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Tears can’t rewrite past wrongs and there have been plenty of tears shed in the past 48 hours.
As stirring as it was to see James Hird’s emotion finally on display when he resigned as Essendon coach on Tuesday, it was simply a case of too little, too late.
Hird was never the victim throughout his calamitous tenure as coach, although he made sure onlookers knew his views – namely that the AFL were on a witch-hunt to dismantle him.
His ongoing war of words with the AFL was, for the main part, his own doing.
However it was also the fault of the club that hired him and its inability to fire him in 2013 when it became clear that players had been injected with suspicious substances.
Regardless of what you think of Hird – the player, the coach, the person – the last two years would have been testing, particularly for his family.
Indeed, it was in speaking of his wife and children, an acknowledgment of the pain he may have caused them, that Hird finally succumbed to tears on Tuesday afternoon.
The weight of scrutiny was finally too heavy to support, with the support of the Essendon board no longer unconditional.
Ultimately, the Essendon board failed Hird in allowing him to remain coach for as long as they did.
But Hird had already failed himself in allowing a regime of injections to take place without the proper due diligence required of him, as the off-field leader of the club.
What so many people have failed to comprehend is that, as coach, Hird was negligent at best, when he failed to take all reasonable steps to know what was being injected into his players.
That we still don’t know what was injected into the Essendon players – legal or not – is an indictment on Hird and the entire administration at Essendon.
And while it’s sad that one of the AFL’s all-time greats walks away from the game with less love for it, it’s a predicament that Hird had some hand in.
But the saddest predicament lies with the players, like it always has, many of whom also appear to have become disenchanted with the game.
Hird’s resignation from Essendon on Tuesday overshadowed the biggest TV rights deal the AFL has ever brokered.
It was somewhat symptomatic of his own stature since 2013 where, regardless of what every other club was achieving or failing to achieve, the Bombers’ supplements scandal was omnipresent, threatening to devour the entire competition.
While Hird’s sacking will in no way purge the competition of the scandal, his exit may allow the AFL to take the baby steps it needs to move forward.
As for the players, the prospect of moving forward remains somewhat inhibited amid the ongoing WADA investigation.
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