‘Ablett-esque’: Outrageous shooting star Allen Jakovich’s unforgettable farewell to the Demons
It is the 30th anniversary of outrageous shooting star Allen Jakovich’s final game in the red and blue. SHANNON GILL speaks to his old coach Neil Balme about the enigma, the memories and the legacy of ‘Jako’.
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“He was a bit … Ablett-esque.”
There may be no greater compliment in 1990s footy, yet that’s how Neil Balme describes his old pupil at Melbourne, Allen Jakovich.
Shooting star ‘Jako’ was the enigmatic on-field showman of the AFL for a glorious four years.
Water bottle kicking, crowd high-fiving, girlfriend waving, brother kissing and aeroplane celebrating were just some of his party tricks.
And then there were the goals.
Bicycle kicks over the head, big barrel torpedoes, twisting and turning team-rule-defying snaps across the body. All in all there were 201 of them in just 47 games at the Demons at the astonishing clip of 4.28 per game, generally accompanied by a dervish of fist pumping to animate or incite the crowd.
If you disregard his seven-game comeback with the Bulldogs two years later, that average is the eighth best of anyone to tally that many games in VFL/AFL history.
Only Peter Hudson, John Coleman, Tony Lockett, Jason Dunstall, Peter McKenna, Bob Pratt and Ron Todd would sit ahead of him, Gordon Coventry and Gary Ablett below him.
“A fantastic player,” Balme says.
“He could have been anything.”
“Like a Daicos or Dusty”
This week marks the 30th anniversary of Jakovich’s last game in the red and blue.
It was a microcosm of the whole Allen Jakovich experience.
After a lean spell for both team and player, Balme had overseen a team meeting full of frank and fearless observations. The man himself would tell the Herald Sun afterwards that he knew he had to “put my best foot forward and contribute something.”
In front of just 14,000 fans at Princes Park, he lit up Hawthorn for eight goals, including three in a matter of minutes to start the second half. Eleven marks, fourteen kicks and, typically, just the one handball rounded out the stats sheets. The radar was on target too, with only one miss in contrast to his four goals and ten behinds against the Hawks earlier in the year.
The next day on the Footy Show, Mal Brown said Jakovich “does things the normal player can’t do. Whether it be a left-foot snap, or he should handball but knocks over two and barges through and soccer a goal, or bounces it around corners”.
“He is a very gifted player.”
Yet there was also the Jako baggage; five free kicks against, a report for abusive language towards an umpire that would cost him $2000 and a limp off the ground towards the end of the game.
It would be the last time he was ever seen on the field for the Dees, the last quarter ‘rest’ turned out to be a back injury that would require surgery.
On the surface Jakovich would appear to have driven a coach mad, but the sage Balme couldn’t help but be charmed by Jakovich.
“I quite enjoyed him,” Balme says.
“I’m a bit soft like that as I thought all those players were loveable. But he was a good kid, a bit naughty and maybe not prepared to commit exactly as you needed him to, but not everyone’s the same.
“He was so explosive. He wasn’t 6‘5 but he could mark beautifully, he was quick, he led well, he was a magnificent kick. He saw the ball pretty well, he was naturally a very, very good player.
“He was like a Daicos or a Dusty in some of the stuff he could do. When he was on, he was beautiful to watch.”
“More bullfighter than footballer”
Jakovich’s debut AFL season three years earlier in 1991 has gone down in folklore.
A footballing nomad, he’d played in Perth, Darwin, Port Hedland, Kalgoorlie and Adelaide before being drafted by Melbourne and debuting as 23 year-old.
He was said to have told Melbourne officials upon arrival and seeing the Southern Stand being rebuilt that it was “a pity … that’s 40,000 people who won’t be able to see me play.”
Up until Round 14 that year he had just two senior games and one goal to his name, while kicking 60 in the reserves.
Recalled, he went from anonymity to the Lockett and Dunstall sphere, tearing off another 70 senior goals in ten home and away games and two finals, including seven second half goals to win an elimination final off his own boot.
Some 131 goals across the entire season was a unique haul, as was the joie de vivre he brought to his work.
Peter Wilmoth wrote of his impact in the Age, “unlike the brooding, hulking presence of Tony Lockett, Jakovich is a New Romantic. He is Don Giovanni meets Don Scott … his style is more bullfighter than footballer.”
While the goals continued, the continuity didn’t.
Balme inherited his star when he took over as coach in 1993, in their two years together he played just 22 of a possible 45 games due to groin, calf and back issues.
He still managed to kick 90 goals in what was effectively one regular season.
“If he really committed himself like a Brett Lovett did, he would have been an absolute super-duper champion,” Balme says.
A “genuine rock and roll star”
Super-duper champion status did not mesh with a love of the good life, and Jakovich was never just about football.
There’s legendary stories of him disappearing from teammates on a pre-season training holiday each night only for them to find him on stage singing in a local pub.
He starred in the first AFL ‘Men for all Seasons’ glamour modelling calendar, was one of the initial recruits for the Thursday night Footy Show and was even a guest star on sketch comedy show Fast Forward.
If there was a promotional photo or hospital visit to do, Jakovich was your man. Sweating out the kilometres in the pre-season heat, not so much.
