Obituary: Few have dominated and defined their sport the way Barassi did – he changed the game forever and leaves an incalculable legacy
Few have dominated and defined their sport the way Barassi did – he changed the game forever and leaves an incalculable legacyEddie McGuire once said that Ron Barassi was the only man in Australia who didn’t know he was Ron Barassi. For generations of young Australians and newcomers to these shores, the name Barassi was one of first football words you learned. “Three syllables,” Martin Flanagan wrote, “coming off the tongue in a hiss of passion.
When Ron Barassi left Melbourne to captain-coach Carlton, it was as big a story as the game had seen.Barassi was a magnificent footballer, one of the best of a golden generation that included Coleman, Whitten, Skilton and Reynolds. He played more than 200 games, won six premierships, two best and fairests and would have won at least two Norm Smith medals if such a thing existed then. He would bust packs, run all day, and saved his best for finals.
As a coach, Barassi was not a man to be trifled with. Few men demanded more of their players. These days, if you said some of the things he said, you would be led away in handcuffs. But he was tactically astute and a genuine innovator, hiring hypnotists, installing floatation tanks, using video analysis and becoming the first coach to watch from an elevated vantage point. The Blues became the most prolific handballers in the game.
In 1975, they won the club’s first premiership, downing a Hawthorn side that had beaten them three times that season. At the celebrations that night,
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