A walk with Glenn Archer put Rhyce Shaw on the path to North Melbourne coaching job
Rhyce Shaw had never met North Melbourne legend Glenn Archer until he joined the Roos as an assistant. Was a walk and talk around the club’s spiritual home the catalyst for his appointment as head coach?
Mark Robinson
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Rhyce Shaw and Glenn Archer went for a two-hour walk about a month ago.
The wannabe Shinboner and the Shinboner of the Century lapped the triangle surrounding the North Melbourne Football Club — Arden St, Macualey Rd and Fogarty St.
It wasn’t an official job interview for the Kangaroos coaching position, but an informal one with a bloke, who along with three others, would be pivotal to selecting the 37-year-old Shaw.
Perhaps it was significant for Archer.
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Certainly, it was significant for Shaw.
“I knew nothing of him,” Shaw told the Herald Sun on Thursday.
“Obviously, I knew he was a champion.”
They’d never met before Shaw joined the club as an assistant coach.
“He was someone I admired from afar,” he said.
“It certainly was significant just to take the opportunity to talk to Arch. To tell him how I felt, how I wanted the direction of the club to go, and what I was trying to achieve.
“We spoke a lot about who I was. I felt he was asking questions to see what I was actually about, who the real me was.
“All I can be is be honest and that’s what I tried to do.
“We spoke about my family and his family and stuff like that.
“It was in no way an interview. We didn’t speak about that. He was getting my thoughts on what the club was like and how it was operating.
“It was just a really good opportunity to talk to one of the great North Melbourne people.
“He cares a lot for the footy club and it was a fantastic opportunity for me.”
Unquestionably, Shaw endeared himself to North Melbourne people within weeks of being appointed interim coach after the departure of Brad Scott.
In a lot of ways, Shaw is the accidental coach, initially chosen to hold the reins ahead of long-time assistants Darren Crocker and Leigh Tudor because he was relatively new and the club was keen to see a different ideology to the predecessor’s.
Chairman Ben Buckley revealed on Thursday that Shaw was the only candidate to be formally interviewed for the job.
The process bemused many, including some at the AFL, but in the end, North Melbourne did what it wanted to do and ignored the outside noise.
The process has been denounced as flimsy since Buckley described it as “exhaustive” on Thursday and has been the butt of jokes.
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North had a list of 30 candidates and information was collected on all of them over five weeks.
When Alastair Clarkson, Adam Simpson and John Longmire said “no”, the list was whittled down to four candidates.
Shaw was formally interviewed and North had their man.
The accidental coach had become the fairytale — and to be frank, the Kangas don’t care one iota about what the critics say.
One of Shaw’s endearing qualities, other than his obvious connection with people, has been his full embrace of the club and the Shinboner spirit.
It’s something not everyone understands or appreciates.
On Thursday night during Shaw’s on-air interview with Leigh Matthews on 3AW, Matthews made a joke about the Shinboner tag.
It was a touch awkward because it is no joke to Shaw, and Shaw was hardly going to clip the player of the 20th century in his first radio interview since winning the job.
Either Shaw has got it in his brief time at the club, or the Shinboner has got him.
Maybe he believes in the power of the Bloods, the spirit of his former club Sydney.
It’s an interesting comparison. The Bloods culture is held in such high esteem.
But when North Melbourne people talk about the Shinboner spirit, it seems to be lost on everyone else and dismissed as nothing more than suburban mumbo-jumbo that’s clung to by the battlers of the inner north.
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To Shaw, it’s ever present.
“It’s going to play a huge part,” he said.
“I’m a big believer in stories. I’ve been telling a story with the boys this year, about the fact we have such a great history and a great story to tell at North Melbourne, the Shinboner story going back to 1925, our first year in the VFL.
“It’s going to help the way I tackle the direction I want to go.
“The Bloods culture is so revered and it is for a reason, because it works. There’s belief, not just with players, but in the story. The story is the key part of what drives the players. Again, we have the opportunity because we have a great story at North Melbourne.
“I’m a firm believer in knowing where you’ve come from to know where you’re going. I’m just starting to get that feel right now.”
He’s reading The Shinboners Book: The History of the North Melbourne Kangaroos Football Club, which carries a legendary quote from the Australasian newspaper, dated, June 15, 1940.
“In two aspects,’’ it reads, “North Melbourne stands second to none. One is the loyalty of its supporters. The other is the determination to carry on despite its disadvantages. In the face of adversity, which might well have broken the spirit of most men, we find that from the earliest days there was always enthusiasts to fight for North Melbourne.”
Shaw understands the fight for this footy club over 150 years, which will be celebrated on Saturday night when the club announces its top 150 players.
He’s learning and embracing and, in a brief quiz, rattled off key junctures in the club’s history.
“I’ve learnt we’ve always had to fight,” he said.
“I don’t know if relevance is the right word, but fight for their keep. We got knocked back so many times in those early days from joining the VFL, they’d had to keep working and working.
“They were on the brink several times, but onwards they went. It’s that fighting mentality and never beaten mentality. That sticks in my mind when I read the book, page after page.”
He says he is a storyteller.
“I suppose I believe in fairytales a little bit,” he said.
“I think that’s what coaching is. You have to tell a story, try to make players believe, and that plays a big part in football. Because it’s such a science-driven, technically-driven industry, there’s a huge part in the romantic side and the storytelling side which people forget sometimes.”
And that’s largely what the walk with Archer was about.
The wannabe Shinboner chewing the fat with the Shinboner of the Century.
“We were telling stories and I think that’s where it all begins and it all ends.”
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