VAFA legend Russell Barnes says he ‘bleeds the brown and blue’ of Ormond
Russell Barnes has done it all in the VAFA, yet at the age of 60 he’s still pushing for more – as reserves coach of the club he served with great distinction.
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It was a cold day at EE Gunn Reserve, a biting wind pushing to the bottom end of the Ormond football ground.
The 50 or so spectators at the reserves match between the Monders and Monash Blues were rugged up.
Ormond coach Russell Barnes was too.
As soon as the game started he was pacing the boundary, shouting instructions and encouragement to his players.
It was one way to keep warm on a winter midmorning.
His eyes were glued to the game, every passage bringing a comment.
“Keep going boys!’’
“Watch them through the corridor.’’
“Locate a man down back; you must get a man.’’
“Yeah, good Dylan (Smith)! Yeah the Panozz (Laurence Panozzo)!’’
He held a notepad and a multi-coloured biro, jotting down the occasional thought.
As Tonn Steele came off for a breather, Barnes put his arm around him and had a quiet word. The kid nodded profusely.
Then Barnes fixed his eyes back on the game, wanting to know who was picking up No 28 for the opposition.
The shouts kept coming.
“Gotta punch!’’
“Lock ‘em down boys!’’
“Good tackle.’’
“Good work Oli (Oliver Smith).’’
Russell Barnes has been coaching a long time and enjoyed great success at senior level.
But at 60, his passion for it and the game of football remains undiminished.
He said he hadn’t figured either out yet; it was an unending process of learning.
“I love coaching and I’m still trying to get better,’’ he said.
“Keeps me young too, I reckon. A lot of the terms I’m used to using mean the same thing but I’ve got to get used to the modern vernacular.
“But the game’s still got a lot of basic things. You’ve still got to win the ball and you’ve still got to kick goals to win games.’’
So here he is coaching the reserves team at the club where he became a legend of amateur football, Ormond.
Just before his team ran out for the first bounce Barnes bunched the four Under 19s playing in the ressies for the first time and started reading from a board.
On it were words and a photograph of the Ormond strip.
“This is not a jumper. This is a portal through which men pass,’’ Barnes began.
“This is not material, this is a fabric that binds us together. This is not a souvenir, this is a symbol of aggression and skill. This is a reminder of all who have worn it before us. This is not brown and blue, this is the absence of fear. This is not a uniform, this is a club united. This is not a jumper for only 22 men to wear. This is a jumper to represent all Ormond people. This is victory and loss, but we will not be defeated. This is everything but a jumper.’’
About 10 years ago Barnes’s great mate, Ormond figure and former league footballer Michael Oaten, had adapted the words from the All Blacks, and Barnes wanted his newcomers to hear them.
His final instruction to his team as it left the rooms was, “Make sure you do your very best’’.
Some of his friends tease Barnes about the fact he’s been involved in six amateur football clubs – Ormond, Old Brighton, Hampton Rovers, St Bede’s Mentone Tigers, Beaumaris and Aquinas.
But he calls Ormond home. His main group of friends is “Ormond people’’.
“I’m an Ormond person. If I bleed, I bleed brown and blue,’’ he said.
To say he played for the Monders hardly does justice to his achievements with the club.
Starting in 1979 under the coaching of Wayne Walsh, he played 255 senior matches and in four premierships, lifting the cup three times as captain.
He was also a regular VAFA representative. In 2017 he was installed as an official Big V champion.
“Russell Barnes was the toughest footballer I’ve ever seen,’’ former Ormond coach Geoff Reilley said.
“And by tough, I mean physically and mentally tough. He’s never done one dirty thing in his life. I’m talking about toughness purely on the basis of what he was prepared to put his body through, given his build, which was always slight.
“His courage in taking marks running backwards was quite extraordinary, and he was a wonderful tackler too. He went to war every time he took the field.’’
Reilley has never forgotten the time Ormond played Old Scotch and Barnes took a knock to the shin that opened his skin, to the point bone was showing.
Barnes didn’t want to come off but the doctor and trainers insisted he did.
“He was taken into the rooms and (Ormond coach) Mike McArthur-Allen sent me in to see how he was,’’ Reilley recalled.
“All he was on about was, ‘I’m going back out’. The doctor was saying, ‘No Russell, you can’t, this is a very bad wound’. He said, ‘Well, I’m going back out’. And he did go back out. He was just so tough and single-minded. Anyone who played with him was in awe of him.’’
Reilley still sees Barnes regularly, and is adamant his passion for football has not lessened “one iota’’.
“He’ll coach until they say, ‘Sorry Russell, we can’t find a job for you’,’’ he said. “He’s a remarkable person.’’