It’s hard to separate the fact from the urban myth with off-field Jakovich tales that are told, but one of undeniable truth is his fronting of the AFL player band Trial By Video.
Then Footy Show producer Harvey Silver was trying to find an AFL player with the cajoles to sing on a live television and eventually that led to Jakovich.
“Someone at Melbourne said, ‘Allen Jakovich sings’,” Silver recalled to CODE Sports last year.
“You never really knew what you were going to get with Jakovich, and that was what made him great.” Silver added.
Soon Jako wasn’t just a football player, he was also the lead singer of a gigging band around Melbourne nightclubs.
Fellow band member Tony Woods recalled to CODE that “he was even more charismatic as a frontman than he was on the field.”
“Jakovich started to morph into this genuine rock and roll star and started to get a bit unreliable. We’d get to call time at 10:30pm, and we didn’t know where he was. He’d roll up half an hour late with his own entourage of followers.
“I reckon he even rolled up in a fur jacket a couple of times. “
“It was probably harsh”
The take-off of the band coincided with the back issues that were flaring after that day out versus Hawthorn. When Jakovich returned to training after surgery, out of condition and seemingly unlikely to be on a footy field anytime soon, the writing was won the wall.
Balme is still not entirely comfortable about the call he was part of to end Jakovich’s time as a Demon.
“Those things are never easy, but it was fairly expected from both parties,” he says.
“We were in a tough spot in those days with salary caps and the club wasn’t particularly well off financially either. It was a decision made that we were going to have to invest a lot in this bloke and we don’t have the confidence he was going to do the work to get himself back on the track.”
“It was probably harsh, but it was the reality of the situation. A back injury like that, you can underestimate how tough it is.”
Officially Jakovich retired before he was delisted ahead of the 1995 season.
One-time nemesis Collingwood was tipped to swoop immediately but were frightened off after they investigated the back issues. Eventually the Bulldogs would give Jakovich a lifeline 12 months later, but after seven games and seven goals Jakovich was officially finished as an AFL player at just 28.
Balme says Jakovich should not shoulder all the blame for the briefness of his career.
“You can’t be too critical of him. The footy club wasn’t in a wonderful position of being able to pull everyone into line,” he says.
“Some of those running and coaching the club weren’t doing as good a job as we could have either.
Subsequently Balme’s experience as the steady hand through premiership eras at Geelong and Richmond has given him a different perspective.
“I reckon if we were winning flags we would have been able to pull him into line.”
“A mad, wild knight”
Unlike most AFL characters who continue to make a living in media or on the speaking circuit, Jakovich seemingly disappeared into thin air once his career was over.
Old teammates would give vague answers about thinking he was involved in fishing businesses in various parts of Australia, yet for two decades Allen Jakovich was a mystery.
Nobody heard him, nobody saw him. He was the great white whale of media and footy fans alike.
For a significant proportion of Dees fans that rail against the old stereotype of privilege, private schools and pomposity, Jakovich, the antithesis of all that, became a symbol much bigger than just his spectacular playing career.
Facebook pages emerged sharing weird and wild Jakovich stories from his heyday and the part confessional, part satirical Demonblog fan site named its annual player of the year award the ‘Allen Jakovich Medal’.
Silence only enhanced the legend.
Then after two decades of exile Jakovich emerged in 2017, not for a tell-all television special with associated cheque, but to take part in a two-hour interview with the Demonland fan podcast.
In retrospect it was completely on-brand, dismissing his ‘Demon royalty’ tag the hosts gave him to instead refer to himself as “maybe a mad, wild knight.”
He appeared on the Front Bar the next year to a hero’s welcome, yet the piece de resistance was in the aftermath of the long awaited 2021 premiership.
As Garry Lyon interviewed players, officials and hangers on in the joyous rooms, Jakovich wandered by. Emotional and dropping a f-bomb on national television in his excitement, it warmed the hearts of all Demons of a certain vintage.
Watching back in Melbourne, it made Balme’s night too.
“It’s great that he managed to bob up and enjoy the glory. That was lovely,” he says.
“He was a damn good player.”
Allen Jakovich
Melbourne 1991-1994: 47 games, 201 goals. Average: 4.28 goals per game
Footscray 1996: 7 games, 7 goals
Big Bags
11 goals v North Melbourne, Round 20 1991
9 goals v Collingwood, Round 11, 1993
8 goals v Sydney, Round 15 1991
8 goals v St Kilda, Round 18 1991
8 goals v Essendon, Elimination Final 1991
8 goals v Essendon, Round 12, 1993
8 goals v Richmond, Round 21 1993
8 goals v Geelong, Round 1, 1994
8 goals v Hawthorn, Round 17 1994 – last game for Melbourne
Last game for Melbourne:
Round 17, July 16 1994 at Princes Park
Melbourne 17.10. 112
Hawthorn 11.8.74
Goals – Melbourne: Jakovich 8, Schwarz 3, G Lovett 2, Lyon, Pike, Dyson, Norrish. Hawthorn: Allen 3, Hudson 2, Dunstall 2, Crawford, Taylor, Cooper, Platten.
Best – Melbourne: Jakovich, S Febey, M Febey, Wight, Lyon, Dyson, Viney, Neitz. Hawthorn: Platten, Maginness, Allan, Lawrence, Crawford.
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