from the Age..Former North Melbourne premiership defender King, impressive as a special comments man on 3AW, has a lot of important figures at Punt Road sold on his potential.
It was working alongside King at 3AW where Richmond coach Terry Wallace — who calls King "outstanding, and improving all the time" — first became attracted to the idea of getting him aboard at Punt Road.
Wallace was struck by the depth of insight in King's observations about the game in general and how specific clubs played. "I didn't really know a lot about him, but his analysis of the game seemed pretty intelligent," Wallace says.
"I wanted to try to put a run-and-carry game together. He had so much run and great kicking skills as a player, and I thought he could teach people how to cut through the middle of the ground and work the angles because that's what he did."
Working with a young team that inevitably would cop its share of setbacks, Wallace was also keen for an assistant full of vibrancy and positivity. That's King, all right. "He always bounces out on to the training track, no matter what's happened," Wallace says.
Other Richmond sources cite King's gradual distancing of himself from a player's mentality to that of a coach as his most significant advance.
One insider says King's greatest asset is his broad range of skills. Though nominally the Tigers' defensive coach, King has taken on a large part of Richmond's opposition analysis, and has also worked closely with the club's information technology department to streamline the formulas required for probing into rival club's playing styles and key performance indicators.
"You can get 50 pages of information that doesn't mean much … but he's been able to build a set of criteria with the IT blokes which cuts through the crap … he's upskilled our department tenfold in that area," says a Tigers boardroom source.
http://www.realfooty.com.au/news/news/whos-the-voss/2008/05/23/1211183110847.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
