Allan Lindsay Jeans (21 September 1933 – 13 July 2011) was an Australian rules footballer and coach. He was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame at its inception in 1996. Jeans was known for his oratory and motivation skills as a coach and led St Kilda and Hawthorn to a total of four premierships.

AFL career

Allan Jeans was recruited to St.Kilda after playing in Finley Football Club's 1954

Murray Football League The Murray Football Netball League is an Australian rules football and netball league affiliated with the Victorian Country Football League. The league covers a large area of northern Victoria (Australia), Victoria and southern New South Wales ...

(MFL) senior premiership, and he was also runner up in the 1954 MFL O’Dwyer Medal. After a modest 77-game playing career with the St Kilda Football Club (1955–1959), Jeans, known as "Yabby", took the reins of the Saints in 1961 for a remarkable 16-year career as senior coach. He coached St Kilda to successive

grand finals Primarily in Australian sports, a grand final (sometimes colloquially abbreviated to "grannie") is a game that decides a sports league's premiership (or championship) winning team, i.e. the conclusive game of a finals (or play-off) series. Sy ...

, in 1965 and 1966, including the Saints' first (and only) VFL premiership in 1966. He took the Saints to another grand final appearance in 1971. Claiming "burn-out", he retired from coaching the team at the end of 1976. In 1981, Jeans revived his coaching career when he was appointed coach for the

Hawthorn Football Club The Hawthorn Football Club, nicknamed the Hawks, is a professional Australian rules football club based in Mulgrave, Victoria, that competes in the Australian Football League (AFL). The club was founded in 1902 in the inner-east suburb of Hawt ...

. He coached them until 1990 (excluding a year off in 1988 due to brain injury) establishing them as the dominant VFL team of the 1980s, with premierships in

1983 The year 1983 saw both the official beginning of the Internet and the first mobile cellular telephone call. Events January * January 1 – The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP is officially completed (this is considered to be the beginning ...

1986 The year 1986 was designated as the International Year of Peace by the United Nations. Events January * January 1 **Aruba gains increased autonomy from the Netherlands by separating from the Netherlands Antilles. **Spain and Portugal enter ...

1988 File:1988 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The oil platform Piper Alpha explodes and collapses in the North Sea, killing 165 workers; The USS Vincennes (CG-49) mistakenly shoots down Iran Air Flight 655; Australia celebrates its Bicenten ...

and

1989 File:1989 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The Cypress structure collapses as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, killing motorists below; The proposal document for the World Wide Web is submitted; The Exxon Valdez oil tanker runs ...

from seven consecutive grand finals. Finally, he had a short-lived one-year stint at Richmond in 1992, winning only five out of 22 games.

Later life

Jeans, following his retirement from his job as a Senior Sergeant with

Victoria Police Victoria Police is the primary law enforcement agency of the Australian state of Victoria. It was formed in 1853 and currently operates under the ''Victoria Police Act 2013''. , Victoria Police had over 22,300 staff, comprising over 16,700 ...

, became an avid social

lawn bowls Bowls, also known as lawn bowls or lawn bowling, is a sport in which the objective is to roll biased balls so that they stop close to a smaller ball called a "jack" or "kitty". It is played on a bowling green, which may be flat (for "flat-gre ...

player at Cheltenham Lawn Bowls Club. One of his last public appearances was at the post-match presentations of the 2006 AFL Grand Final. He died following years of ill health on 12 July 2011.

References

External links

St Kilda Saints profile of Allan Jeans
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Jeans, Allan 1933 births 2011 deaths Australian rules footballers from New South Wales St Kilda Football Club coaches St Kilda Football Club Premiership coaches Australian Football Hall of Fame inductees St Kilda Football Club players Hawthorn Football Club coaches Hawthorn Football Club Premiership coaches Richmond Football Club coaches Finley Football Club players Australian police officers Four-time VFL/AFL Premiership coaches