ERNIE Merrick has a gift for coaching, an eye for footballing talent, and a hunger for life, but he has no stomach for steak.
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Emigrating to Australia dulled his appetite for red meat.
“I’d never seen a steak, until I got to Australia, the way you have steaks,” Merrick recalls in that gravy-rich Scottish accent of his. “So I really wanted a barbecue.”
The 22-year-old had just arrived in Melbourne. He told his mate, Derek, who had talked Ernie into moving to Australia, to invite some friends around for a barbecue. With Ernie at the plate, Derek brought out a huge lump of rump and tutored his mate in the art of cooking a steak.
“Then I got a knife out and began cutting it,” says Merrick, “and Derek said, ‘What are you doing!?’. I said, ‘Well, there’s six of us’.
“And he said, ‘No, that’s yours. You’ve got another five to do!’.”
For two years, Merrick ate steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner until he realised you can have too much of a good thing. He decided to take a break from eating red meat – and that was more than 40 years ago.
Merrick chooses Merewether Surfhouse for lunch, so we can enjoy seafood and a glass of Hunter chardonnay while gorging on the coastal views.
The Newcastle Jets coach loves the beach. It was one of the selling points Derek and his brother Colin had used in tempting their friend out of Scotland. When Merrick landed in Melbourne, one of the first things he did – even before eating a steak – was go to the beach.
“I arrived in 1975, 2nd May, and I was on the beach, I think, at half past one, right on the beach at Beaumaris,” he says. “It was 15 degrees, and there was no one else there, and I couldn’t work it out. ‘How good’s this?’. I thought it was summer.”
Little wonder Merrick likes sunny weather; it matches his disposition. He is a warm character with an uninhibited laugh that ignites his face. That’s rarely evident on the television when you see the coach on the sidelines, scrutinising a game.
“I’ve got this game face,” he says. “But I’m actually really happy inside. Sometimes I forget to tell my face!”
IF being a football coach involves taking risks and learning to walk the tightrope over physical and emotional challenges, all in the name of entertainment, then Merrick was born for the job. His family had worked around the fairgrounds of Britain for generations. One of his ancestors was a lion tamer who started a circus.
“My mother’s side was circus, my father’s side was side stalls,” Merrick says. “So she was from the aristocracy and he was working class – in fairground hierarchy.”
Merrick was born in Portobello, near Edinburgh, in 1953. For the first six years of his life, Ernie travelled with his family in a caravan around the country.
Yet that wasn’t as adventurous as his mother Dorothy’s childhood in The Salvo Company Open Air Circus. She was an acrobat and assistant for her magician father’s trick of driving swords through a box – with her in it. Merrick has on his phone old photos of his Mum’s family circus.
“This is the circus monkey with my mother,” Merrick says, showing me the image. “She says the monkey was a horrible thing, it was always pulling her hair.”
So that Merrick and his three siblings could attend school, the family settled in Stewarton, south-west of Glasgow – “it was the last place in Scotland where they made tartan bonnets”. During the summer holidays, Merrick could grab some pocket money by working with relatives at fun piers and arcades.
But he knew there was no future in a fairground life; it was dying out. He decided to train as a physical education teacher. That held elements of the family’s circus tradition – “we think it was to do with the acrobats” – but the decision was largely fuelled by Merrick’s passion for sport. His great love was football. He entertained thoughts of becoming a professional footballer one day.
As a student at the Scottish School of Physical Education, Merrick had high hopes as he trialled for the football team.
“I didn’t make the first team, didn’t make the second team, and I made the fourth team,” he recalls. “So straight away, I went to the head coach and said, ‘Look, I’ve trialled, you put me in the fourth team, why’s that’?
“He said, ‘Ernie, I’ll be honest, I’m sorry about that, but the only reason you’re in the fourth team is because we don’t have a fifth team’. So I knew I was up against it.”
Merrick persisted and played in the first team at college and was also invited to trial for sides in the Scottish first and second divisions. While he ended up playing semi-professional football, Merrick realised: “I knew I wasn’t going to make it; I didn’t feel quick enough.”
He was teaching in a “rough, tough” area of Glasgow and playing some football under the grey, soggy cloak of a Scottish sky, when fellow Scots Derek and Colin Hay contacted him from their new home in Melbourne, urging him to come on out. Australia needed PE teachers, they assured, there were beaches – with girls in bikinis lying on them – and fabulous weather.
