Mick Malthouse v Brad Hardie
It was the penultimate round of Footscray’s 1986 season. Having entered the year hoping his Footscray side could go at least one better than their preliminary final appearance in 1985, Mick Malthouse was resigning himself to a September holiday, but at least found the energy to drag his star player for failing to pick up his man.
That player was the Dogs’ overnight sensation Brad Hardie – the reigning Brownlow medalist but now running towards Waverley Park’s concrete dug-out in disgust. Incensed with both his benching and the club’s refusal to commit to a new contract, Hardie stepped off the field and promptly removed his long-sleeved guernsey, before swinging it above his head for dramatic effect and finally hurling it away in disgust.
For Hardie this was the final straw – despite his individual brilliance he believed that the cash-strapped club had no intention of keeping him on in 1987 but were still leading supporters to believe that they did.
On the Monday following the warring pair met to call a truce but couldn’t figure out their differences. Fate sealed, Hardie aired his side of the argument via the media. “Footscray knew damn well they were going to let me go,” he would tell Inside Football in 1995, “but they played the melodramatic game where they try to appease the supporters and say, ‘we want him and we’re doing everything possible – it’s the player not us’. The truth never comes out, and in my case that’s why I went public, and continued to go public.
“This is something that’s going to live with me forever,” he said. “Unfortunately, or fortunately, you’re remembered for misdemeanours.”
The affair is only glancingly mentioned in the book, Malthouse: A Football Life, by the coach’s daughter, journalist Christi Malthouse, and then mainly for the fact that the coach’s daughters were taunted at school in the aftermath. “At the end of that year Brad Hardie was sold to the newly formed Brisbane Bears for enough money to save the Bulldogs from financial collapse,” was the final, dispassionate Malthouse take.
Only it couldn’t be the final word. In 2011 Malthouse was asked to pick a team of the best 22 players he’d coached in his storied career and to the mock-surprise of many, Hardie didn’t even make the bench. Hardie quickly labelled his old boss “a tosser”.
“If it is his favourite team, that is fine, I am not going to be in his favourite team. If it his best team, yes I should be in it,” Hardie said on Perth radio. “The bloke is a tosser and there are a lot of people in the industry that think it, but don’t have the balls to say it.”
Not for the first time it was left to Bulldogs legend Doug Hawkins to play devil’s advocate. “He was in the best three or four I played with,” Hawkins said of Hardie, before offering perhaps the most sensible take in the long history of the spat: “No doubt, Mick and Brad aren’t talking and it is sad. They are three-quarters dead. Let’s move on. Life is too short.”
Ron Barassi v Shane Zantuck
Former North Melbourne, South Melbourne and Demons winger-cum-defender Shane Zantuck went by the nickname Zebra, presumably because it was the first word starting with ‘Z’ that popped into the heads of team-mates and also because Zantucko just doesn’t really work. That aside, Zantuck’s name is synonymous with the 1984 incident in which only the intervention of Melbourne team-mate Robbie Flower stopped him going toe-to-toe with their coach, Ronald Dale Barassi.
There are so many versions of this story that it’s getting hard to tell fact from fiction, but the theory that’s come to be accepted is that in his three-quarter-time address that day at Waverley, Barassi claimed that nobody in his Demons side had given enough of himself to be able to look his coach in the eyes, but Zantuck apparently did just that throughout his coach’s sustained spray. Locking horns soon after, the pair nearly came to blows as insults were hurled backward and forward.
Whatever the specifics, Barassi was blasé about it all in the aftermath. “Zantuck’s fiery, I’m fiery. That’s what happened,” is how Channel Seven’s Scot Palmer quoted Barassi in his post-game Punchlines segment that day. Speaking to Inside Football in 1995, Zantuck said it was always going to be a no-win equation. “What have you got to gain, except getting your name in the paper?”
For a decade after the incident Zantuck had remained silent on the issue despite frequent requests to tell his side of the story, but in 1995 he finally opened up. “Even now when I get asked about it I’m a bit reluctant to go into a long story about it because all it was was a couple of swear words thrown at each other,” he said. “Barass and I chatted about it on the Monday, he laughed and I laughed and I think if we had a dollar for every time somebody’s asked us about it we’d be pretty rich. I would never have gone public with it. As far as I’m concerned it was between him and I.”
