Who is Chris Scott? Is Geelong’s coach a mastermind or underachiever?
WHO is Chris Scott? Was he handed the 2011 premiership? And how will he fare if the Cats miss the finals despite the holy trinity of Dangerfield, Selwood and Ablett? MICHAEL WARNER investigates.
AT first glance broadcaster Gerard Whateley seemed out of place clasping his glass of red in the bowels of the Geelong football department after a win at Kardinia Park last season.
In an area usually reserved for players, coaches and the club’s wealthiest backers, Whateley and Cats coach Chris Scott were locked deep in conversation.
“They’re an odd couple, but once you thought about it, it all made sense,” a former club official recalled this week.
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“Chris is very close to Whateley. He understands who the powerful units are around the place and he keeps them close to him. He loves being on AFL360.
“It’s a pretty canny move.”
Scott, 42, is much more than an old-fashioned football coach. He gets the game’s politics, mixes in its influential circles and uses the media to his advantage.
As another observer said: “Chris is a very astute operator. Very shrewd. He’s an intelligent guy, good at reading the play and wants to manage his reputation tightly.”
It’s almost eight years since Scott launched his AFL coaching career in a blaze of glory, leading the Cats to the 2011 premiership.
He has coached 187 games for 129 wins (and two draws) at a remarkable 69.5 per cent win-rate - the best of any 100-plus-game coach in history - yet remains a polarising figure among Geelong supporters.
A thorny 6-8 finals record is raised by his critics.
An off-season ignited by the return of the great Gary Ablett Jr has come down to two must-win matches against Fremantle and lowly Gold Coast next week, and even then they must rely on other results to qualify.
Make it or not, Scott’s backers point out the club has debuted 15 players over the last two years and been cruelled by injury and a difficult draw.
In an era where Grand Final rivals St Kilda and Collingwood have fallen away, he also boasts a 12-7 record over master coach Alastair Clarkson.
“You can’t not rate him,” a rival club figure said.
“All those other clubs around them have fallen off a cliff and they’re still competing. And you can’t really blame them for going for broke and trying to win one more. Geelong has been up since 2004 - they sort of have no right to still be doing that.”
An intensely private person, Scott lives with his wife and daughter in outer Geelong and counts Cats runner and Brisbane premiership teammate Nigel Lappin among his closest mates.
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He studies annually at Harvard University, is combative and perceptive, and according to another Lions teammate Jonathan Brown “just doesn’t suffer fools”.
Cutaways of a frequently apoplectic Scott in the coaches box are a window into the soul of a man who craves to win and cares passionately about his players.
Cats boss Brian Cook says “he’s simply and basically a very good coach”.
“I see him as a team person, he’s very resilient and has the ability to jump up pretty quickly from defeats,” Cook said.
“He’s a very intelligent guy and has a huge work ethic.
“From a playing point of view, he’s been going through a transition for a long time and I think he’s done that extremely well — it’s not easy to manage players who are leaving.”
One of the harshest assertions levelled against Scott is that the team he inherited from Mark “Bomber” Thompson effectively coached itself to the 2011 flag.
“That’s a total myth,” skipper Cameron Ling declared this week.
“Chris was outstanding that year and smart enough to identify that we had a very driven group, who were extremely motivated to get back to the top again.
“He brought in some new ideas and some tactical moves that he really wanted us to buy into.
“We worked really well together and achieved something special, which is a credit to him.”
Ling retired after the flag but concedes Scott soon ran into difficulties moving on the likes of Jimmy Bartel, James Kelly, Paul Chapman, Stevie Johnson and Mathew Stokes.
Tensions flared when Scott failed to attend exit meetings for Corey Enright and Bartel at the end of 2016.
“It was a clash of Chris Scott and the football club making decisions that they felt were in the best interests of the club - which is their No.1 responsibility - and highly-competitive, highly-successful and highly-driven players believing they could keep going at the level they had for the previous decade,” Ling said.
“When you have a clash of those two very strong forces, I don’t think it’s ever going to be perfect.”
Scott played in two of Brisbane’s three premierships in its golden era (he was emergency in 2003) and was heavily-influenced by coach Leigh Matthews.
