Theatrical until the end, James Hird’s tenure as senior coach of the Essendon football club ended with the controversial club legend “stepping down” from the job. So said club chairman Paul Little, anyway. “I don’t accept that we sacked the coach,” said Little, before explaining a convoluted process that sounded a lot like, well, a sacking.
Hird “moving away from the club to create this fresh start,” was something the board “embraced”, added the administrator, who definitely hadn’t sacked him, remember. To emphasise the sheer cordiality of it all, he said this was merely one of up to three options that had been presented to Hird, though nobody elaborated on the others. Donning the mascot costume? Issuing coaching orders via a Brendon Bolton ventriloquist dummy?
In effectively removing Hird the Bombers have deemed him guilty of the only crime that really matters in football: losing. Mounting statistical evidence suggested that he wasn’t particularly competent in this primary role but given the hellish three years Essendon experienced as an organisation and the chaos under which the senior side has operated, who even really knows?
At the press conference to announce the departure there was a transparent attempt at symbolism by encircling Hird, Little and club CEO Xavier Campbell with the entire Bombers playing list, one that lacked subtlety and by the looks on the faces of most involved, sincerity.
The desperation to present this as something closer to a tearful retirement speech than a coup was all you could expect after the last three years, but the warmth Hird professed to feel for his players wasn’t reciprocated with anything as much as eye contact as both parties somberly departed. Most turned the other way as their coach slid back his chair and left the room.
“I hope that me going enables the club to get some space,” Hird had said at one point. This was all about the players and their welfare, which their outgoing coach showed by cracking a joke that had the net effect of labeling midfielder David Zaharakis “soft”. Thanks boss.
All of this comes after a 112-point home loss to Adelaide at the weekend, the club’s fifth in a row, to go with this season’s 110-point loss to lowly St Kilda and other assorted carnage. Hird barely kept his job last summer and five wins from 19 games this year evidently didn’t cut it either. Assistant Matthew Egan will fill the senior coaching role until the end of the 2015 campaign.
Nobody could call this a rash decision. The horse hadn’t so much as bolted as disappeared beyond the horizon, taken some French lessons, returned and then bolted again. Significant numbers of Essendon supporters will inevitably still view Hird as a towering figure at the club and continue to cherish him, but the entire organisation is now a diminished force for his ill-fated return in 2011.
At the very least this rules a symbolic line under three years of pain for the club, even if the World Anti-Doping Agency’s decision to appeal the verdict exonerating 34 past and present Essendon players lingers like a dark cloud, to be heard in November. Those fans can also rest assured that the timing of this call means Carlton don’t get an exclusive run at the best-credentialed coaches currently seeking a senior position. In pure football terms and with regards to the players any prospective coach would have at his disposal, the Bombers job might actually hold more appeal.
One of the real problems with football clubs when they’re forced to make business decisions like this is that in many senses they’re not really businesses. They act like businesses, talk like them and take your money like them but they’re not. A real business boasting the corporate expertise of Essendon would have sacked Hird long ago.
Because if you sack a figure like Hird you disrupt the fragile equilibrium of fandom that even captains of industry share with rank and file fans. You tear up the same keepsakes they do, toss away the scarf from the same club store and empty the premiership DVDs into the same dumpster. It’s not surprising to note the vitriol and contempt rival fans now reserve for Essendon because it’s couched in a genuine fear; it could just have easily been my club. The thin veneer of professionalism and corporate governance that this whole story peeled back should please nobody.
But football clubs can’t live on the edge anymore. Forget about redemption, Essendon now needs reinvigoration, renewal and strict adherence to some pretty basic principles. Those should be a little better expressed than in Hird’s departure, which was padded out absurdly as he jabbered on about “adversity” and the need to “move forward in the same direction”. “In life you will not always win,” he added like some random generator of Hallmark sentiments had become lodged in his mouth. Essendon need to nip that sort of nonsense in the bud. All clubs do.
Which isn’t to say that everything about today grated. Who would employ Hird now, he was asked close to the end. “Anyone who needs a belligerent personality who doesn’t back down,” shot back the vanquished coach. Amid the layers of artifice and corporate double-speak, here was at least one shiny nugget of honest-to-god truth.
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