(Ken Piesse is a Melbourne author and sportswriter of over 35 years' standing.)

Allan Jeans told me 12-months ago that he was "pretty well stuffed."

He was still going strong only a week-or-so ago, when I saw him last, with some advance copies of my book, Football Legends of the Bush, for which he generously provided the foreword. His grin was wide and his handshake firm, but he was on oxygen support and couldn't get out of his chair. He'd lost a dramatic amount of weight and eventually his lungs simply shut down.

Australian football has lost one of its genuine icons.

Sitting with his wife Mary in the nursing home, frail and weak and wrapped in a blanket, we were yarning about old times when the subject of his one-year stint at Richmond in 1992 was broached.

"So Yab, why did you actually come back and coach them?" I asked. Quick as a flash, Mary Jeans quipped from her side chair, "Poverty!" And the whole room erupted with laughter.

Jeans never lost his sense of humor. It wasn't his trademark, especially in public or at media conferences, but he could swap tales with the best of them.

Asked about his nickname of Yab or Yabbie, Jeans said it was all to do with the locals at his hometown of Tocumwal. "My brother Len was Lobby, short for lobster. One of his mates reckoned I was just a little yabbie, so Yabbie I became," he recalled.

Brian Muir and Alan Morrow, two old teammates also from the bush, were among his closest confidantes. They'd visit weekly until Allan told Brian just last week that they'd have to cut back their meetings.

"He didn't deserve to go like this," Morrow said. "But it was probably a blessing. His mind was still so sharp and he never lost his sense of humor, but his body was disintegrating."

Ironically, if it hadn't been for football, Jeans would never have left his beloved Murray River haunts of Toc' and Finley.

The celebrated four-time premiership coach was as reluctant a city slicker as they come and even after playing an initial six games for St Kilda in the early ‘50s, went back home to his mother, Hilda, and asked what he should do.

"You can always come home Allan," she said. "But you can't always go forward."

From the age of 19, Jeans ran the local hotel at Finley. It allowed him to develop a rare empathy with people, especially the larrikins.

Appointed a league coach at the incredibly young age of 27, he became St Kilda's one and only premiership coach in 1966 and won three more at Hawthorn (1983, 1986 & 1989).

Those three flags came during a run of seven consecutive Grand Finals. "Had we had a [leading] ruckman in the '80s we would have won more," Jeans said. "When Paul Salmon came to the club I originally thought he was there only for his superannuation. But he was a great, great player for us. Had he come earlier we could have made a clean sweep of all those flags."

I liked to quiz him about his all-time favorite moment: was it St Kilda '66 or Hawthorn '89? "Oh no mate," he'd laugh. "You don't want to quote me on that one do ya?" Deep down he was never prouder than when the Hawks won back-to-back flags in 1989, but he said St Kilda's premiership was still an amazing high.

A no-nonsense, ex-policeman with superb oratory skills, Jeans' speech at half-time of the ‘89 Grand Final remains the most famous of all. So worked up was he that doctors feared it might lead to another aneurysm.

At the main break, with Hawthorn well ahead in that epic play off, Jeans said there were more in the medical room with the club doctor than in the main room. "We might have had a good lead but so many of them were hurting. You could just see it in their eyes," he recounted. John Platten was concussed and out of it, Dermott Brereton was bleeding from the kidney having been cleaned up at the opening bounce and Robert DiPierdomenico had had his lung punctured, courtesy of a charging Gary Ablett.

Inspired, Jeans told the story of a little boy going into a shop to buy a new pair of shoes and how he settled on the very first cheap pair he saw. Within hours he was regretting not paying a higher price for a better pair of shoes. Looking each of his players in the eye, and pointing his finger in their faces, Jeans went to each in turn, and, raising his voice to a crescendo, questioned: "Are you prepared to pay the price? Today? Now?"

Hawthorn had never won two premierships in a row and Jeans was as emotional as he'd ever been, including after the '66 fairytale flag with St Kilda. The atmosphere in the rooms was electric as Jeans kept demanding, "Pay the price... You must pay the price."

Players ran back down the race with tears streaming down their faces. Gary Ayres said Hawthorn was never going to lose after Jeans' speech of a lifetime.

With a super-charged Ablett kicking nine goals, fast-finishing Geelong came within six points of the Hawks. At the last centre bounce, with less than a minute to go, Gary Buckenara said to Chris Wittman that they had to win that contest, no matter what, or Geelong would surely surge again. They did, and Hawthorn was able to hold on for a last-gasp flag, the most famous in modern annals.

Jeans remained a keen follower of everything AFL to the last, from his nursing home near Cranbourne.

As their old coach's health declined, visits from ‘his boys' became more frequent. Dermott Brereton regarded him as a second father. Current Hawthorn coach, Alistair Clarkson, spent a recent Saturday afternoon watching the footy and yarning with him. Ian Stewart, a stormy petrel at St Kilda, even came down and told Jeans how his controversial exit at Moorabbin had all been his and not Jeans' fault. "I appreciated that," said Jeans. Fellow Hawthorn icon, John Kennedy snr, said he learnt more from Jeans' coaching approach than anyone else.

Once ever-so-robust and renowned for having a wrestle with his players after Sunday morning training, Jeans' last four or five years have been difficult, magnified by wife Mary's own problems. He pored over the foreword he'd written for Football Legends of the Bush and simply said, "That's okay mate. No worries." Given his distrust of the media over the years, that was the ultimate compliment.

We'd laughed for years about his potential autobiography and always he'd smile and say: "Oh... but I'd have to write about Stewie [maverick centreman Ian Stewart] and Carl [Ditterich]."

"Oh no mate," he'd say. "Couldn't do that."

Ken Piesse's new book, his 64th, is available from August 1 from cricketbooks.com.au