Hardest sell
22 April 2006 Herald Sun
Trevor Grant
Coaches are employed to win matches, but in a marketplace where every dollar counts, they have another job: being the face of their club. And that comes more naturally to some than others. LITERALLY with his back to the wall in the MCG dressingrooms, Danny Frawley sucked in a few deep breaths as he surveyed the flying wedge of reporters who had corralled him 30 minutes after the game.
They weren't there for a fireside chat with the Richmond coach. Having just witnessed a spiteful clash against the Western Bulldogs in 2001, in which veteran Tiger Matthew Knights had been left with a bloodied face after an encounter with opponent Tony Liberatore, they were seeking his response to the incident and its emotion-charged aftermath.
Frawley had prepared as well as he could for this moment. Over a cup of tea a few minutes earlier with senior club officials, he had been strongly advised to avoid inflaming what everyone knew was already a major controversy. It was decided to invoke the well-worn coach's strategy of saying nothing to avoid saying something.
Before too long, though, the plan had fallen apart. Under persistent questioning, Frawley dropped his guard and eventually uttered the powerful lines that would quickly become big black headlines: "Payback time . . . every dog has its day".
For the media it made a red-hot story. For the coach it would make his job of preparing for the next game much more difficult and, monetarily at least, a lot less rewarding that week.
"I knew I shouldn't have talked about it. But as I was being grilled and grilled a few things started to come back into my head about when I got felled behind play years ago. As well we'd got touched up on the scoreboard," Frawley explained this week.
"I didn't react until the end of the press conference when I used that line. I knew instantly it would be headlines. Next minute I'd got a letter from Mr Demetriou saying, `Give us $3000 and cop a $3000 suspended sentence'. After that I became a bit insular. People couldn't work out why but I had a family to feed like everyone else."
The fallout for Frawley on this occasion extended beyond the headlines. It was one more incident which helped brand him as a team boss who found the diverse pressures of the job a considerable burden.
Already he'd made his mark when, in his third game as an AFL coach, in 2000, he charged out on to the MCG at three-quarter time as if he was physically leading his team into battle. "I ran down right next to the North Melbourne bench and said: `Come on boys, we've got 'em. They are too old, too slow'. A couple of the senior North players went straight to (coach Denis) Pagan and, of course, the hairs on the back of his neck went straight up. " Frawley recalled.
"We got beaten by six goals. We kicked 1.6 and they kicked six straight but the facts were that I'd put the club under pressure by comments that I'd made."
As unfair as it may have been, Frawley, who was feted for his coaching in 2001 when the team finished third, its highest position in 19 years, was landed with a label which would stick until he left the job in 2004.
While he may have been a perfectly capable coach, it's not seen as enough in today's football. The same goes for Neale Daniher, Kevin Sheedy or Dean Laidley. Almost all AFL coaches are expected to be much more than their title suggests. While they are still required to coax, coerce and cajole their players to victory each week, they have to be able to woo sponsors and members, and to do it they need to present, through the media, an image that is not going to frighten the horses.
It may not be a face to launch a thousand ships but when we see the craggy countenance of Sheedy on our TV screens we are looking at a committed salesman as much as a fierce competitor and wily strategist. Sheedy is to Essendon what, if you'll pardon the comparisons, Elle McPherson is to bras and Pat Rafter is to Y-fronts. He is the face of the Bombers; the man, who, as the marketing types like to say, is there to sell the brand.
Sheedy might be the master at it, but, for some, doing this effectively while also trying to do your day job of winning games is an eternal battle in an arena where there's an obvious incompatibility between the need to present the right image and the need to let the raw emotion that is the heart and soul of the game run free.
There is no better place to see this clash of objectives than at the post-match media conference. Twenty years ago, this was a small gathering of reporters throwing a few questions at the coach. Now it's a televised event which can expose every little foible in a coach's make-up.
Yet, according to coach and player manager Ricky Nixon, there is an obvious lack of proper preparation. "What staggers me is that the coach is effectively the CEO of the brand these days yet I'm not sure they get the support when the camera and microphone is around," he said.
