By Caroline Wilson
realfooty.theage.com.au
June 19, 2004
Richmond coach Danny Frawley is planning a dignified exit from Tigerland and could announce his resignation in a matter of days should the club lose to Carlton tonight.
Frawley is believed to have accepted his time is up as senior coach of the Tigers, having achieved only 45 wins from 103 games, and has told friends he will resign over the mid-season break should the finals become a mathematical impossibility after tonight.
But Frawley, 40, has no intention of walking out on his contract and will coach until the end of the season.
With the Tigers sitting 14th on the ladder with only four wins this season and the lowest percentage in the competition, the accepted wisdom at the club now is that despite his best attempts, Frawley has not lost the respect but no longer has the belief of his players.
A subcommittee headed up by director of football Greg Miller has made it clear that work has begun to find a new coach for 2005, although the popular choice, Kevin Sheedy, has not been contacted by his old club.
Sheedy will make a decision regarding a two-year contract offer from Essendon after this weekend's Melbourne game.
But Sheedy's connections scoffed at reports yesterday that the Bombers' coach had been approached by a rebel group plotting the demise of president Clinton Casey, saying Sheedy had no knowledge of any coup and had spoken to no one involved or potentially involved at Richmond since the start of the season.
After tonight's clash with the Blues, the Tigers are scheduled to meet four of the top five teams over the next month - Brisbane Lions, Essendon, St Kilda and Melbourne.
Frawley, his wife Anita and the couple's three children plan to remain in Melbourne despite substantial farming and other interests on both sides of the family around the Ballarat area.
Having worked at the AFL during his final years at St Kilda, where he holds the club record as captain, Frawley is regarded as eminently employable in the football industry.
One of his strengths at Richmond has been his development work with the younger players at the club.
Frawley's manager Ricky Nixon was unavailable for comment yesterday but is believed to have held a series of talks with Frawley and others regarding his future.
Miller told The Age: "Anything can happen in football. Danny and I certainly haven't discussed anything like that."
Having worked as an assistant for three years under Tony Shaw at Collingwood, Frawley took over from Jeff Gieschen at Tigerland in 2000.
He immediately encountered a new group of assistant coaches and a football department structure - with Casey replacing Leon Daphne and Mark Brayshaw replacing Jim Malone - that, in hindsight, left the rookie coach forced to confront situations in which he had little experience.
It was Shaw's mid-season retirement at Victoria Park, paving the way for Mick Malthouse's appointment, that could prove the model for Frawley's method of departure.
When former Kangaroos chief executive Miller took over the football department at the end of 2002, he quickly moved to extend Frawley's contract until the end of this year, removing a performance clause that Miller felt would have placed unfair pressure on the coach.
But Frawley began this, his final season, in dreadful circumstances when outgoing director and mentor Tony Jewell criticised his coaching style. Jewell said Frawley was indecisive in the coach's box and had come from a losing culture at St Kilda.
Casey then said just over a fortnight ago that the club needed to appoint an experienced coach next time around, a comment that hurt Frawley and which Tigers' football department insiders believe was the final straw for players' confidence in their coach.
The club was further damaged by Casey's eroding power-base.
Three directors resigned from his board at the start of the season, chief executive Ian Campbell was forced out, Casey's choice as his replacement Leighton Wood was vetoed by the rest of the board, and it was revealed that the club was in diabolical financial strife and would seek AFL assistance.
Football department costs have been cut this season and disastrous changes to the marketing department, along with a series of worst-case financial scenarios, mean the club will lose $2 million-3 million.
http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2004/06/18/1087245115139.html
