AFL coaching can be cruel, but Ken Hinkley helped the Power tear up its tarps

While reality checks are rarely palatable, sporting coaches can find them especially bitter pills, as English soccer’s Brian Clough discovered after his fabled but ill-fated move from Brighton to Leeds five decades ago.

In the feature film The Damned United, which depicts that debacle, there is a scene in which Clough is subjected to a less-than-decorous rant from a team chairman, who delivers some humiliating home truths about the position of the coach (or, in England, “manager”) in the pecking order at a professional sporting club.

“The reality of footballing life is this,” Clough is unequivocally told. 

“The chairman is the boss, then come the directors, then the secretary, then the fans, then the players. And then finally — last of all, bottom of the heap, the lowest of the low — comes the one, in the end, we can all do without. The f***ing manager.”

Such spiteful words could hardly fail to induce twinges of unease among AFL and NRL head coaches, who must at times live in fear of barbed remarks like these. Coaches are, after all, their codes’ tightrope walkers, flying high when the going is good, but always the likeliest to topple if there is a wobble somewhere along the line.

Over the past 12 — or perhaps 24, or 48, or even 120 — months, Port Adelaide’s Ken Hinkley has lived this reality, and endured it. 

Despite regular rumblings about his job security, his record is, on the whole, impressive. In a dozen seasons at the Power, he has engineered victory in more than 60 per cent of his side’s matches — an achievement that compares favourably with the win-loss ratios of premiership champions Alastair Clarkson and Damien Hardwick.

But footy’s cycles of boom and bust are measured in fortnights, in which a team can be lauded one week and then lambasted the next. To be a coach under such circumstances is to be on almost perpetual probation. As the wisdom of the talkback radio caller goes: “We can’t sack the entire squad — we’ve just gotta get rid of the bloody bloke in charge.”

Hinkley’s latest triumph — a three-point win over Hawthorn that has earned his side its third preliminary finals berth in five seasons — has helped take the heat off him, at least temporarily.

If the result has been overshadowed by a post-match exchange between the Hawks captain and the Power coach, that spat has at least served a salutary purpose.

When former US president Teddy Roosevelt made his famous distinction between the athlete “who is actually in the arena” and the “cold and timid” onlookers who know neither “victory nor defeat”, he did coaches a disservice.

As the Hinkley-Sicily exchange demonstrated, coaches feel pressure more acutely than most, but are denied the consolation of being able to throw themselves into the battle. Instead, they can only let off steam in unedifying ways — by slamming down phones on the sidelines, snapping at journalists in post-match press conferences, and sometimes allowing emotion to get the better of them in the immediate aftermath of games.

“He knew that he’d stepped over the line,” Power CEO Matthew Richardson said on Saturday, after Hinkley himself expressed contrition over the incident.

“It’s one of the things that we love about Ken — he cares deeply about his players, he cares deeply about the footy club.”

Tearing up tarps

Coach Ken arrived on the scene at Alberton like a sheriff bursting through the swing doors of a last chance saloon, at a time when the Power was a basket case — almost a white elephant. It was adrift and in the doldrums. It had not played a final since the hellish 119-point hammering at the hands of Geelong on 2007’s biggest stage.

Hinkley’s appointment, announced in October 2012, restored stability to a club that, for several years, had known only mediocrity, despondency and financial hardship. Indeed, so successful was he in reversing the Power’s fortunes that it is today easy to forget the lay of the land that confronted Hinkley when he inherited the keys to the estate.

“This club’s in a renewal stage, there’s no doubt about that,” he said at his first media conference after securing the top job.

“We know what we’ve got to do and we know where we’ve got to go.”

To fans, the torrid twilight of the Primus era was a hopeless and desperate dark age in which the only milestones took the form of new lows. In 2011, for example, the Power achieved the ignominious distinction of becoming the first side to lose to newcomers the Gold Coast Suns. Compounding that defeat was the fact that Port had led, at one stage, by more than seven goals. 

Later that year, Collingwood inflicted 138 points’ worth of pain in what was then the Power’s biggest loss since it entered the AFL. As a spectator who attended the game later recalled, it was a record that lasted all of seven days.

“I just remember going to the bar at half time with my mates and we didn’t return to our seats, we just watched the rest of the game in the bar,” the fan wrote on Reddit. “The worst night I’ve ever had at the footy. The following week, we lost to Hawthorn at the MCG by 165.”

The most conspicuous features of the wilderness years were, of course, the tarpaulins the club resorted to in a doomed attempt to deflect attention away from the seats left empty by fans who seemed to be deserting in droves. 

The advent of Hinkley enabled the club to tear up those tarps. Soon afterwards, it adopted the INXS song Never Tear Us Apart, and — in new marketing material — embraced a simple slogan clearly designed to reinspire a disaffected supporter base. While the words “we will turn up” are hardly Churchillian, the simplicity of that commitment was a reflection of how far the Power had fallen, and of the rudimentary nature of the repair work that was needed before the club could reconnect with fans.

Australian Rules can be an unusually cruel sport. Unlike, say, elite soccer, which combines the possibility of league with cup glory, AFL football has few, if any, forms of team success other than grand final victory. To finish — as Hinkley’s Power has done — in the top eight in seven out of 12 seasons, and in the top four in four of those years, and as minor premiers in one of those (and to qualify for four preliminary finals) are the kinds of accomplishments that help coaches keep their jobs in the short term.

But they are hardly likely to placate fans in the long run. In football, silverware is the only yardstick, and the only satisfactory silverware is the premiership trophy.

If, however, Hinkley falls short of that ultimate reward, and at some point moves — or is moved — on, he might find a more hopeful message in The Damned United than the quotation at the start of this article.

The departure of Clough from Leeds was arguably a happier separation for the former than the latter. In the five decades since Clough was sacked, Leeds has claimed a solitary top-flight title.

The crafty Brian more than matched that achievement. Less than four years after he left Leeds, Clough found himself in charge of Nottingham Forest and in possession of that club’s first ever first division trophy — but he didn’t stop there.

His side went on to win his continent’s highest prize — the European Cup — not once but twice, and in successive seasons.