Garry Lyon explains why he’s never taken an AFL coaching job after being inducted into Australian Football Hall of Fame

By his own admission, Garry Lyon was never “brave enough” to become an AFL senior coach. But three clubs almost talked him into making the jump from the media to the coaches box.

Melbourne champion Garry Lyon has detailed his agonising decision to overlook coaching despite multiple offers, admitting he wasn’t “brave enough” to jump into the deep end.

Lyon became a media star instead of turning his hand to senior coaching, once admitting he loved footy but not to the point where he was prepared to obsess about it until it ruined his life.

Lyon told the Herald Sun as part of his Hall of Fame interview that he seriously considered senior coaching amid offers from Melbourne, Adelaide and Richmond.

Garry Lyon coached the international rules side but never made the jump to AFL coaching.

Lyon hands the premiership trophy to Simon Goodwin and Max Gawn in 2021.

Essendon champion Matthew Lloyd is being urged to consider a full time coaching role given his exceptional work for Haileybury College.

But amid soft cap consideration for clubs, Lloyd might join Dermott Brereton and Lyon as brilliant football minds who never became senior coaches.

“I entertained a few offers but I didn’t want to coach Melbourne. If I was going to coach it would have been elsewhere to see new experiences,” Lyon told this masthead.

“I spoke to Richmond. I thought a lot about coaching but I never really got to the point where I wanted to pull the trigger. I was probably not brave enough to jump off the deep end. Because it’s a really, really deep end.

“I had this media career going which was getting bigger and I was feeling a bit of pressure about people saying, ‘You have to coach’. It wasn’t like I was twiddling my thumbs. It was becoming a genuine career. So I chose to stay there. I revisited it a few times.

Garry Lyon says he received advice from Ron Barassi that he had to be all in to be coach.

“But I had some great advice from Barrass (Ron Barassi). He said you will know. You will get to 99 per cent certain and you are not certain enough because the one per cent will get you. You will jump in and then it will be hard. So I loved the idea of it but I was never brave enough to do it.”

“You know how much I love footy but there are times when you just get jack of it. You want a bit of a spell. If you talk to senior coaches they would say at some stage they just want to push it away and when you are in it, you can only do it for an hour.

“When I did International Rules, even for six weeks I was stressing about everything and in the end it did my head in.”

Lyon also detailed the impossible position Melbourne players were put in during the 1996 merger talks as president Ian Ridley asked for players support for the union with Hawthorn.

Hawthorn’s players were able to visibly reject that talk and remain folk heroes today, with Chris Langford taking off his top to wave it to the crowd in the last home-and-away game of 1996.

Lyon speaks on stage during the Australian Football Hall of Fame event.

“I loved Ian Ridley. He was our president, ‘Tiger’, he was a premiership player, a superstar coach, a State of Origin chairman of selectors. He had more red and blue blood in his veins than any man you know.

“And he was telling us the club was stuffed and we are going to have to merge. And he was saying to us that we need player support.

“And I remember saying, ‘I’m not doing that. We’re not giving you support, because that’s not our job’, and which took a bit of doing because they painted a pretty grim picture. But we just said, ‘Look it’s not our area’.

Garry Lyon says Ian Ridley had “more red and blue blood in his veins than any man you know.”

“I remember the night they voted and it was a no vote. OK, back to work.

“I wasn’t playing the merger game. Melbourne plays Hawthorn, Jason Dunstall kicks his 100th, David Neitz trips over trying to kick the winning goal. Chris Langford is very demonstrative. I wouldn’t have done that myself. That’s not my style, but I wasn’t out on the field. We just let the vote go with no endorsement of the plan. And the amazing thing is, that was in 1996 and we played in a prelim in 1998 and in 2000 we played in a grand final, for a side that was told it was no good.”

Originally published as Garry Lyon explains why he’s never taken an AFL coaching job after being inducted into Australian Football Hall of Fame