Brendan McCartney always looked like a man from a different generation, like he’d wandered out of the 1950s and into a Western Bulldogs tracksuit.

He hails from the northern Victorian town of Nyah, the son of a butcher, and in a wonderful piece from The Age journalist Martin Flanagan in February, he told of how his upbringing had moulded his views on life.

“Don’t dream of a better job – do a better job,” McCartney said was one of his father Graeme’s maxims.

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Now McCartney doesn’t have a job. On Friday he resigned from his position as Bulldogs coach, the club citing irreconcilable differences with skipper Ryan Griffen, who requested a trade on Thursday.

At a media conference, Dogs president Peter Gordon said the issues that caused McCartney’s demise were a “deterioration in coach communication with players in 2014, and in particular the second half of the 2014 season”.

Gordon pinned the problem on “Macca’s work ethic – out of caring too much, trying too hard, and therefore demanding too much of those around him, and perhaps not always demanding it in precisely the right way”.

Perhaps McCartney’s end stemmed from struggling to bridge the generation gap with the players at his disposal.

In the Channel 7 documentary The Chosen Few, he detailed watching one of his players in VFL action and being disgusted by some of the things he saw. He fired off a text, requesting a meeting in his office on Monday to review some video.

He was astounded by the flippant response.

“SWEET AS MATE … CAN’T WAIT TO LOOK AT EM … SEE YOU TOMOZ.”

“This won’t be a social chat mate,” came McCartney’s reply.

The player responded with: “SWEET AS … CATCH YA IN THE MORNING… CYA MATE.”

The coach was bewildered.

Now, with hindsight, I recall the end of McCartney’s press conference after the Dogs’ 22-point win over West Coast in round 18 last year. A colleague of mine asked how McCartney rated the game of young Luke Dahlhaus, seated to his left.

The answer degenerated into a faux-lecture that left both parties looking embarrassed.

It emerged on Friday that feedback from players had led to McCartney acknowledging his communication needed work, and Griffen had agreed to work with his coach until his “unfortunate change of mind in the last few days”.

Gordon’s tone adopted a funereal air when discussing McCartney’s departure, abandoning the term “Macca” he had used up until that point.

“Brendan McCartney is a very good man, one of the very best men I have ever met,” Gordon said.

“We wish him well and we hope that when we get through all of this he won’t be a stranger to our club. He’ll always be welcome here.”

So player power has struck. Again.

McCartney becomes the third coach in the past three weeks to be shown the door, with the almighty ‘communication’ again proving key.

Brenton Sanderson couldn’t properly ‘communicate’ with his Crows, issues around Guy McKenna’s man management and ‘communication’ with his Suns cost him his job, and now McCartney’s ‘communication’ issues have left him on the outer as well.

It’s fitting that a man indicative of another age has become the latest casualty in a generational and seismic shift in the culture of AFL footy.

The inmates are running the asylum – players have too much power and contracts don’t seem to be worth the paper they’re written on.

Former coach Robert Shaw feels the younger generation are more assertive in demanding excellence from their mentors.

@rohan_connolly powerful new generation. Empowered to speak. Far less accepting of coaching/management program’s that aren’t improving them.

— Robert Shaw (@shawry_analyst) October 10, 2014

Anyway extraordinary events. Just don’t think we should rip into players in isolation. We all have a say on our work conditions don’t we?

— Robert Shaw (@shawry_analyst) October 10, 2014

Gordon spoke of the shifting sands of footy, how aphorisms like ‘the coach lost the players’ were meaningless in the modern landscape.

“Life in the AFL these days is a whole lot more complicated than (what) can be reduced to these kind of one-liners,” he said.

In that sense, he is spot on – just as what is sure to have transpired at the Whitten Oval will be more complicated than a few unsettled players being unhappy with some blunt direction from the coach.

Perhaps that’s the way of professional sport taken to its nth degree – the best players will always be the powerbrokers at the end of the day.

No one goes to watch the Cleveland Cavaliers play to see how great David Blatt is during a time out, they want to watch LeBron dunk on somebody.

Coaches are replaceable, but marquee, franchise players – like Patrick Dangerfield, Gary Ablett and, well, Ryan Griffen – are not.

One of the more interesting moments of Friday’s media conference came when Gordon was asked if he’d speak to Griffen to try and persuade him to stay with the club.

“The last information I had was that he’d gone pig shooting,” Gordon said.

It made sense – he’d just helped bring down the biggest dog in the kennel.