Dual premiership coach, or four-time loser? Longmire’s legacy should not be defined by flags alone

If John Longmire was born in, say, the English city of Coventry, and not the NSW-Victoria border town of Corowa, there probably would be no doubt about the extent of his greatness.

Let’s assume he would have followed the same path in life, albeit in pursuit of a different-shaped ball. He would have multiple winners’ medals as a player – not just one – and an almost untouchable record as a coach in a sport where first-past-the-post is the aim.

There is an inherent brutality in how we crown our sporting champions in Australia. In most other countries, consistency throughout an entire season is rewarded. Here, consistency only gets you a slightly better starting position; you have to prove yourself all over again. Our tradition of grand finals (across all football codes, including the one they play in England) throws an element of chaos into the mix. It’s part of what makes victory so special, and defeat so crushing. Luck plays an even greater role. If something goes horribly wrong on the day or even during the week, so be it.

Longmire’s career has been coloured, to a large degree, by such heartbreak. He was North Melbourne’s leading goalkicker for five seasons running to start the 1990s but missed their 1996 premiership through injury. No medal. He was overlooked for their 1998 grand final team, too, having recovered from another injury too late to present a compelling enough case for selection. No medal. His 200th and final game was the 1999 grand final. Having returned the week before from an elbow injury, he touched the ball only three times in North’s win over Carlton, but left with a medal, despite it being his worst season.

As a coach, Longmire has firmly established himself as not only one of the greatest of the AFL era, but an exemplar of the caper, to the point where his peers – including those who have more flags than him – talk about him with genuine awe.

“It’s funny,” said three-time premiership coach Damien Hardwick on AFL 360 this week.

“I feel like I’m an AFL coach on the same level, but I look at him and I think it’s someone you aspire to be like. The way he controls his narrative, his demeanour, I think is second to none.”

And yet Longmire sits just shy of that elite bracket of coaches – the Hardwick, Clarkson, Sheedy bracket – in the average punter’s mind.

Three consecutive grand final defeats is the reason, but is it fair?

“Yeah, it sucks,” says Richard Colless, the Sydney Swans’ chairman from 1993 to 2013 who enacted the famously hassle-free Roos-Longmire handover.

“But that’s how it is. There are people who can tell you the last 50 premiership winners, but if you asked who were the runners-up, you wouldn’t have a clue.”

John Longmire has reached his fifth grand final as Swans coach.Credit: Phil Hillyard

Since Paul Roos handed Longmire the reins in 2011, the Swans have missed the finals just twice in 14 seasons. He has the ninth-best winning percentage in VFL/AFL history among those who have coached more than 100 games. He has won 14 finals matches, bettered only by 13 other coaches. This, in a competition specifically designed to ensure teams aren’t competitive for that long. In a non-traditional footy city, where the go-home factor makes it harder to retain elite talent from interstate, and where the good-luck-trying-to-buy-a-home-in-Sydney factor has the same impact.

But, as Hardwick alluded to, it’s how Longmire does all this that’s so special: with a stoic, no-nonsense style that is inimitably his own, a perfect blend of his country roots and the metropolitan street smarts he picked up along the way. Granted, he inherited a football club in good working order from Roos, whose tenure marked the beginning of the Swans’ famed “Bloods culture”. But he also helped build it as an assistant, and has kept it running smoothly through generations of players and coaches coming and going, evolving their playing style along the way while never straying from the club’s key tenets. There’s the Ship of Theseus, and then there’s the good ship Sydney. They don’t record stats or give out trophies for that stuff, but it’s important.

Longmire has become the human embodiment of his football club and the pre-eminent figurehead of his code in his home state. This masthead sought to speak to Longmire for this piece about his coaching philosophy and where it comes from. A one-on-one interview was initially approved, but then came a polite but firm caveat: he wouldn’t be speaking in depth about himself, or anything really, because to do so during the finals is the quickest way to look silly. Which probably sums him up better than anything he could have told us.

Tony Soprano might describe him as “the strong, silent type” – although, unlike Gary Cooper, he is very much in touch with not only his emotions, but also those of his players, with whom he has always fostered a pastoral sense of care that they pay back in spades on the field.

“The balance between relationships and standards is critically important, and he gets that balance right,” Roos says.

“You can tell the standards are really high at the Sydney Swans footy club. Some coaches get the relationships right, but can’t get the standards. Some can get the standards right, but can’t get the relationships. You have to have a balance of both to become a John Longmire and become a successful club, and that’s what he does really well.”

