Legendary Sturt coach Jack Oatey a football visionary who changed the game
LEGENDARY Sturt coach Jack Oatey has been inducted into the SA Sports Hall of Fame.
JACK Oatey changed the face of Australian football.
With his development of the attacking, run-on handball game, his emphasis on skills and determination to play team football, he was years ahead of his time.
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Oatey became the first coach to mastermind 10 league premierships and he did it in keeping with the way coaches coach today.
He was a father figure to his players and, while he was a strict disciplinarian, he got to know his men and was more intent on developing their on and off-field skills than barking instructions or yelling abuse.
Sturt champion Rick Davies, who this year was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame, said Oatey "taught me the rules of life".
The checkside kick he taught his Sturt champions of the late 1960s and '70s to kick "miracle" goals from the boundary line mesmerised SANFL opponents as the Double Blues swept to five successive premierships.
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The kick is used regularly in the AFL today and - what Jack would have loved most - with great skill, although over the border they are usually dubbed "banana" kicks.
Port Adelaide was unchallenged king of SA football under Fos Williams in the 1950s and into the '60s. In the 1966 grand final Oatey's up-and-coming Sturt doubled Port's score but the 16.16-to-8.8 scoreline was not the most significant stat.
In this game, in the days when you only handballed to get out of trouble, Oatey's men dished out 55 handballs. Port had just 11.
It was the signal for the changing of the times, four years before Carlton coach Ron Barassi's legendary half-time grand final edict to "handball, handball, handball" against Collingwood.
Using a game plan that was more like the possession-style game of the 2000s, Sturt overwhelmed the Magpies in three successive grand finals.
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A skilful rover, Oatey was a Magarey Medal runner-up with Norwood in 1941 and played for South Melbourne when serving in the Army in the World War II years.
But it was as coach in a staggering 775 games over 37 seasons that the legend of Jack Oatey was made.
Williams, his greatest rival, said in tribute to Oatey when he died in 1994, aged 73, "his vision on how the game was to be played changed football". And he changed it for the better.
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FOOTBALL: JACK OATEY