THERE are several boxes any prospective candidate for an AFL senior coaching job must be seen to tick. And for the Gold Coast team joining the competition in 2011, there will be a few more still.

It's those latter categories that triple Brisbane Lions premiership captain Michael Voss, off to a massive head start in the race to be the AFL's newest franchise's inaugural senior mentor, has well and truly covered.

Let's see. Profile? Check. There's not many bigger names going around. Identification with the local market? Check. Voss is second only to Lions coach Leigh Matthews as a hero to the Queensland football world. Marketability? Check. Voss is young, presentable and affable.

And now to that first lot of criteria. Experience? None, really, though Voss did lead an Australian Institute of Sport under-17 team to a win against South Africa last year. Tactical smarts? Well, Voss does that bit with the "NAB analyser" during half-time of Channel Ten's games. Oh, and here's a reasonably important one. Can he actually coach?

The Gold Coast team, or GC17 as it's known like some sort of political summit, should have a real "chicken or the egg" scenario to grapple with in its initial coaching appointment.

Is it the profile and saleability of the new club's first senior coach who is going to draw the members, sponsors, players and ultimately, hopefully, on-field success, or is it the sheer technical coaching capacity of the new man who will get the on-field success, and ultimately, hopefully, members, sponsors and players?

One senior AFL coach, who for obvious reasons preferred not to be named, believes it's the latter score that should determine who gets the Gold Coast job. "This thing that it has to be about marketing, and that those abilities are perhaps more important than simple coaching ability, is a nonsense at any time, and particularly now," he says.

"Alastair Clarkson has already proved that with virtually no profile at all. If you get the results, people are going to come through the gate."

But that's an argument the new club appears to have either debated and resolved already, or ignored altogether.

Voss has accepted an advisory role with the franchise, working hand-in-hand with the men driving the football side of the new club, former Brisbane chairman Graeme Downie, Southport Football Club president Alan McKenzie, AFL Queensland chief executive Richard Griffiths and the AFL's national and international development manager, David Matthews.

While there's no official statement of intent on the part of the club, that role for Voss is surely as good as a work experience gig, one he'd have to stuff spectacularly not to eventually land the senior position.

He's already up to his neck in information about the sort of player rules under what the Coasters will make their AFL debut, and the setting up of a team to play in a second-tier competition as early as next year.

It's as close as Voss is going to come to an apprenticeship of sorts before seemingly being announced as the Gold Coast's man. And that lack of hands-on experience has some pretty respected coaching figures a little concerned.

"If you ask me what's ideal, the ideal thing for any ex-player is to have a gap away from his current club," Leigh Matthews said this week. "Go to another club, get some experience at another culture, another coaching system."

Another senior coach doesn't believe that even Voss' familiarity to the Queensland public is going to give him nearly sufficient largesse, as he guides a team which, generous draft concessions or not, is likely to struggle initially for results.

"It's going to be tough, there'll be a lot of questions asked and a lot of flak flying around early days," he says. "I just don't see how an inexperienced bloke is going to be able to cope with that, whether he's seen as a Queenslander or not.

"If I was them, I'd be going like hell to try to land a Mark Thompson, Mark Williams or a Paul Roos when they come out of contract. Have a look at Fremantle. They've gone for four untried coaches now (Gerard Neesham, Damien Drum, Chris Connolly and Mark Harvey) and it hasn't done them much good."

Kevin Sheedy recently warned Voss that he must be prepared to live, breathe and eat football to do the job justice. "Lots of great players don't make it as a coach, unless that person has an unbelievable desire and passion to do nothing else but coach," he said.

AFL sources who accompanied Voss on that South African trip have little doubt that is indeed the case. Others at Carlton who sat opposite Voss as he equivocated, then backed away from the Blues' senior coaching job last year aren't quite as convinced.

But if Voss does indeed have that drive, he's probably fortunate that the Gold Coast job throws up a rarefied set of criteria. Because on the traditional counts, there's no end of potential coaches of the new club better placed.

First, there's the group of current AFL assistant coaches who have already thrown their hats into the ring for the most recent crop of senior jobs over the past couple of years, and in a couple of cases, come agonisingly close to landing one.

Sydney's John Longmire has been a perennial "usual suspect", although less now that he seems all but to have been anointed as Paul Roos' successor at the Swans.

Collingwood's Guy McKenna is an obvious candidate, as are former Western Bulldogs assistant Chris Bond, now with Fremantle, who all but had the St Kilda job until Ross Lyon threw his hat into the ring, and Hawthorn's Damien Hardwick, pipped by Matthew Knights for the Essendon gig vacated by Sheedy.

And now there's another group looming in the wings. There's a very obvious future coach in Nathan Buckley, so impressive already in his work as a television and radio special comments man, and who has declared his intent to gain experience as an assistant.

Then there are more current assistants, those whose stocks with their coaching peers around AFL traps have risen rapidly over the last year or so, the likes of David King at Richmond, the Western Bulldogs' Leon Cameron and the Scott twins: Brad at Collingwood and Chris at Fremantle.

King and Cameron in particular are earning some big raps for their work with their clubs.