Later, Reilley sent a text message. Barnes, he said, would die with his boots on.
Barnes said he was a “good, ordinary player’’ who got the most out of himself. He “had to win’’, and he invariably did.
After matches his main emotion was relief that “the job’’ had been done.
“My one regret in football is I wish I’d enjoyed my playing more,’’ he said.
“My job was to be involved in a winning team. When we won all those flags at Ormond in the 80s, for me it was relief more than anything else because that was what we were there to do. I was competitive. I didn’t like to lose. I followed the instructions of the coach (McArthur-Allen), who was an outstanding teacher and leader of people.’’
Twenty-six years of coaching has brought him premiership success and promotion, but also relegation, and he still wonders if he’s any good at it. He knows one thing: like life itself, it has its ups and downs.
His first senior appointment was at Old Brighton, and he took his older brother Steve with him as reserves coach. The Tonners finished 8-10 in B grade. Barnes, 33 at the time, was sacked after the season. He called it a “blow to the ego’’.
He returned to Ormond as an assistant coach, then crossed to Hampton Rovers, serving as senior coach from 1998-2000. They won the C section premiership in his first year and took the drop in his second.
The Rovers finished fourth in C grade the following year, but he was replaced by Norm Goss. That was another blow, because he wanted to “coach Hampton Rovers for 25 years, do a Kevin Sheedy’’.
Then it was on to St Bede’s Mentone Tigers for five seasons. He believes he produced his “most complete coaching effort’’ at Brindisi St.
Barnes told the club at the start of his tenure that it shouldn’t be satisfied with getting nine wins and nine losses and doing enough to stay in C. It had to expand its ambitions.
He took it to a grand final and to the B section finals for the first time, losing the first semi narrowly to Old Ivanhoe.
Players left at the end of 2004, the Tigers were relegated and Barnes departed too.
Luke Beveridge, whom he brought to the club in 2005, took over. The famous run of C, B and A flags followed.
“Sliding doors, that,’’ Barnes said. “If Luke hadn’t said yes to coming to the club, who knows, he might still be working at the Tax Office.’’
Barnes coached Beaumaris in 2006 and ’07, and returned to Ormond in 2008. The premiership captain became a premiership coach in his first year back at the Gunn.
His tenure ended after two seasons when he was asked to make a second presentation to the committee. He’d done it once and he wasn’t keen to do it again.
Hampton Rovers snapped him up but his two years brought double relegation.
Barnes’s next appointment took him east, to Aquinas, where his three years brought two preliminary finals appearances.
In 2018 he was back at St Bede’s Mentone Tigers, where his son Michael (a best and fairest with the Sandringham Dragons) was playing.
It was the toughest of years for the Barnes family: Russell and his wife, Jude, lost their daughter, Jane, to a rare form of leukaemia.
She died on the Sunday night after Round 1.
“I remember walking into the selection room and Michael came up and said, ‘Mum rang, Jane’s had a seizure and she’s gone into the Alfred’,’’ he said.
“I left and went straight in. I had someone run up my arse on the way there on the Nepean Hwy. Anyway, we were in hospital from the Thursday to the Sunday, when Jane passed on Sunday night.
“There were four of us set up – (sons) John and Michael, Jude and I – and on the Friday night I said to Jude, ‘Look, Michael’s got to go home, he’s got to play footy tomorrow, Jane would want him to play footy’.
“He got best on ground. He did it for Jane, we say.’’
At the time he was working at Cheltenham cemetery and it was his “dream job’’. He’d been there since 2013.
“Of course, when Jane passes, that just dies in the bum,’’ he said.
Barnes said the support his family received from the VAFA and its clubs helped sustained them through a such a wretched time.
“Jane was a wonderful girl and then woman,’’ he said.
“To lose her … it gives you perspective, doesn’t it? Football’s a game after all.’’
Three years after Jane’s death, Russell Barnes is back at Ormond. The club asked him to be the director of coaching. He was happy to do it and also suggested he knew someone who could coach the reserves.
“I said to them, ‘I reckon it’s me, I reckon I could do it, for me it’s not a case of lowering myself, it’s a case of learning and taking the next step’.’’
So there he was at EE Gunn Reserve two Saturday ago, in a biting wind, watching the umpire throw the ball up at 11.40am and urging his players on all the way.
The Monders lost by three points.
If they’d got up, Barnes said it would have been “one of the best wins I’ve coached in’’.
“It was probably the youngest reserves team Ormond’s ever fielded,’’ he said.
“I went to the game excited because I was seeing four kids who could become senior players in the near future.
“And I had that chance to show them what our club’s all about.’’
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