Brendan McCartney will leave a legacy at the Western Bulldogs which can only be revealed in the fullness of time.
McCartney inherited a club three years ago that was on the rebuild and looking for a much-needed influx of youth and direction.
It is not easy to be the man to fill the shoes of a revered coach such as Rodney Eade, who had great success with the Bulldogs without tasting the ultimate glory.
McCartney was an untried coach, which put him behind the eight ball in the public relation battle with the supporters.
It took little time for the former Geelong and Essendon assistant coach to get most of the fans on side when they saw the progress being made by some of the exciting youngsters drafted into the club.
Wins did not have come as a result, but the fast tracking of the development of players was significant and should stand the individuals in good stead for the rest of their careers.
Bulldogs president Peter Gordon acknowledged the tremendous progress the team made in McCartney’s initial two years.
“For the first two years of the McCartney era, there has been undoubtedly important and measurable progress led by our senior coach,” Gordon said at today’s press conference.
As the losses piled up, the scrutiny from the outside became more intense.
There were question marks over his game plan.
Commentators asked for a plan B and it was rarely seen.
He was perhaps too stubborn to make changes for his own good.
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While that was one matter, there was a bigger storm brewing on the inner sanctum.
It has come to light that McCartney’s relationships with some of his key senior players began to fracture.
A post season review of the coaching position conducted by the board highlighted a breakdown in communication between McCartney and senior players.
It was all brought to a head at the arrival of the trade period when a number of players wanted out of the club.
Shaun Higgins, a free agent who has already crossed to North Melbourne, Liam Jones and Jason Tutt, both rumoured to want a trade to Carlton, sparked what could be a mass exodus.
Then came the bombshell of club captain Ryan Griffen asking to be traded to the GWS Giants on Wednesday night.
That was the dagger in McCartney’s coaching tenure at the club.
The post-season review might have suggested that McCartney’s “position was not hopeless and not unrecoverable”, but Griffen’s request to walk out on the club was the point of no return.
“When we met yesterday in the wake of Ryan’s decision communicated to Simon and I the previous evening for the first time, I asked Macca whether his best judgment was that he could overcome these significant new impediments and he said he was uncertain,” Gordon said.
“He asked us to get some further feedback from some key people and we spent a lot of yesterday doing so.
“That was not all one way – there was some significant support for Macca.- but the feedback was sufficiently compromised to make it very clear that Macca’s task next year would’ve been extremely difficult and his continuation might itself present an impediment to our continued improvement as an AFL club and an AFL team.
“In light of those discussions and in light of that outcome, Macca has therefore made a decision to resign as senior coach of the Western Bulldogs effective immediately, a decision which we agree is in the best interests of the footy club.”
McCartney will be remembered for the development he put into the youngsters at the club.
He was praised for his behind-the-scenes work in the west.
“Brendan McCartney is a very good man, one of the best men I have ever met,” Gordon said.
“As president, board and senior management, we all like him and we respect him and we value very much the job that he’s done, the development that he’s put in and what he’s made of our club over the period of the McCartney era.
“He’s made a fantastic contribution to the game, to junior development and to our footy club, we’ll always be grateful, he’s been a great teacher in the game, has a proven record of developing players.
“His contribution to our club will be long lasting and proven by time.
“In addition to that work, other work, including non-football work, volunteer work he does in the west which has never and does never see the light of day is a measure of his character and his worth as an individual.
“We wish him well and we hope that when we get through all this, he won’t be a stranger to our club. He will always be welcome here.”
The Peter Gordon statement on resignation of Brendan McCartney
“As a club we’ve all been dissatisfied with progress on the field in 2014.
“In consequence of that, we conducted a review of our season and that review was both brutally honest, but appropriately honest.
“While a number of issues emerged, it’s fair to say the central and predominant concern was recent coach communications with the players.
“First and foremost, Macca himself acknowledged and volunteered that observation, that the predominant concern was communication issues that he had with the players.
“He promised to work on it and the fact of the matter is he’s worked on it really hard since then to try and affect an improvement.
“He’s cooperated with a number of steps that we as a club and as a board have put in place to assist him in that period to achieve the improvement.
“It’s also fair to say that we were concerned and Macca himself was concerned about whether the position was recoverable.
“I want to say that this issue which has emerged was not shown in our review and indeed in our governance and management of the club over the last three years.
“Most of the evidence we gathered in the review pointed to a deterioration in coach communication with players in 2014 and in particular in the second half of the 2014 season.
“My own judgment about this is this situation emerged out of Macca’s work ethic, of caring too much, of trying too hard and therefore demanding too much of those around him and perhaps not always demanding it in precisely the right way.
“Firstly, it was important to us that this was a deterioration, not something which had infected his coaching over the entire period, or majority of the period, but which had occurred predominantly in the second half of the 2014 season.
“Secondly, because of the value which we acknowledged of the contribution and the development which Macca had led since starting at the club in 2012.
“Thirdly, as a club, we aspire to rise through the ranks of the competition by improving our own performance and by assisting our teammates and colleagues to do the same thing rather than by blaming or scapegoating individuals or hoping for outsiders to solve our problems for us.
“We wanted to confront and embrace the struggle.”
Post review
“(The) position was not hopeless and not unrecoverable.
“A critical factor in our deliberations and our determination was our captain Ryan Griffen had indicated after extensive consultation that he was pleased both with Chris Grant’s intervention and leadership of that review and that Ryan was prepared to work with Macca to see if things can improve.
“As leadership of the players, as management, as board and as a senior coach, we all knew that this was a serious issue, we knew that the process and the path that we embarked upon was going to be tough.
“The expressed concerns had been significant and it was a close and a difficult decision and our board meeting about it several weeks ago occupied several hours.
“Ryan’s unfortunate change of mind in the last few days in our judgment as senior management and as a board and indeed as senior coach has had two principle effects.
“Firtsly, it took away one of the central planks, the support of the captain, which had been pivotal and even critical to the tough decision we had made to set out on the program that we had several weeks ago.
“Secondly, it created a new impediment that in 2015, Macca would be communicating his message to a group who with the best will in the world would have had this serious event always in the back of their minds and might be capable of effecting things every time he needed to deliver a serious or harsh message or make a tough call to a player or a group of players.”
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