Former North Melbourne premiership defender King, impressive as a special comments man on 3AW, has a lot of important figures at Punt Road sold on his potential.

It was working alongside King at 3AW where Richmond coach Terry Wallace — who calls King "outstanding, and improving all the time" — first became attracted to the idea of getting him aboard at Punt Road.

Wallace was struck by the depth of insight in King's observations about the game in general and how specific clubs played. "I didn't really know a lot about him, but his analysis of the game seemed pretty intelligent," Wallace says.

"I wanted to try to put a run-and-carry game together. He had so much run and great kicking skills as a player, and I thought he could teach people how to cut through the middle of the ground and work the angles because that's what he did."

Working with a young team that inevitably would cop its share of setbacks, Wallace was also keen for an assistant full of vibrancy and positivity. That's King, all right. "He always bounces out on to the training track, no matter what's happened," Wallace says.

Other Richmond sources cite King's gradual distancing of himself from a player's mentality to that of a coach as his most significant advance.

One insider says King's greatest asset is his broad range of skills. Though nominally the Tigers' defensive coach, King has taken on a large part of Richmond's opposition analysis, and has also worked closely with the club's information technology department to streamline the formulas required for probing into rival club's playing styles and key performance indicators.

"You can get 50 pages of information that doesn't mean much … but he's been able to build a set of criteria with the IT blokes which cuts through the crap … he's upskilled our department tenfold in that area," says a Tigers boardroom source.

It's an interesting observation, given that one critic of Voss' candidature says the former Lions champion has displayed a tendency to "over-complicate things" in his dissertations about the game.

Cameron is in his fifth year now as an assistant coach with the Western Bulldogs. He'd done only one season when Rodney Eade arrived as senior coach. But Eade had no problems leaving the former gifted 256-game wingman in the role, and is glad he did. "He's got a very good brain, and he's quite creative in his thinking, too," Eade says. "He not only thinks in terms structure and process, but can also think outside the square.

"And he's pretty forthright, calls it as he sees it. That's one of his real strengths. Leon's prepared to make the hard call, where a lot of assistants don't. They want to play good cop to the senior coach's bad cop … Leon will let them know exactly where they stand if they're not doing the right thing. He's got a very strong character."

Something of which would doubtless be required by whoever the Gold Coast's first coach turned out to be.

Voss might measure up well on that score, too. And as a front man for a Queensland-based team, GC17 might not do much better. But as the Brownlow medallist noted himself in his Age column yesterday about the new club's likely draft concessions, "the devil is still in the detail".

And that line could apply equally to the job for which he seems destined.

Analysis

WHEN coaching legend Kevin Sheedy addressed a football gathering in Brisbane late last month and was asked the inevitable questions about the new Gold Coast AFL franchise, he had a word of warning to Michael Voss.

"Lots of great players don't make it as a coach, unless that person has an unbelievable desire and passion to do nothing else but coach," Sheedy said. "I'm talking great players, not good, great. Leigh Matthews was one of the great players that made it as a coach. Tim Watson didn't make it. Probably Kevin Bartlett didn't. There's been more successful coaches that weren't great players."

Sheedy probably should also have mentioned Malcolm Blight alongside Matthews. He might have added Paul Roos' name. But his essential point, a favourite Sheedy theme, has merit.

Watson and Bartlett are but two playing greats who have found the transition to coach somewhat tougher. You could name plenty. In the past 30-odd years, there's been Darrel Baldock, Graham "Polly" Farmer, Royce Hart, Wayne Schimmelbusch — all undisputed champions on the field, none overly successful in coaching.

The theory is that for those men, mastery of on-field playing skills was so easy that they found it difficult to relate to mere football mortals, men for whom kicking, marking and handballing, not to mention football smarts, didn't come so readily.

It's a theory which gained credence with the contrasting coaching success of a series of men whose playing careers were anything but legendary.

Names like four-time premiership coach with St Kilda and Hawthorn, Allan Jeans. Four-time Richmond premiership coach Tom Hafey. Three-time flag-winning Hawthorn coaching legend John Kennedy. And more recently, Mick Malthouse and Denis Pagan.

The latter pair, along with Sheedy, help propagate another theory about coaching success — that crusty old back-pocket players, or defenders in general, have an edge over flashy forwards or midfielders when it comes to coaching.

The thinking there surrounds the defender's job of stopping opponents rather than concentrate primarily on their own game. To often sacrifice their own talents in the name of nullifying someone else's. And to rely on a sense of team and selflessness more than the men entrusted with winning the ball a lot, or kicking plenty of goals.

If Voss puts any stock in history, or football theorising, that may worry him. After all, he won plenty of ball, rarely worrying about someone else rather than have them worry about him.

A hard psychological edge was evident, too, in his reputation as one of the game's most prolific sledgers. It could be the perfect combination.

The combination might be the perfect blend for AFL football's next prospective senior coach. Whether it suffices instead of serious hours in an AFL coaching box is another matter. The only certainty about Voss the coach is that should he fail, the "great player, bad coach" chestnut is sure to get another workout.