“As far as giving sprays out, they rarely ever do it. There are times you have to decipher whether them yelling at a player was a message for me to deliver, or just them venting their frustrations.”īyrnes stresses that both Scott and Goodwin are two of the more even-tempered coaches you could run for. “Whereas with Scotty up in the box, like most are, you have the headset on and listen in to their commentary of the game as it goes along. “It was probably a bit easier with a coach on the bench like Goody, because I could just watch the game and wait for him to tap me on the shoulder and he’d give me the message. Over the past two seasons, Byrnes has had contrasting approaches, with Simon Goodwin coaching from the boundary and Chris Scott from the elevated coaches box. Runners have also had to adjust to the back-to-the-future evolution of some coaches preferring to coach from the boundary. “Now you have to be careful that the instructional message lands with the player as you don‘’t get another crack at it, there’s more pressure just to get on and off.”īyrnes and Christian Petracca after the 2021 Grand Final. “You used to be able to linger out there longer and you got used more to give players sprays rather than instructional messages. You’ve got to try to find your way into play without getting in the way, but also getting to the player and giving clear enough instructions in that time period. “So there’s a bit of pressure and timing around delivering those messages because you obviously don’t want to give a free kick away.

“You can only go out during goals and then you’ve got two messages you can deliver in between that, and 90 seconds to deliver,” he says.

In more modern times, runners gained notoriety for seemingly being out on the field all game, with the suspicion that they were to help clog up space for defences rather than pass on messages.Īs Byrnes explains, there has been an evolution in runners duties over the past few years, after the 2019 rule changes that limited runners to entering and exiting the field after a goal. Two years later, a ‘coaches runner’ was introduced and has been part of the game ever since. The genesis of the runner was in 1953, when midway through the year trainers were banned from relaying coaches’ messages. Joel Selwood and Byrnes embrace after the 2022 Grand Final.

Cat runner melbourne australia