BigMart wrote:Why is everyone so against a guy who built a list, coached us to three successive finals campaigns....loves the club.....played for the club....
Has never said a bad word about Lyon, rates lyon as a great coach, admires the players....
Its like he is the anti-saint....
Yes he was disappointed at being sacked.......whats the issue with that...
I think there are a few factors contributing to the continuing waves of hatred towards GT that you see displayed on SS.
1. A lot of posters on here were really disappointed back in 2005 and 2006 when we had all those injuries and didn't end up getting to a GF. The coach was an easy target for this disappointment, especially as he had made a few public comments that suggested that he didn't put much store in conditioning staff. There was a similar big buildup on this forum of unfair vitriol against Lyon after the 2009 and 2010 GF losses (especially in 2009).
2. Many on here adopt a sort of tribal attitude to the club: anyone who deliberately leaves the club, or whom the club decides to sack, becomes a hated enemy once they bob up somewhere else, especially if they are seen to be in any way critical of our club. If the club sacked Ross Lyon now, I reckon that there would be endless criticism of him on here, particularly in relation to our failure to win in 2009 and 2010. Indeed, the early signs of an anti-Ross Lyon element on SS are already emerging in relation to his alleged failure to "play the kids".
3. There are a number of anti-GT obsessives on here who have tended to criticise him out of all proportion and to stir the place up about issues such as the $200k payout, our decision in 2001 to draft Ball rather than Judd, and an alleged "ruining" of the list by GT because he tried to "top up" with lots of duds from other clubs (that last criticism has now completely disappeared: I wonder why
). I'm not really sure what drives the obsessive hatred displayed by these guys. It has been suggested to me in PMs that one prominent GT-bagger (and Meher Baba-bagger) on here has a personal axe to grind with GT over something that happened years ago. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but the way some of the posters on here go out of their way to denigrate the bloke, I guess it's possible.
As everyone knows, I used to go into battle on here against what I saw as the ridiculously unfair denigration of a coach who - despite the fact that I was highly disappointed when Blight was sacked and he was appointed - seemed to me to have made the club try to shed its perennial underdog status and start to look the rest of the AFL world straight in the eye(something that we had never previously achieved, even after the 1966 GF win).
I've now basically given up trying to defend GT's legacy on here. I realise that some people are going to be rational about him and others aren't and there's nothing I can do to persuade them otherwise. I have now seen on a number of other occasions how collectively irrational this place can be, eg: after the decision not to recruit Cousins, after the 2009 GF loss, towards Raph Clarke, towards Luke Ball since he left the club, etc.
But I will say just this. Lyon is almost certainly a much better technical coach than GT (although Johnny Member is definitely onto something in his defence of GT's coaching style: it is a vast simplification to claim, as some do, that GT simply told the players to go out and attack in a free-flowing way and let the defensive side look after itself). However, I do think we've lost a bit of the swagger we had in the mid-2000s and I also think we are starting to become a target for the rest of the AFL world in terms of the style of football we play. We also now have an invisible President and a coach who chooses his words carefully and is quick to deflect blame to the players when things go wrong. In these respects, I rather miss the GT-RB era.
But of course there's no going back.
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."
- Jonathan Swift
