RODNEY Eade could barely wait for the song to finish. He was scanning the circle for Brian Lake and as soon as the final words of Sons of the West were sung, he unloaded a vintage Eade spray.

It's been widely reported that Lake responds well to harsh words and, from experience, I would agree. And this is classic Eade - the best coach I've experienced at pushing the right motivational buttons. In the press conference a short while later, when he suggested it was time for Will Minson to have a spell in the VFL, he wasn't making an 'off the cuff' remark. In fact, both Lake and Minson had probably just played their best games for the year.

But Rocket knows that his big boys have a history of performing well on the back of an old-fashioned spray. The public nature of the coach's tirade achieved exactly what he wanted - an improved effort from two important players and a strong message sent to the rest of the group: the coach isn't happy.

My fellow Channel Ten commentators Malcolm Blight and Robert Walls were renowned for letting players know exactly what they thought of them. Both premiership players and coaches, Blighty and Wallsy were themselves influenced by the great Ron Barassi. It's great to watch old footage of Barassi launching into his players. In the past, it seems that footballers who couldn't cope with a fearsome spray from the coach were considered soft and not up to playing at the highest level.

It was interesting to hear Brad Scott go public with his coaching philosophy of not berating his players. The environment he wants to create at North Melbourne is geared towards teaching and education. Scott the player was considerably more brutal. He enjoyed the competitive, aggressive side of the game as much as anyone did. Perhaps Scott is similar in this regard to John Worsfold. I'm told by the West Coast players that it is almost unheard of for Worsfold to go off his head; but the Worsfold 'mad stare' we saw as a player, I'm told, is put to equally intimidating and effective use in his role as coach.

It could be argued that the real art of coaching is finding the way to get the maximum out of the myriad personalities that make up a team. My old teammate Craig Ellis, who played 100 games for the Western Bulldogs during Terry Wallace's reign as coach, is a case in point.

Horse was an incredible athlete. Through the late '90s he performed exceptionally well on the other great athletes of that time: Matthew Richardson, Anthony Koutoufides, James Hird. He was naturally aggressive, had good skills, and held down the centre half-back position in a side that was consistently in the finals. The tricky part of coaching him was that he knew virtually nothing about the game.

I remember Wallace storming into a team meeting in the lead-up to a game against Fremantle, who were then new to the competition. Blank sheets of paper were handed out and Wallace warned that any player who couldn't name at least a dozen of Freo's starting 18 would be dropped. This new emphasis on opposition analysis spelt trouble for Ellis. His sheet of paper had only one name on it: Jason Akermanis.

Ellis was pleased to find he could name anyone at all. Only Aker, as we know, was playing some reasonable footy for Brisbane at the time.

It's fair to say that their player-coach relationship deteriorated from this point. Ellis simply didn't immerse himself in the game like the rest of us did - he just happened to be athletically perfect for the game. In hindsight, the most effective way to coach Ellis was simple: a few basic team instructions, a short video showing him his opponent's strengths and weaknesses (and perhaps what he looks like), then let him go. Under simple instructions, he could seriously play.

Paul Roos, in his final year as a player with the Sydney Swans, wrote a list of the things he promised never to do as a coach. It would be great to see this list. As a player, Roosy must have witnessed his coaches do and say things that he felt were incredibly annoying and ineffective. Nearing the end of his 10-year stint as senior coach of the Swans, and having experienced the whole spectrum of emotions, I wonder how many times Roos has broken his promise and had to revisit his list.

It was interesting to read Leigh Matthews' description on the AFL website this week of the end of the coach's pre-game rev-up. I'm not sure this loss has reached the suburban level just yet. I've been down to a few local games and heard a number of amateur coaches giving their best John Kennedy impersonations.

As Scott, Nathan Buckley and the next generation of coaches come through the ranks of the AFL, I wonder if the old-school spray will become a thing of the past.

But I do know that as long as Eade is coaching Lake, the spray will still be heard at the highest levels of the game.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.