Merrick had the paperwork for a one-year working holiday. But he was looking further over the horizon.
“I knew I was never going back, which is very sad,” he muses. “I left my parents at the age of 22. Although they encouraged me, because they thought it would be a better lifestyle. Economically, in the mid-’70s, it was very tough in Scotland.”
Merrick’s mate, Colin, demonstrated spectacularly how Australia’s lifestyle could be converted into unimagined opportunity – and an unforgettable melody. Colin was the singer and guitarist in a band. The Scottish emigrant co-wrote a song, chronicling his observations of Australians. The song was titled Down Under. The song became the unofficial anthem of a nation and, for a time, made Hay’s band, Men at Work, one of the biggest acts in the world.
Merrick remains close to the Hay brothers. Derek had visited Newcastle a few days before we meet for lunch. And Merrick loves the music of Colin, who has a healthy solo career almost 40 years after those heady Down Under days.
“He writes some really good stuff,” says Merrick, adding one of his favourite songs of Hay’s is an autobiographical journey in melody, Are You Looking at Me?.
“Are you looking at me, pal? – typical Glasgow saying, if you’re in a pub, and someone’s looking at you,” chuckles Merrick. “And the words in that song are very good, because he talks about his life in Scotland being in black and white, always dull and colourless, and then he came to Australia and everything was in colour. And then before he knew it, he was in America and everyone knew his name.”
The song is also about not living in the past but looking for new places, embracing new experiences, “somewhere you’ve never been”, as Hay sings. He may well have been also singing about Merrick’s life in Australia.
Finding his feet in a new country, Merrick began the journey to somewhere he had never imagined for himself: a professional football coach’s position. As well as teaching, he was playing for a Melbourne team, Doveton. He also attained formal coaching qualifications, “but I did that more for teaching than thinking about being a coach”.
“I didn’t actually want to be a coach. I was a very reluctant coach initially. I was a player who was a physical education teacher.”
Then Doveton’s coach left and, after initially declining an invitation to take over, Merrick stepped into the role.
“I’ll never forget my first game as a player-coach,” he recalls. “We were playing against the top team called Green Gully, and we were down 3-nil at half time, and I go, ‘Whoa, this isn’t going to plan’.
“I’d never had to do a team talk or anything. So I’m going into the sheds at half-time, thinking, ‘I’ve got to do a team talk here. What am I going to say? Are the boys going to listen to me?’... Anyway, when you’re thrust into a role, sometimes you just have to perform. So I started speaking and it came out pretty well. And the boys all paid attention, and I mentioned the key things, it was more about character, togetherness and playing for a bit of pride, and the rest of it.
“The boys went out in the second half. As they left the dressing room I could just tell I’d had an effect on them. So, we went out and played the second half – and we were thrashed 6-nil!”
Merrick erupts into laughter.
“The team talk was good, but I realised I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
“There’s a lot to learn, but you’ve just go to keep learning. It’s a hard job, you think you’re making an impression, and then for the next 10 years, I made lots and lots of mistakes. And you try and learn from those mistakes.”
Merrick kept learning. And while teaching at a Melbourne high school in 1979, he met the person who accompanies him through his career and life, his wife Kerry. She was a fellow teacher and was from Melbourne sporting royalty. Her brother is former Australian rules footballer and Richmond legend Barry Richardson. Ernie and Kerry married in the mid 1980s and have three adult children.
Merrick says he and his wife share a love of sport, but she rarely offers opinions or advice on his job. Although there was a time in Costa Rica, when Kerry was with Merrick as he assessed a couple of players, “and she chose the best-looking one”.
In Melbourne in the 1980s and early 1990s, Merrick coached in the National Soccer League, but that didn’t feel secure. There was a high turnover in coaches. So when he was offered a teaching and coaching position at the Victorian Institute of Sport, he accepted: “You don’t get sacked after two losses.”
Yet it wasn’t so much the prospect of a steady job but the chance to learn from other coaches in a range of sports that attracted Merrick to the VIS.
“I think that’s where I became a real coach,” Merrick says of his 13 years at the institute. “The skills [of each coach] were different, but we’re all really coaching people. So in coaching, I’ve never coached football skills, I’ve coached people, and that’s the difference.”
