winner or loser.

John Hirst: No, it was a fun thing, and even when there were teams, it's not very clear that one team was definitely winning over another. There was some sort of recognition of who jumped highest or who kicked furthest, or who had most of the game. But there were no goals and no scoring. It was more a free-flowing and frisbee is the right connection, free-flowing, the ball being kicked all over the place, a large number of people participating, sort of like Greek dancing, you know, anyone can get up and do it. So rather different from a team sport, but the long kicking and high marking, we do know was very much a part of it.

Mick O'Regan: Because at one point you write that, or you describe an evolving influence rather than a founding one, because in a moment we'll come to the critics of your position, who say there's simply no evidence. But just on that notion of an evolving influence, can you elaborate on that?

John Hirst: Yes well when Australian Rules begins, it doesn't look very much like the present game at all. Just take the question of scoring for instance. Often they would play the whole afternoon, and only one goal might have been scored. They would then play next weekend and see if they could get to two. Often they said 'If you get to two goals, you've won'. There was no time for the game, it was more 'When someone has scored so many goals we'll stop'. So immediately that shows how different a game it is from the present one, which is notable of course because it is an open high-scoring game.

It was also, the early game, much more played at ground level. You weren't allowed to pick up the ball at first unless you'd taken a mark, taken the ball on the full or on sort of a one hop, and you caught it, you could mark and have a kick. But otherwise, if you were kicking, you just had to kick it off the ground. And a lot of scrimmages, and often the ball went through the goals as a result of a scrimmage, and one side being able to push the other and the ball, through its goal.

Mick O'Regan: Which of course highlights the link to Rugby School and it changes in what we now call Soccer rules that emerge from Rugby into the game Rugby. And there would be a lot of commentators at the time who drew much more upon the fact that Wills had gone to Rugby, had studied at Rugby School in England, and had been a sportsperson there and very influenced by the game. And this comes I suppose to that central criticism. There's obvious connections to rugby, but people who if not deny, then downplay any possibility of an indigenous influence, say 'Look, there's simply no mention of it by Tom Wills himself or the people who wrote the rules, or formalised the rules in 1859, they simply didn't talk about the connection to indigenous games that they'd seen, and that seems to be a key plank in the view opposing yours.

John Hirst: Yes, as we said when we began this discussion of the early game, it's not in the early game that you can see the similarity, but what is interesting is that the game very quickly evolves into something more like the game as we see it today, and in that process it was becoming more like the Aboriginal game. There was one thing in the early rules that made this possible, and that is there was no offside rule, which was common in all English games from which they borrowed.

So though in drawing up the original rules they just made a sort of amalgam of rules from the great Public Schools of England, Winchester, Harrow, Rugby and so on, in leaving out offside, they left open this possibility of a much freer and more open game. You could kick the ball down to a goal-sneak and though he was in front of the ball and in front of all the other players in his team, he could kick a goal. So that was one thing at the beginning, which had the potential for making it a very different game.

But quite quickly, into the 1860s the game is more open and free-flowing. You can run with the ball so long as you can bounce it; it becomes much more an aerial game with long-kicking and running, rather than played at ground level. And it's at that point that you can begin to think that the Aboriginal style of play might have had an influence.

Now there's not going to be definite evidence saying Yes, we followed the Aboriginal game, but some of the things that are said by those who deny any influence, are wrong when they say for instance that Aborigines were so marginal and so looked-down upon, the racist mindset would have precluded any borrowing. Well that is just wrong for the mid-1850s, that's right for Australia 50 years later. But in the 1850s, there was much closer connection between Aborigines and the settlers, a whole variety of contacts, people moving around freely, Aborigines weren't being locked away in institutions or mission stations.

And two of the people who happened to be very influential in the game, Wills, who was there in drawing up the first rules, and Harrison, who was very influential in the '60s, as it happens did live very close to the Aborigines. So to suggest that there might be an influence from the Aboriginal game is not absurd. I'm not saying we can prove it, what I'm saying is we can't prove the contrary; just because we don't have the evidence of someone saying, 'Yes, we followed the Aboriginal game', I don't think that amounts to saying, 'There could not have been any influence'.

Mick O'Regan: As you say in the article, I mean beyond the game it's the spirit and that's always going to be an elusive quality to try and track down historigraphically isn't it?

John Hirst: Yes. I mean if you look at the original rules, you could ask the question, Well why doesn't the game evolve into something like soccer, or like rugby? It evolves into something very, very different, and that's the sort of puzzle in itself. Why was it that every change they made about picking up the ball, running, long-kicking, high-marking, all the rules and practices which led to that different sort of game, why did it go that way and not in any other of the many directions it could have taken?

So that's what suggests to me that it's not silly to suggest that there might have been an Aboriginal influence, and even Geoffrey Blainey who was very strongly against Aboriginal influence on the game, makes the concession, Well perhaps the high mark was borrowed from the Aboriginal game. Well if you're prepared to contemplate that, the argument that there could have been no borrowing and everyone despised Aborigines so much that they would never have thought of borrowing from an Aboriginal game, well that goes out the window then, and opens the possibility that there might have been more borrowings.

Mick O'Regan: And as you say it's a good puzzle to have.

John Hirst: It is a good puzzle to have. We have a similar sense of humour, the Aborigines and settler Australians, so why is that? You know, it is reassuring in a way, given our long history of exploitation and oppression of Aborigines, to think that we have become similar people in some aspects of our outlook on the world. And it is a puzzle to know why that is, and these are so deep matters that ordinary documentary evidence isn't going to help us, and the fact that we haven't got documentary evidence shouldn't then lead us to say Well there's no connection at all.

Mick O'Regan: Professor John Hirst, whose article is in the current edition of The Monthly magazine.

And that's it for this week's Sports Factor. Thanks to the team of Andrew Davies, Costa Zouliou and Sabrina Lipovic.

Guests

Ben McEvoy
St Kilda AFL player.

David Parkin
Former AFL player and coach.

Professor John Hirst
Historian, La Trobe University.

Presenter

Mick O'Regan

Producer

Andrew Davies