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Sport Nation
Find your Sport Nation frequencyVale Robert Walls, a true champion
Michael Lovett • May 15th, 2025 2:01 pm
Robert Walls will be remembered as a rare breed of football talent and intellect who successfully crossed three of the game’s major intersections – star player, premiership coach and brilliant media performer.
He was a three-time premiership hero for Carlton in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before going on to coach the Blues to a flag in 1987.
But squeezed in between those heady days at Princes Park was a three-season stint playing out his final years as an on-field mentor at Fitzroy from 1978-80 before making his first foray into coaching with an emerging Lions side from 1981-85.
Indeed, Walls’ record with the Roys from 1981-85 was the last time the founding VFL club looked like being a serious threat.
His record with Fitzroy reads pretty well all things considered – 115 games, 60 wins, 54 losses and a draw.
The Lions made the finals in his first season in 1981, eliminating Essendon in the first week and were desperately unlucky to lose the first semi-final by a point to Collingwood a week later.
They missed the finals (then the top five) by a game-and-half in 1982 but returned in 1983 and 1984 before petering out in Walls’ final season in 1985 which preceded his return to Carlton in 1986.
The stars – young and old – he led during his time with Fitzroy will moisten the eyes of old-time supporters: Paul Roos, Gary Pert, Bernie Quinlan, Richard Osborne, Matthew Rendell, Gary Wilson, Mick Conlan, Grant Lawrie and David McMahon.
And then there were the 110 per cent players who gave their all and were adored by the fans – Leon Harris, Ross Thornton, Laurie Serafini, Doug Barwick and Scott Clayton to name a few.
They thrived under Walls. He was a hard taskmaster, but his teaching background meant he knew when to pull the right levers.
He was also an innovator. Remember the ‘huddle’?
In the early ’80s, Walls introduced a kick-in routine known as the huddle where players would gather in a tight group about 40-50m from the kick-in and then spread to provide the kicker with plenty of options.
Lions players would run into the open space created out wide by the huddle formation, receive the kick-in and play on. It caught out many an opposition side and showed Walls the coach was ahead of his time.
The lure of returning to his old club in 1986 and one of the League’s biggest supporter bases proved too tempting and it started spectacularly well with the Blues making the Grand Final in Walls’ first season.
His players were navy Blue royalty headed by Stephen Kernahan, Stephen Silvagni, Craig Bradley, David Rhys-Jones, Ken Hunter and Wayne Johnston.
But Hawthorn, hellbent on making amends for losing the 1984-85 Grand Finals to arch rival Essendon, spoiled the party as a young Jason Dunstall kicked six goals in what was Blues champion Bruce Doull’s final game.
Doull, of course, had been a premiership teammate of Walls in 1972, and there is a famous photograph of the pair in a bath together cradling the cup after that thumping win over Richmond in which Walls had kicked six goals.
But Carlton’s ruthless pursuit for success saw no one spared, not even a club legend.
After claiming the 1987 premiership with a brilliant second half and reversing the previous year’s result over the Hawks, Carlton exited the 1988 finals in straight sets and then it all unravelled early in 1989. The Blues lost their first five games and coming into the round 10 clash with the struggling Brisbane Bears at Princes Park they were 2-7.
But in a fluctuating contest, Brisbane’s flamboyant forward Warwick Capper – of all people – delivered the knockout blow kicking truly late in the game from long range to clinch an unlikely Bears win. Days later it cost Walls his job.
Club powerbroker Wes Lofts, another old Carlton premiership teammate, sacked Walls the following Monday and he was promptly replaced by another Blues legend – and you guessed it – former premiership teammate, Alex Jesaulenko.
To his credit Walls took his medicine and admitted years later he deserved to be shown the door.
But it started his third football journey, jumping to the other side of the fence as a radio commentator in 1990 before the coaching call came again, a move summed up perfectly by well-known Carlton historian Tony De Bolfo in his profile of Walls on Blueseum, Carlton’s official historical website.
De Bolfo wrote: “Walls accepted a plea from the AFL to coach the troubled Brisbane Bears. Based at Carrara on the Gold Coast and privately-owned by local hotel magnate Rueben Pelerman, the Bears were on the brink of extinction. Walls took up the challenge in Queensland because like his former mentor Ron Barassi, he was a passionate supporter of the concept of a truly national AFL competition. In his five seasons up north, he battled adversity and apathy at every turn. But there can be no doubt about the selfless contribution he made to the process of returning the Bears to a more traditional membership-based structure. Nor that he coached them into the finals for the first time in 1995, and helped lay the foundations for their eventual relocation to the Gabba in Brisbane.”
But Walls was keen to return to Melbourne and in the twist of all twists, he was appointed Richmond coach in 1996. Remember, the Blues and the Tigers despised each other during Walls’ playing career with the flash point coming in the 1973 Grand Final when Tigers hard men Laurie Fowler and Neil Balme asserted their physicality as Richmond claimed the flag.
Walls took the Tigers to ninth in 1996, after they had made the finals in 1995 under John Northey (for the first time since 1982) but they floundered in 1997, and the end came after round 17 when they were trounced by 137 points by the Adelaide Crows.
This time he read the tea leaves and put a line through coaching, but it precipitated a full-time return to the media where he excelled in all three forms – radio, television and print.
He was a regular on Channel 7, and later with Channel 10 and Fox Footy, and could be heard on several radio stations including 3AW and SEN.
His work on television was particularly incisive and, occasionally, forthright.
Who will ever forget his joust with then Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy on Seven’s On The Couch in 2001?
Who will ever forget his joust with then Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy on Seven’s On The Couch in 2001?
We relived it in the round six edition of the Record in a feature article recalling 30 years of talk shows such as Talking Footy and On The Couch. “The pair traded less-than-friendly barbs about their playing days and respective coaching records. It ended with the frostiest of handshakes.”
Walls crafted well-thought and researched columns for The Age and over 20-plus years was a friend to many of us who never played or coached at the highest level. He was chuffed to win several media awards over his distinguished career and enjoyed the company of those who work in a competitive and sometimes ego-driven industry.
Vale Robert Walls, a champion all-rounder.
