The Dockers have backed Ross Lyon to lead their rebuild. Credit:AFL Media/Getty Images Still, there's some truth in it that applies to the football fiefdom whose chief politicians – the coaches – are at this time of year facing the outcomes of their own luck. Traditionally it's very unsporting to suggest that luck has any serious part in football. A coach can't speak much about it, since the entire premise of coaching is control, and the best weapon for control is an appeal to players' "endeavour" at the expense of luck. On Friday night, Clarkson said it again. "Your greatest appeal as a coach is to ensure that you've got spirit," he said. And to be sure, that is Clarkson's greatest appeal as a coach, and Hawthorn's recent record is as close to proof as we'll get that summoning the right spirit means more than identifying the right statistics.

Or rather, the right statistics are the result of the right spirit combined with some wily tactics. Ross Lyon and Clarkson may be peers in this. Both of them share the eyes of a madman who's seen a rainbow in the distance and decided at all costs that he's going to locate where it lands. It's difficult to not admire that kind of conviction, even when it appears extreme and solemn. These are not the kind of men to use luck for anything other than wishing the best of it for others. When Lyon was questioned after the match about the importance of missed shots at goal, he smiled a knowing smile but still said, "I think you can just package it (all) up under discipline, skill and decision making." It's his prerogative as a coach in control to say that, but however you cut it Ross Lyon is a coach short on luck. Maybe he didn't have the right "personnel" to score enough points against Hawthorn on Friday. Maybe a few of his Fremantle players made undisciplined mistakes in the wrong moments, in the wrong areas of the ground, that made things too hard for the team to win.

But with a little luck, it might have been different. Lyon looked like he wanted to admit to a bit of bad luck on Friday, when talking about Tom Sheridan's dropped mark, but he couldn't quite do it. "Obviously those mistakes make a difference," he said. It was as close as he got. He, probably more than any coach, has earned the right to lean on bad luck in the way an exhausted man leans on a tree. But because he's a coach and has to come again next year, Lyon had to pass off Friday's loss as just another signpost on the way to somewhere better.

He had to speak in a way that suggested his team is not yet good enough, saying several times, "We have to improve. I have to improve." When you finish on top of the ladder, it must be a hard thing to say and really mean. Lyon seems to be proving anew with each narrow miss that a brilliant and determined coaching philosophy is one thing, and winning a premiership is another. On scales, they don't balance. No man, however omniscient, can control the variables of a platoon of individuals chasing an oval ball that's bouncing around a field big enough to land a plane on. This era is increasingly bent on explaining results with statistical proofs. There's a cohort of people making careers out of it.

Of course, it's not much use pointing Lyon to statistics about scoring rates or inside 50s, since he's done his best to know more about these things than anyone else in the country. Explaining the development of his players at one point, Lyon plucked a reference about Drew Petrie's average stats across the first four years of his career. So, despite Lyon's statistical prowess, his tenure reiterates that all the statistics in the world can't catch a football and kick it straight. A stat doesn't bend a ball onto the inside of a post, or blow an umpire's whistle inside your defensive 50 that gifts your opposition a goal. But bit of bad luck might do it. Later on, Lyon summarised his season with this old idiom: "Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. At the moment, I'm that orphan". It was a fair and funny thing to say. He was anticipating certain lines of questioning about his reign of near misses, and he batted them away smiling about how he needs to improve, and by asking his questioners: "Does that make

sense?". With any luck, it will make better sense next year.