You’re 24-years-old. You’re enjoying your best and most consistent season of footy so far. You’ve just played a pivotal role in helping your club side lift their first Shute Shield Premiership in 41 years, and your new NRC team – coached by the same guy that orchestrated said Premiership – are flying high at the top of the 2016 competition after three rounds.

While the oft-repeated mantra in sport is that it is a ‘results-based business’, every now and then a little slice of humanity creeps along to outweigh the harsh nuts and bolts of a win, loss or draw.

It’s one thing to put your hand up for a coaching gig when you hang up the boots, it’s quite another to make a decent fist of it. Time and again you see ex-players strolling straight into a mentoring role, at all levels of the game, as if it was merely a rudimentary extension of their on-field career. But more of than not it is a position for which they are wholly unsuited, totally unprepared for, and leads to a rapid disappearance from the game before they’ve even started.