“He’s a very intelligent and highly-competitive football person,” Brown said.
“He knows the trends of the game and is probably always trying to stay ahead of them.
“When the coaches get surveyed they quite regularly say he’s the hardest to coach against, that in itself gives his game-day coaching a tick.
“Chris has been coached by Robert Walls and by Leigh Matthews, two men who definitely don’t suffer fools and so Scotty is going to give a bit of tough love, just like those two guys did.”
Brown said the “holy trinity” of Ablett, Patrick Dangerfield and Joel Selwood had been harshly judged.
“Ablett has been pretty good and it was always going to take a while for him to settle in and find his role, and I think Scotty acknowledged that,” Brown said.
“They just haven’t been able to find that bottom five or six that can consistently contribute or perform their roles like the Richmond team does.”
Brown sees a lot of Matthews’ coaching in Scott, including a recent barb about the Tigers needing a lot to go right to win the flag again.
“That wouldn’t have been an off the cuff comment. That was premeditated, just planting the seed of doubt, much like Leigh used to do,” Brown said.
But a former player, who asked not to be named, said Scott’s communication with some fringe players could be better.
“When you’re in a vulnerable position, either as a young player unsure about your spot or a senior player unsure if you’re going to get another contract, you just crave any conversation, even one minute with the senior coach,” he said.
“Just for the acknowledgment that you’re going OK.
“For a nice bloke and a smart bloke, I don’t think Scotty’s that good at just talking sh-t either, sitting around chewing the fat and shooting the breeze talking about golf or something like that.”
Said another ex-club official: “He doesn’t worry about being a people person. It’s not like he’s roaming around the club shaking hands with everyone, but that said the players like him.
“The guys who might find it hard are the ones coming in and out of the side, they wouldn’t necessarily be getting much out of Scotty but they’d be getting plenty out of the assistants.”
Asked about the criticism, Cook said: “There isn’t one coach in the AFL who is great at everything, but I think Chris is good in that area.
“He’s a real thinker and analyses deeply and tries to find simple words defining those complexities, sometimes it takes him time, but I think he’s very rounded as a person and as a leader, so I’d defend that comment.”
Ex-Brisbane and Richmond champ Craig Lambert, who lived with Scott when he was drafted to the Lions in 1994, said “Chris was always unbelievably driven”.
“He was almost like a protege of Leigh Matthews and would have taken a lot of his coaching philosophies off Leigh,” Lambert said.
“You always knew that Chris would end up in coaching because he wanted to know the game plan back to front, even though his greatest strength was his competitive spirit and he would play undersized on bigger blokes but win the battle.
“I’ve always felt Chris has a lot of Leigh in him.”
Ling said critics of Scott’s tactical acumen were off the mark.
“When you get your defence decimated like they did at the start of this year, and they were able to put together a young defence and tactically support that by changing their ball movement and their style, it says that they are pretty sharp with their tactics,” Ling said.
“Chris Scott is a very good coach who is doing everything he can to become a great coach ... but for them to win the premiership, whether it’s this season or in the coming seasons, will depend on their ability to develop the bottom six or eight players to the next level.
“If they miss the finals, given the team that they’ve got and all the top-end talent, it probably makes next year the highest pressure year in his time at Geelong, but they’ve only missed finals once since he’s been coaching.
“He’s got a lot of credits in the bank.”
Scott is closing in on a new contract.
Cook told the Herald Sun talks to extend Scott’s tenure beyond the end of next year were progressing well.
“We expect Chris to be our coach for the long-term,” Cook said.
“He’s got one more year to go, which is next year, and it’s been our practice for the last 20 years to try to sort it out earlier rather than later and that’s what we are working towards at the moment.”
Scott, 42, boasts the best winning record of any coach to take charge of more than 100 games in VFL/AFL history (69.5 per cent) but a poorer 6-14 finals record.
He coached the Cats to the 2011 flag in his first season and has missed the finals just once, in 2015.
Geelong must beat Fremantle at home and Gold Coast next week and then rely on other results to figure in the September action again.
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Originally published as Who is Chris Scott? Is Geelong’s coach a mastermind or underachiever?
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