Leigh Matthews

Leigh Matthews has had an extraordinarily successful history in the AFL sport. He played for the Hawthorn Football Club for 17 years from 1969 to 1985. The raw statistics are amazing: 332 games, five years as captain, eight times Club Champion, 915 goals, All Australian, fourteen times Victorian Representative… All this in an era when Hawthorn were the most powerful team in the competition, playing in seven Grand Finals and winning four.

After retiring in 1985, he became coach of the famous Collingwood Football Club, the culmination being winning the first AFL Premiership in 1990. This win broke the “Colliwobbles”, a term lumped on Collingwood because they had lost nine Grand Finals since their last premiership in 1958. After leaving Collingwood in 1995 Leigh spent a few years as a very successful and incisive media commentator before returning to the coaching arena in 1999. His appointment to the Brisbane Lions Football Club has proved to be a masterstroke. From a demoralised and disjointed last in 1998, Leigh has lifted the Lions to 3rd in 1999, 5th in 2000, and Premiership glory in 2001. This Lions triumph made him only the second man in AFL history to be involved in a Premiership at three clubs. Still the youngest recipient of the prestigious Legends Award in the AFL Hall of Fame and generally regarded as the best footballer of the twentieth century, Leigh has had an unparalleled career as a great player and now super-coach. He has exhibited the rare and proven ability to do it himself and then to impart this knowledge to others. A champion player who because a champion coach and mentor.