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If the last few days proved something, it’s that Essendon Football Club will do anything for James Hird, and that Hird will take anything from Essendon. If he were to try giving for a change, the best offering would be to walk away and never come back.
When club chairman Paul Little fronted a press conference on Wednesday, he was frustrated with the latest episode in the Hird saga, damned the damage it had done, then confirmed that no action would be taken.
Hird is often described as Essendon’s favourite son, but here he was playing the troublesome teenager, with Little forced into the role of over-indulgent dad.
“We’re really disappointed in James for crashing the car in a drag race,” he might say, “but he was very upset, so we sent him to the holiday house in Lorne for a week to think it over.” No doubt bodysurfing a wave of remorse.
James Hird and Essendon have a weird relationship. For so long, Hird represented perfection. As a player he was footy’s golden child: boyishly blond, sublimely skilled, graceful yet courageous on the field, eloquent and upright off it. He was a pretty boy who played like a hard nut, had a magician’s bag of tricks and inspired as a leader.
The infatuation was such that three years after Hird retired, his idle musings about coaching were enough to destabilise then-coach Matthew Knights. By the next season Hird was at the helm, with zero games of coaching experience, zero games of assistant coaching experience, and a ten-year, dual-premiership coach in Mark Thompson as his own nominal assistant.
In Essendon-land, this fitted the mythos. When the Messiah returns, the chosen people aren’t going to quiz him about his work experience.
So when Hird was suspended after last year’s supplement scandal it led to a crisis of identity, both for Hird and the club at large. Devotees were not used to Hird being less than perfect. Hird was not used to being less than adored.
The response from both was to cast the man as a martyr, sacrificed at the altar of AFL expedience. It has been an enthusiastic refrain. From civilised Twitter conversations to outright conspiracy blogs, the Hird defence revolves around the AFL being shifty and natural justice being denied.
For those Dons not yet incoherent with rage, I agree with a lot of those points. The AFL’s conduct was dubious. As with the Melbourne tanking case, the league was judge and jury, and came out with contradictory findings and sanctions. The Essendon hearings were not about assessing guilt but negotiating penalties.
You’re right that the ASADA investigation has been a botch as well, taking over a year without answering what should be relatively simple questions.
And yes, Tania Hird’s allegation about an AFL tip-off is worth investigating, even if your indignation is perplexing given a tip-off would only have helped the club.
But none of that changes what we already know happened at Essendon.
We know that Hird enthusiastically backed a supplements program involving numerous substances and injections. We know that plenty of these substances were experimental in nature or mixture. We know they were administered based on hunches rather than hard data.
The club had “a culture of frequent, uninformed and unregulated use of the injection of supplements,” according to the ASADA interim report. We know dubious sources were involved, and some injections were administered in unsterile conditions without a medical professional.
We know that Hird was happy to expose several dozen young men to these chemicals without any idea of the long-term effects, in the hope that the program would benefit his coaching goals and ambitions.
Most importantly, we know from Hird’s own correspondence that when club doctor Bruce Reid protested that the program was ethically suspect and clinically unsafe, Hird’s response was to instruct others to circumvent Reid and stop him interfering. Reid’s expertise was discounted as inconvenient.
The program ended up costing the club $2 million in fines, a 2013 finals place, and the ASADA investigation that still hangs over their players, while Hird copped a lenient one-year suspension.
Essendon’s response was to give him a million-dollar lump sum for his year off, an expenses-paid business course in France, a new contract for two years after his suspension, and a guarantee that he can slide right back into his old job.
Thompson, the man who built Geelong into the modern game’s powerhouse, is treated as a seat-warmer. You almost hope he wins the flag, just to see how awkward things get.
For an unproven coach who has brought such havoc down on the club, this backing defies sense. Any other coach in history would have been ditched. It can only be put down to the Hird factor, the son you can’t stop loving.
Essendon had to back Hird because to do otherwise would be to admit he’d done wrong. To admit that would destroy the club’s mythology. Far more reassuring for fans to attack the journalists who exposed him.
But even all that backing wasn’t enough. This drama showed us something about Hird that the golden-boy years couldn’t. Against a backdrop of fans with “Stand by Hird” signs, he refused responsibility. He denied wrongdoing. He lawyered up. He scowled through press packs. In his version, he was the victim.
Paul Little’s press conference made it clear Hird hasn’t got past that. Nor has his wife Tania, her narrative of persecution in an ABC interview kicking off the recent trouble. It goes hand in hand with a massive sense of entitlement, as Little’s parental press conference laid bare.
“The important thing is there are now clear protocols in place,” he said about the Hirds talking to the media, as though no protocol had been discussed before handing them a year’s pay to play Xbox. While I realise a husband and wife are different people, they’re also a financial partnership, so the conditions on one’s million-dollar contract would likely be understood by the other.
So again allowances were made for Hird, which he accepted and no doubt thought he was owed. It’s just a bit hard to generate sympathy for a guy who’s sitting around in France, counting his money, complaining how he’s been victimised.
James Hird might be a great bloke to sit next to on an aeroplane. He was a great footballer. He has a nice speaking voice. But he is also prepared to shrug off responsibility for putting his players at risk.
He’s prepared to take a million dollars from his own club in exchange for nothing.
He’s prepared to let them guarantee his job from 2015, at another million a year, regardless of whether that’s best for the team. He’s prepared to subject that team to the scrutiny he’s created.
He’s prepared to walk back in there on January 1, after all the damage he’s done, with a regal wave as though nothing had happened, as though they should be glad to have him back.
If a man like that walked into any other football club in the country, he’d be kicked out into the street. And if he looked within himself and scrounged up a scrap of self-respect, he’d probably start walking.