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The Malcolm Blight Files — Part 3: How the ‘Messiah’ was led back to the promised land

IT may have been the easiest “sale” in AFL history. When Adelaide Football Club asked Malcolm Blight to become its coach, the SA legend Malcolm Blight saw a chance to tend to unfinished business.

Congratulations to footy's newest Legend

MALCOLM Blight was dubbed the “Messiah” in his second coming to Adelaide — and the exalted title did fit as he and the Adelaide Football Club were both immediately fulfilled in his first (and second) season as Crows coach.

But the other title handed to Blight in the build-up to his arrival at West Lakes — the AFL’s first million-dollar coach — is part of the myth that adds to his legend.

“No,” says Bill Sanders, the Crows chief executive who, with club chairman Bob Hammond, brought Blight home to deliver the first AFL premierships to Adelaide.

“It was much less than that ... with incentives,” added Sanders.

Not that Blight needed financial inducement to coach the Crows.

“I wanted to coach the SA State team,” recalls Blight, referring to the one title that is not on a distinguished and extensive record been placed on the highest pedestal in the Australian Football Hall of Fame, as a “Legend”.

“I was asked — and I couldn’t do it by my club commitments (at Geelong). But I would have loved to have done that job.

“So when Bill Sanders, Bob Hammond and John Reid came wondering in 1996 if I would coach the Crows, I was going to say yes. Coaching the Crows was almost like taking on the SA State team.

“Growing up in Adelaide, playing for SA, I told the (Crows executives who chased him) that the chance to coach the Crows rekindled all I remember of SA v Victoria games at the Adelaide Oval all those years ago.

“I know Port Adelaide was coming in to the AFL in 1997, but the Crows were still representative of SA.

“Taking the Adelaide job was a substitute for something I wanted to do — I really wanted to do.”

Adelaide Crows coach Malcolm Blight jokes with Troy Bond at training in 1997. Picture: Ray Titus
Adelaide Crows coach Malcolm Blight jokes with Troy Bond at training in 1997. Picture: Ray Titus

And there was the matter of still not being a premiership coach — anywhere.

“I was not fulfilled,” said Blight who had taken Woodville to an SANFL preliminary final and Geelong to three VFL-AFL grand finals.

“I’d achieved some degree of success in coaching ... but I was a little short ...”

Robert Shaw, after a record 4-0 start, had the Crows falling out of contention midway through the 1996 AFL season.

The notion Adelaide needed a Victorian to succeed in the Victorian-dominated national competition — just as the Perth-based West Coast had succeeded with Michael Malthouse (at Blight’s expense in the 1992 grand final) — had not unfolded as hoped with the Crows.

“We had real concerns,” Sanders recalled of a high-level club meeting at West Lakes.

“And we made the decision we would not renew Robert Shaw’s contract and start searching for a replacement.”

In Melbourne, where Blight was making his name as a Channel Seven AFL commentator whose opinion everyone noted, Hammond and Sanders had the easiest sales pitch ever put to a coach ... and without the $1 million lure mentioned outside the club.

“It was straight forward,” recalled Sanders.

“We just said, ‘We’d like you to coach, what do you need?’ And we moved from there.

“Malcolm met our needs for a coach. And we felt this was the job that could fulfil him.

“There were more meetings — in Adelaide and Melbourne. At his sister’s house (June Roache in Adelaide) I’d wait for Malcolm to leave the room and I’d put it to (his wife) Patsy that she would want to come home ...

“We still laugh about her response. She said, ‘I am ambivalent’.

“That’s Patsy — always in strong support of Malcolm, always behind him and always prepared to handle what comes with Malcolm’s public profile.

“I knew she wanted to be home in Adelaide, closer to family. But she never put that before what Malcolm thought was best.”

Patsy’s feelings may not have been at the forefront of Blight’s return to Adelaide to be the fulfilling messiah.

But her illness in Blight’s third year as Crows coach did become a key factor in his resignation during the 1999 season.

“You can’t do this by yourself,” Blight says in tribute to his wife.