Few in Australian sport have mastered the art of the weekly press conference like Longmire. He never says anything he doesn’t intend to, never speaks in disrespectful tones towards anyone, never triggers controversy for the sake of it, and can spot a rhetorical trap from a mile away. He talks of systems, methods and processes – and it might sound boring, but it’s all rooted in truth.

“In an industry where it’s easy to whinge, and it’s easy to make smart-arse comments … I can’t think of an example off the top of my head where I remember him saying anything publicly which was in any way provocative, hurtful, self-serving,” says Colless.

John Longmire is a master of the press conference.Credit: Rhett Wyman

“This might sound really corny, but he’s an unbelievably decent individual. He reacts to stress that most of us don’t have in our lives, but he’s extremely measured. The reality is the coach, more than anyone, is the face of the football club. How you react to certain events or decisions in relation to football, the first person you turn to is, ‘Well, what’s the coach think? How’s the coach going to react?’ And he has a much greater influence on the club than he realises, or he sets out to.”

The breadth of Longmire’s experience in the game is unmatched. He was a champion player and sidekick to the great Wayne Carey, a forward, backman and a ruckman at various times, vice-president of the AFL Players’ Association, television presenter and pundit, and for several years the head of IMG’s player-management operations in Australia, identifying, recruiting and nurturing young talent, negotiating their contracts and sponsorships. Only after all of that did he dip his toe into coaching for the first time with the Swans in 2002.

It’s not as if he stopped learning then. Longmire continues to search for nuggets of wisdom high and low, inside the brains of the younger coaches he brings into the club to enhance the collective, as well as his contemporaries from other codes and in other countries. And at 53, he still has potentially another decade in him as a senior coach; Swans chairman Andrew Pridham has said repeatedly he has the job for as long as he wants it.

But there’s just no getting around his grand final record: one win in 2012, and three defeats in 2014, 2016 and 2022, with an average margin of 55 points. This will be his fifth as a senior coach. A win-loss record of 2-3 in grand finals looks an awful lot better than 1-4, and in that sense, nobody has as much on the line on Saturday as Longmire. Not that he’ll see it that way, of course, but the public will.

For Colless, it’s a matter of perspective. “What the broader footy community rates as success is not necessarily what an individual club or certainly, our club, rates as success,” he says.

“This is a club that was sort of beyond redemption. It’s turned itself around and it’s a perennial finalist. If you were a South Melbourne supporter immediately prior to the Swans being relocated and you were told we’re going to play in 50 finals, eight grand finals and win a couple of premierships, you would say, ‘That’s just not possible. This club is incapable. It’s been poorly administered. We’ve made ridiculous recruiting decisions. We’ve employed second grade people as coaches,’ and so on and so forth.

“But the reality is that multiple premierships have greater cachet than single premierships, which have a greater cachet than grand final appearances with no premiership.”

Come the final siren on Saturday afternoon, either Longmire or Chris Fagan will be feted as a coaching genius. The other will be left dealing with a painfully familiar crushing sensation in the pit of their stomach. Those who look deeper than surface-level will see a different picture, of course, and acknowledge that both have already achieved degrees of success, simply by being there – but in today’s world, how many people do that?

“You’ve probably read the book Moneyball,” Roos says.

“What they worked out is [what happens] over 162 games, you can sort of predict through statistics. But the question that the general manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, most gets asked is: well, why can’t you win in the play-offs?

“It’s because in a seven-match series, it doesn’t come down to statistics. It comes down to a bounce of the ball, a missed strike, et cetera.

“Same thing in a grand final. You can be a great coach, get to a grand final, and have a really good game – but if the ball bounces one way, and Ross Lyon is a good example, he’s a not premiership coach. Leo Barry drops that mark, I’m not a premiership coach. It’s hard, but he’s putting himself in a position.”

Roos has no doubt that Longmire’s record would be eating him up on the inside. He can speak to that from personal experience.

“It still eats me up that we lost in 2006,” he says.

“But I’m smart enough to realise that back-to-back grand finals against incredible opposition ... you give yourself a chance. You can control a lot in football, but I can’t control where the ball bounces. I can’t control what the umpires are going to do when the rules are so grey.

“Regardless of the outcome on the weekend, his legacy is cemented as one of the great modern coaches.”