"It's amazing we do all this media training for players but very little with coaches. It's extraordinary given how much exposure they have. You have only to look at those regrettable comments from Grant Thomas last year about umpires, which I'm sure was a spur of the moment mistake.
"They all have a massive responsibility now. If they go in to a press conference with an aggressive, angry voice and attitude players are going to hear it in the car and sponsors and supporters will also see and hear it. The ones who have the `David Parkin jugular' pumping away at every press conference just lose the battle these days. Any coach who can crack a gag and lighten things gains respect out there in the wider world."
Professor David Shilbury, a marketing and sports management expert from Deakin University and a former AFL Tribunal member, has been observing coaches through the media for many years. He contends that there is very little conscious planning to ensure the brand is sold well. Rather it's all hit or miss, depending on the personality of the coach.
"There are some who quite obviously detract from the brand. You have only to watch the post-match press conferences to understand that. Those performances carry messages and perceptions that are embedded in a brand," Shilbury said.
"I think you can count on one hand the coaches who do it well. I think Kevin Sheedy stands out. He's got something very special which few others have. It's a wonderful ability to relate to anyone. It's this rapport that has evolved and been developed for him to be the face of Essendon."
Some coaches, such as Sheedy and Richmond's Terry Wallace, always appear to enjoy selling their clubs. Others are naturally less inclined, even though they throw themselves into it, as Melbourne's Neale Daniher did a couple of years ago.
"The hardest thing was to say to Neale, `It's OK to come out of the bunker. The bad people have left'," Melbourne chairman Paul Gardner says. "After that, it was fine. I didn't say, `Sell yourself', I said, `Be yourself'. I think he has done it very well."
Gardner, who works in the marketing and advertising industry, says the use of Daniher has been important to Melbourne establishing "brand differentiation" in the AFL marketplace.
"The personification of Neale Daniher as an honest, down-to-earth person with strong Australian country roots is not a bad image for us to portray, especially coming off an image which may been largely seen as top-end-of-Collins-Street elitist," Gardner said.
Gardner's counterpart at Hawthorn, Jeff Kennett, isn't so interested in using his club's coach, Alastair Clarkson, in the marketplace. "I am privately critical of some coaches who are media groupies, consistently writing columns, commenting on other teams and clubs. I would not want my coach to be so public profile that it became bigger than the task for which he was employed," Kennett said.
In the wake of the highly successful 2001 season, the Richmond board asked Frawley to become the face of the club.
"I was quite comfortable with it at first but when things went sour with the win-loss ratio and I was being wheeled out to talk on every issue it was very hard to maintain your composure," Frawley said. "I was a guy who couldn't hide my emotions that well and it became a real battle."
Frawley said if he had anything to offer from his five years as Richmond coach it would be to always try to keep things in context. And the person he would like to be the recipient of this advice is Kangaroos' coach Dean Laidley, who made headlines after his team's Round 1 win over Port Adelaide when he accused critics of his team as being "uneducated".
"He came out on the front foot and made a few statements. There would have been a huge build-up to the game and his words showed a big let-out of emotion.
"I would have loved to have grabbed him and said: `Dean it's a win. You've got four points but show you are treating it as a stepping stone, not an event of major significance'. You can so quickly lose a couple of games, as they've done, and see things turn."
Now, looking on as a television and radio commentator, Frawley can finally identify the forest from the trees. "So often as a coach you isolate yourself. Being in the media now I see it is not all gloom and doom. It's a game of footy. People are within their rights to talk about you and your team. Just don't take it personally."
Still, Frawley knows there's a very seductive element missing from his life.
"There's no emotion in business," he said. "There's no job like footy coaching, where you can turn up at the MCG and feel the charge from 80,000 people and say you are at work. You can talk about the need to be the face of the game and corporatised and all that, but heaven help us if it ever loses the emotion." http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/footy/common/story_page/0,8033,18885149%255E19742,00.html