When the A-League kicked off in 2004, Merrick was invited to be the inaugural coach of Melbourne Victory. He left his job as the head soccer coach at the VIS and jumped on the roller coaster of full-time coaching in the A-League. It turned out to be a long and exhilarating ride.
Merrick was at the helm of Victory for six seasons. In that time, his team secured two premierships, and he was twice named A-League coach of the year. But in 2011, Merrick and Victory parted ways.
“I had a good run,” he says.
While on a long holiday in Europe with Kerry, his phone rang. A Scottish voice invited him to apply for a coaching job in Hong Kong. He thought it was a mate pulling a prank. He hung up. The phone rang again. He took the job but left after 11 months. Merrick then stepped back into the A-League, coaching Wellington Phoenix.
“I really enjoyed my time in Wellington, but the weather was just a bit too much like Scotland,” he says.
Merrick left the Phoenix at the end of 2016, and six months later grasped a huge challenge, coaching the previous season’s wooden spooners, Newcastle Jets.
In the late 1970s while on a bus trip, Merrick had stopped in Newcastle, “and I wasn’t very impressed with it at all. Then I started coming here when I was coaching in the A-League from 2005, and I never really got out of my hotel and did much”.
“Then when I got the opportunity to work here with the Jets, I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I never saw this [Merewether] beach, I never knew this existed. I never knew about Port Stephens, I didn’t know about Redhead Beach or Birubi Beach; 40 kilometres of sand, it’s a hidden gem.”
But Merrick wasn’t coming here principally for the beaches. He was inheriting a team that hadn’t won a championship for almost a decade and hadn’t made the finals since 2010. Yet he didn’t feel like he was taking on a basket case.
“Never thought that for a second, actually,” he replies. He admired the city’s long history of football. But more importantly he liked the club’s cornerstones for building a future, particularly the CEO, fellow Scot and former player and coach, Lawrie McKinna – “I thought you couldn’t get much better support.”
Anyway, Merrick isn’t afraid of taking a risk. He learnt that from a young age.
“Would you like to watch a trapeze artist that far from the ground?,” he says, holding his hands close together. “If you’re not prepared to take risks, you’re never going to have success as a coach.
“If you’re taking risks, you’ve got to realise that failure is a big part of it. You can’t have success without failure. How many times did [motorcycle racer] Micky Doohan fall off his bike? But he has five world championships. He was always pushing the limits.”
Merrick encourages his players to take risks, not to be afraid of making mistakes, not to play too safe, and instead seek goals. It’s paid off. The Jets are finals bound. A Sydney paper has called it “The Ernie Effect”. Merrick counters that explanation, steering credit to a string of names, especially McKinna. But he’s delighted at the Jets’ turn-around: “I didn’t think it would come so quickly, but we’re on the right track.”
The team has faltered recently, losing three consecutive games, but Merrick remains confident.
“At this stage of the season, I feel they’re a team that can get into the grand final,” he says. “I haven’t wavered from that. There are always going to be hiccups.”
Can you win the grand final?
“I wouldn’t say that to you, one way or the other.”
While he helps shape a team of young men and carries the expectations of a city, Merrick says he doesn’t feel under pressure.
“I’ve developed an ability not to worry about things,” the 65-year-old explains. “It’s taken a fair time, because when you’re younger, you worry about things. When you get older, you go, ‘Well, I can’t control that, I’ll start thinking about something else’.
“As my mother says, ‘You’re a long time dead’ [in a Scottish accent], so why would you worry about it? I tend to focus on what you can do, rather than what can go wrong. Because when you worry about what can go wrong, anxiety takes over.”
Merrick is with the Jets for next season at least, and he’s in talks with the club about extending his contract.
As much as he loves his life in Newcastle, living by the harbour, Merrick doubts he will stay once he finishes coaching here: “I’ve got a terrible fear of staying in a city after my use-by date”.
In the meantime, Merrick will try to guide Newcastle Jets and their supporters to their moment in the sun once more. He likes to see people succeed and smile.
If he were in a circus, Merrick reckons, he would be “an acrobatic clown”. Taking risks and having fun at the same time.
“Without taking risks, life’s pretty boring, isn’t it?,” he says. “I just feel as though life is for enjoying. Make the most of it.”
