JOHN Powers, the author of one of the greatest books written about Australian football, has died in London aged 72.

Ron Barassi, the football coach Powers shadowed for a season as a "fly on the wall" at North Melbourne in 1977, expressed shock when The Age delivered the news last night.

Powers' book The Coach broke new ground in Australian sports journalism because he was permitted unprecedented access to the club.

He was a friend and colleague of acclaimed playwright David Williamson, whose play The Club rivals The Coach as the finest piece of literature about Australian football.

Powers had the fortune of choosing a premiership year in which the grand final was drawn for only the second time in Victorian Football League history, but it is a maniacal Barassi who emerges as the central character.

Barassi last night said he was "very, very sorry" to hear of Powers' death. The men, who became friends, caught up in 2005 when The Coach was re-released.

Powers pitched the idea of spending a season with the rising North Melbourne side after meeting Barassi at a cocktail party. "He wasn't allowed to mingle with the players during training, so he'd just jog around the boundary line, but he was there 95 per cent of the time," Barassi said last night.

"He's such a good bloke that he soon got the confidence of everybody and after a while nobody worried, 'Who's this stranger?' because he wasn't a stranger. He had that sort of ability and I think he wrote one of the best footy books ever written, but I might be biased."

Ron Joseph, the club's chief executive at the time, said the book was remarkable for its depiction of Barassi. One of the scenes reveals Barassi after the grand final replay, tears rolling down his face, telling his players: "As you think back on this day, which has been one of the great spectacles of Australian sport, I hope you'll agree that all that hard work and all that shit put on you by the coach was worth it. And I want you to know very sincerely that I love you all."

Joseph said Powers had greater access to the coach than committee members, pointing out that no journalist today could observe first-hand "the raging coach at the end of the match".

Powers launched his professional writing career with the play The Last of the Knucklemen, an Australian western about miners competing for power in the outback that was first performed by the Melbourne Theatre Company in the mid-1970s and later made into a film directed by the late Tim Burstall.

Powers' daughter Christine said her father, who also lectured in creative writing at Deakin University, died in a hotel room in London.

He is survived by two daughters and a grandson.