AFL LEGEND Alex Jesaulenko believes there may still be a place in the game for the long-lost playing coach.
And Jesaulenko - the last man to coach a team to a premiership while playing - is perhaps better qualified to judge whether the dual role could still be filled after he led Carlton to the 1979 flag.
While "Jezza" conceded it would be difficult for one person to take on such a huge responsibility in today's modern football, he added: "I still reckon it's [possible]".
"The only thing is the people off [the field], the match committees and all the other people, you'd have to trust the whole lot of them because everybody's a coach. Everybody thinks they're a coach.
"[But] for me, it was more important to be out there."
Jesaulenko was captain-coach of the Blues in 1978-79, steering them to fourth and then all the way to the premiership.
He later coached Carlton from the sidelines, helping the Blues to eighth in 1989 and 1990.
After his first stint at Princes Park he coached St Kilda in a playing and non-playing capacity but says, given the choice, he knows which way he'd prefer to do things.
"I was a better playing coach than I was a non-playing coach," he said.
"I felt more in control of the players and I could relate to them quicker and with more authority because I was there with them, whereas off the bench or up in the stands, by the time you see things and the message gets through things have already happened.
"By the time you sent a negative directive to a player, he'd done a good thing. Then he gets a negative directive and it always felt wrong to me.
"When I was out on the field I could see it and I could just go up to him and say: 'Hey, this is what it's all about'."
In 1979, Carlton won 19 of its 22 home and away matches and went into the finals series a red-hot favourite to stroll away with the silverware.
Jesaulenko said he found being a captain-coach "pretty easy" up until the last Saturday of September, when his side took on Collingwood in the season decider.
"That Grand Final, it just got to me," Jesaulenko said.
"You know, I probably shouldn't have played. I thought over the years I'd taught myself to relax and get all the emotions out of the game of footy … but that game sort of got to me.
"I was more nervous than I'd ever been in my whole life. It was another Grand Final and I was coach and I was playing."
However despite the pressure, the Blues scraped home over their great rivals, 11.16 (82) to 11.11 (77), claiming the club's 12th premiership in the process.