“It would have been impossible without Patsy. She has been terrific. She is my mate, my best mate. And she is a remarkable lady.”

Blight the most steadfast of Woodville warriors

Woodville captain-coach Malcolm Blight beats Port Adelaide’s Alan Gill to get his handball away at Woodville Oval in 1985. Picture: Stuart Hannagan
Woodville captain-coach Malcolm Blight beats Port Adelaide’s Alan Gill to get his handball away at Woodville Oval in 1985. Picture: Stuart Hannagan

MALCOLM Blight is not one for unfinished business.

A year after he had been sacked as North Melbourne’s playing coach during the 1981 season — to become the last playing mentor in VFL-AFL history — Blight was determined to coach again. And on his terms.

“From the day I stopped coaching North Melbourne,” Blight said, “I decided that if I ever coached again it would only be done one way — my way.”

And he did it as a playing coach — at his home club at Woodville in the SANFL.

He not only succeeded as a player, earning State-of-Origin selection and the Ken Farmer Medal as the league’s leading goalkicker in 1985 (125 goals), but also turned Woodville from the perennial loser to a consecutive SANFL finalist in 1986-87, with a cult following that added new colour to the terraces.

It was a hint of what would unfold a decade later with the Crows.

Bill Sanders was the pivotal player in having Blight make his two homecomings — the first to Woodville in 1984 and then the “messiah” mission at the Crows in 1997.

On his return to the city, after working as a bank manager at Ardrossan, Sanders was assigned by the Woodville Football Club leadership to secure Blight, as the Warriors also sought to bring home Phil Maylin and John Roberts from Carlton and Sydney respectively.

Coach Malcolm Blight talks to his men at three-quarter time at Woodville Oval in 1985. Picture: Paul Lakatos
Coach Malcolm Blight talks to his men at three-quarter time at Woodville Oval in 1985. Picture: Paul Lakatos

“After meeting a few times with Malcolm (and his wife) Patsy in Adelaide and at their home in Malvern in Melbourne, I asked, ‘Would you like to coach?’,” recalled Sanders.

“I saw the reaction. And he said, ‘Let’s talk about it’.

“I added, ‘If you were offered the coaching job what would you say’.

“He said, ‘Yes’.”

Blight was wanting to prove something to himself — more so than those who had sacked him at North Melbourne almost two years earlier.

“I wanted to find out if I really wanted to coach,” Blight said.

It was no simple return.

First, North Melbourne put a $50,000 price tag on his clearance — a fee dropped hours before the deadline, allowing Woodville to keep the money offered by an American mining magnate who considered it “unjust” to deny Blight free passage to his home club.

Second, his first $3600 cheque in his first month as Woodville playing coach would not cash.

“I was at the Hindmarsh branch (of the Savings Bank of SA) — and a teller came into my office to say Malcolm Blight was at the counter,” Sanders recalled. “His first cheque bounced.”

Sanders paid Blight from one of his accounts.

He learned, as Woodville’s chairman and league director, for the first time that the club was broke — and carrying $150,000 in debt.

Woodville stayed afloat with its major sponsor advancing money, club directors putting new mortgages on their homes to raise money — and Blight becoming the first of Australian football’s money-generating coaches.

“Malcolm could have easily said, ‘Not my problem’,” said Sanders.

“But he has always called Woodville ‘his club’ — and the depth of feeling he had and still has for Woodville was shown when we were up against the wall.”

Blight came up with the “Gold Key Club”, with Woodville fans offering $500 to be members of a coterie group that could work out with the coach in the gym, attend dinners or have Blight be a keynote speaker at a company seminar, with all the money bailing out the club.

“He embraced the situation,” Sanders said. “And all while not only coaching but playing — and coming off the ground hardly able to walk for all the lumps and bumps on his legs.”

michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au

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Original URL: https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/sport/afl/more-news/the-malcolm-blight-files-part-3-how-the-messiah-was-led-back-to-the-promised-land/news-story/349b2a83186c4ff18a0374007826cb61