HIS team has won 41 of 43 matches, is Phar Lap odds to win its second flag in an equalised competition and is even credited with saving the game from unsightly flooding and ugliness.

Yet, whatever Geelong achieves, the prefix "super coach" is never attached to Mark Thompson. His role in the club's domination is taken for granted, and the fact that he appears almost bored — and occasionally peckish — in the coach's box encourages the view that his team runs on autopilot.

"Bomber" receives minimal recognition and respect compared with most coaches who've managed to coax their team to premierships. Whereas Paul Roos was rightly seen to have conjured a premiership with a moderately talented team, Thompson is viewed like Tiger Woods' caddie.

Strange as it sounds, the extent of Geelong's supremacy might have hurt Thompson's standing. Since the Cats are seldom challenged in the course of a game, Bomber never makes the kind of tactical innovations or moves that forge "super coach" reputations.

He hasn't had Ron Barassi ("handball, handball" in 1970) and Kevin Sheedy improvisations, or a Gettysburg address at half-time, in part because the Cats haven't found themselves six or seven goals down in a final.

It's true that Leigh Matthews didn't innovate much in the Brisbane Lions' threepeats either, but he didn't have to. He was Leigh Matthews.

Geelong's storied journey from under-achiever to super team began at the end of the club's 2006 train wreck. That tale of a club's redemption and eventual triumph was a plotline that tended to downplay the contribution of the coach.

Thompson's most significant role, it should be noted, was in assembling a playing list (with recruiter Stephen Wells) that was several years in the making.

One popular subplot — Steve Johnson's transformation from miscreant to miracle man — was an example of how Bomber gets only a minor part in the feel-good Geelong movie; Johnson's suspension was to become a catalyst, not only for his ascent to stardom, but for the playing group demanding higher standards of each other.

The Johnson crackdown was perceived to be player-driven, and part of a new leadership group headed by the impressive Tom Harley, whose appointment was made as a result of a recommendation by the club's chief executive, Brian Cook; making Harley captain was one of dozens of changes that Cook suggested in his laborious end of 2006 review.

Cook recommended all manner of reforms, including the hiring of Gerard Murphy's "'Leading Teams" to run the new player leadership program. By outsourcing this critical area after a shocking season, the club created the impression that its new and improved player culture had little to do with Bomber — it was the external gurus and the players themselves.

More broadly, Cook's review, which Bomber unwisely called "crap" early in 2007, enhanced the already stellar reputation of the chief executive. "Fixing" the Cats, thus, was seen as the work of Cook, not the coach.

The most important recommendation, of course, was that Bomber be retained as senior coach for 2007. The fact that his tenure was in doubt, after a year of personal difficulties and team failure, damaged his coaching brand, and is surely a factor in his subsequent damning with faint praise by media and public.

What Geelong basically said at the end of 2006 was that the coach wasn't the problem. But if the coach wasn't to blame for what went wrong, the corollary is that it was the changes the club made — Harley, Steve Johnson, the fitness staff et al — that made the Cats a super team.

Same coach, same players (excepting Joel Selwood), everything else different, so therefore Bomber gets less credit.

I doubt Thompson would be greatly concerned that he hasn't been hailed as a modern master. Bomber is modest by the standards of his profession, and isn't a self-promoter or media tart.

If anything, he downplays his own importance.

Geelong 2007 was all about a club changing its ways, and the coach wasn't given his dues.

Come the repeat performance in 2008, I predict a market correction, with Bomber's stocks much higher.