too young to be able to play senior football. In the following two seasons, Coleman completed pre-season training with Essendon and played in practice matches. However, both times he was sent back to Hastings, where he kicked 296 goals in 37 games over two years, including 23 in one game against Sorrento in August 1948. Instant sensation The 1949 season was a make-or-break time for the budding forward. He again trained with Essendon, but he was frustrated by many of the senior players who ignored his leads. Coleman's potential was noted by a number of other clubs, and Richmond made an attempt to sign him. However, Essendon finally selected him for the opening-round match against Hawthorn. From his first match, when he not only kicked a to-this-day unbeaten record of twelve goals on debut — his 12 goals in the first home-and-away match of a season also equalled the Essendon record set by Ted Freyer, against Melbourne on 27 April 1935 — but he also kicked a goal with his first kick; Coleman was the star player in the game, which was experiencing a boom in the immediate post-war years. Standing 185 cm tall, with a pale complexion and slight build, the 20-year-old Coleman did not appear at all imposing. He looked listless as he stood in the goal square, often a metre behind the full-back, with his long-sleeved guernsey (number 10) rolled up to his elbows. Then, with explosive speed, Coleman would slip the guard of his opponent and sprint into open space on the lead or leap onto a pack of players to take a spectacular mark. This innate ability to make position and his prodigious leap immediately caught the public imagination. He needed only a few opportunities to significantly influence the outcome of a game. Later, one of his teammates, ruckman Geoff Leek, recalled one of his 1949 marks: He usually converted from most of his set shots by way of long, flat punt kick. Notwithstanding this, however, he was also an excellent drop kick. Ted Rippon, Coleman's former business associate and vice-president of the football club, recalled that Coleman had kicked 14 goals in a match in Perth against a WA side, and six of those goals had been drop-kicked against the wind. Coleman capped his brilliant debut year in storybook fashion: he booted his one hundredth goal in the dying moments of a record Grand