Australian rules football: A career for the history books

No coaching career is eternal, but some seem that way. So the sense of shock when the Australian football club Essendon announced that it was not renewing the contract of coach Kevin Sheedy matches the impact in the United States when the Dallas Cowboys fired Tom Landry after 29 years and the certain reaction in Britain when Alex Ferguson (21 years so far) finally leaves Manchester United.

Sheedy has coached Essendon since 1981, winning four Grand Finals. The match against Adelaide on Sunday was his 630th in charge, second on the all-time list after Jock McHale. Add in 251 matches as a player for the Richmond club and he is the sport's most enduring figure, having overtaken McHale's combined playing and coaching totals this month.

He was a player of middling talent made formidable by application, intelligence and big-match temperament - scoring three early goals when Richmond won the 1973 Grand Final. He was voted best player in its 1974 victory.

It is his coaching career, though, that will make him a certainty for Australian Football's Hall of Fame - there were suggestions after the announcement last week that he would be voted in immediately, without the usual three-year wait.

Martin Flanagan, Australia's finest contemporary sportswriter, rates him alongside Ron Barassi - a great player of the 1950s and 1960s, then an innovative coach - as the game's most influential figure since World War II.

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His career has coincided with great transformations. In 1981 Sheedy became coach of a club playing home matches in the Victoria Football League, essentially a Melbourne city championship, at its compact Windy Hill Stadium. But starting with Sydney in 1982, the league expanded to become a national competition, the Australian Football League, with teams in every mainland state - "interstate" teams have won the last six Grand Finals and 10 of the last 15.

Although he has always supported expanding the game, including international combined-rules games against Ireland's best Gaelic footballers, this might have happened even without Sheedy.

His influence in other changes is, however, unquestionable.

While Sheedy has been among the most articulate and quotable coaches of his time - calling erring umpires "Martians" and describing a bombastic club president prominent in rightist politics as "the reason there is a Labor Party" - he led the trend away from hectoring exhortation to analysis and the application of sports science as techniques for getting the best out of players.

Still more significant was his impact on race relations. Although Australia's sports never operated a formal color bar, only the most gifted individuals in the Aborigine population prospered, generally in isolation.

Flanagan points to Sheedy as both the first coach, in 1993, to bring in a group of Aborigine players and an important mentor to Michael Long, the Essendon player who emerged as the spokesman for native players.

His confrontation of the issue forced a change of attitude about racial discrimination. Flanagan wrote that Sheedy "enabled the game to furnish a vision of Australia of which we could be proud."

Among his four championship teams, that of 2000 may be the most remembered. It was the middle of three years in which Essendon dominated the game with an aggressive, free-flowing style that showed novice the possibilities of Australian Football. In 1999 and 2001 the team had stumbled, but in 2000 it had arguably the greatest season in the game's history, winning 24 of its 25 matches, including a 135-75 Grand Final victory over Melbourne.

Sheedy has been less successful in recent years, missing the playoffs for the past three seasons and finishing a calamitous 15th out of 16 in 2006.

Essendon's management decided that a coach who will be 60 on Christmas Eve may not be the man, for all his past achievements, for a long-term rebuilding program.

The decision not to renew his contract followed rapidly on the dismissals of three other coaches in the 16-team competition, encouraging speculation that Essendon may be after another of the jobless trio's jobs.

Sheedy, though, will stay in post until the end of the season. His players responded to last week's news with a 117-105 victory, the 385th of his coaching career, over Adelaide that took them above their opponents into the eighth and last playoff place with five of 22 regular-season matches left.

Don't rule out Sheedy's adding further postseason honors on his farewell tour, or turning up at another club to extend that formidable personal record book next year.