THIS week Garry Lyon embarks on his first full week trying to sort out and repair some of the key issues relating to the Melbourne Football Club.

The key to the resurgence of the club will be appointing the best possible senior coach.

I have always believed that to achieve success you need all aspects of an organisation working in harmony, from the board through to the administration.

But the coaching role will be the critical component.

I have been quite surprised at the media's insistence that the senior coaching position at Melbourne must be filled by a mature coach with experience, as this is out of tune with current trends.

The hysteria surrounding the appointment of an experienced coach is not sound.

Of course, if Garry Lyon and his sub-committee can go to the marketplace and secure one of the best coaches in the land, such as Mick Malthouse, you would do it in a heartbeat, but if this is impossible they need to explore all avenues to get the best man for the job.

Melbourne was seen to appoint an inexperienced and low-profile coach last time around in Dean Bailey, so most are suggesting that they cannot afford to go down the same pathway again, but when you study recent premiership history it points strongly towards first-time coaches being able to achieve the ultimate.

A generation ago when the senior coach was still running every aspect of a club - as still happens at local level - it was obviously a major advantage to have an experienced man at the helm.

Assistants had no formal training to ready them for the senior role, so it was much more risky to take on an untried coach.

At the start of the 1980s, both David Parkin and the late Allan Jeans changed clubs with remarkable success and a string of premierships followed at Carlton and Hawthorn.

This seemed to set a pattern in which clubs looked for coaching experience to put the finishing touches on their football teams.

Mick Malthouse, Malcolm Blight and Leigh Matthews were able to dominate the football coaching landscape in their second coaching stints throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium.

At the turn of the century the entire coaching environment changed and a new professionalism entered the industry.

As the game grew coaching became a viable employment pathway and people invested far more time and energy studying patterns of play, trends and other international transition sports to fine-tune how the game would be successfully played in the future.

All of a sudden the younger-generation coaches and their assistants who had IT capabilities to analyse and dissect the game more accurately and change trends were able to alter game styles and reap the rewards of on-field success.

In the modern era these first-time coaches have won six of the last seven premierships, with Malthouse breaking that run in 2010. They took a varying number of years to win their first flags, but nevertheless the trend of the second-time-around coach had been broken.

In 2004 it was Mark 'Choco' Williams who got his team over the line. In 2005/06 we had the epic Sydney Swans versus West Coast battles, with rookie coaches Paul Roos and John Worsfold facing off.

In 2007, the Cats broke their drought after being extremely patient with their first-time coach in Mark 'Bomber' Thompson, who was in his eighth season when he became premiership coach, repeating the effort in 2009.

Splitting the Geelong successes was the surprise victory of Hawthorn, who had the cunning and crafty Alastair Clarkson as coach. In this year, his tactical edge certainly made a difference.

When Garry Lyon and his sub-committee sit down I hope they have done due diligence and homework on what makes a successful coach - or at least have read this article.

The process is not just a matter of looking at the same options time and time again.

My answer is to look for a strong-willed and aggressive person, but more importantly a hungry individual who will leave no stone unturned to have his name etched into history, regardless of experience.

If you find this individual he will push and drag himself and the club into the next successful era.

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