More recently – in Peter Lalor’s comprehensive biography of Barassi – Zantuck said that the coach’s blooding of younger players in that early-80s period laid the foundations for the club’s finals runs of the late decade, claiming “Barassi never got the accolades for that”.
The pair have remained firm friends and in the end, a far more pointed rebuke from Barassi came decades later when he shared some thoughts on that coaching stint with Age journalist Martin Flanagan. “I have never met so many wimps,” Barassi said of the Zantuck-era side. “When I look at a photo now and, honestly, you could name 50% of the players who were not only not good enough, and that’s OK, it’s not their fault, but geez...they were guys I wouldn’t like to be in the trenches with.”
Ron Barassi v Darryl Sutton and assorted North Melbourne players
Daryl Sutton. Rarely is his full name mentioned, nor his premeriship-winning career discussed, but every football fan knows ‘Daryl’. How could you forget it? That vitriol, that unbridled machismo? That nasally 1970s Australian accent, thicker than Mick Nolan’s mid-section?
“That’s bloody right,” raged Barassi as he addressed his North Melbourne players in Curtis Levy’s footy documentary, War Without Weapons. “Daryl, you are a (unidentifiable expletive). I’ll tell you why. You’ve got the bloody football game beaten. You come down here not concentrating … but oh no, I’m going to protect myself. I don’t mind a bloke going bad Daryl, but to me it’s probably because you’re bloody not switched on properly.”
It was nothing particularly new from Barassi, of course, as John Powers’ masterful profile, The Coach, would soon highlight, so any player who made the transition from Barassi pupil to a coach himself tended to pick up a trick or two.
For Malcolm Blight it manifested most famously in the David “pitiful” Pittman and Austin McCrabb incidents, but also in less publicised, Barrasi-esque disses like his derogatory label for Crows premiership player Kim Koster. “I got a nickname from Blighty,” Koster later told Adelaide Now, “and it was ‘Fumble, Fall Over and Fuck It Up’.” “Whatever you do boys,” Blight once instructed his side, “don’t give it to Koster or Stevens because they’ll just fuck it up.” Cheers coach.
Kevin Sheedy v Derek Kickett
Having been dropped from Essendon’s 1993 grand final side, missed out on a premiership medallion and angrily huffed away from the club for good, mercurial Essendon forward Derek Kickett had a simple message for Kevin Sheedy when confronted by football reporter Damien Barrett: “Personally, I hate his guts.”
And that was that, for Kickett never spoke of the incident again, nor a single word to Sheedy – but he’d made his words count in that sole interview on the matter, dragging a few team-mates into the firing line as well. “I really couldn’t understand why he didn’t drop Tim Watson,” Kickett told Barrett, “because he didn’t perform well in those finals and even through the whole year. He [Sheedy] keeps saying that Michael Symons and David Flood also missed out on the grand final, but they didn’t play every game like I did.”
And Kickett did have a point there, to be fair; that season he’d practically won games off his own boot, kicking eight goals against Footscray a month before the axe was swung. But with eight, two and five disposals in the finals leading up, he’d also hardly made a water-tight case for selection.
“Looking back, I think I did the right thing dropping Derek from the 1993 grand final, but I went about it the wrong way,” Sheedy said in his 1995 autobiography, Sheeds. “I can understand Derek’s bitterness, I have to wear that I guess, but I think he should realise that I did what I thought was best for Essendon at the time. I should have handled it differently, that’s all. But I had to keep the team selection to myself. That’s why I couldn’t let him know in advance, or explain myself. I still enjoy watching videos of him playing football however. Derek is a real artist, a master of spectacular skills.”
Yet there certainly was an element of mild cruelty in the Sheedy’s precise method, even if the primary intention was to throw Carlton coach David Parkin off the scent. Following Essendon’s final training session before the decider, the Bombers coach named a group of three and a group of four players. Only two from each group would play. “In the end,” Sheedy would admit in 2008, “the subterfuge probably wasn’t necessary. We won pretty easily.” But Sheedy’s frequent reconciliation calls to Kickett remain unanswered, a situation that the coach says is unlikely to change. “I doubt there is much more I can do to heal the rift.”
Bernie Quinlan v John McCarthy
Poor Bernie Quinlan never stood a chance, really. He was just far too nice a man for the shark-infested waters of AFL coaching, especially at a club as chaotic as his beloved and doomed Fitzroy in the mid-90s. Flanked by club superstars Paul Roos, Matthew Armstrong and Ross Lyon at his appointment press conference late in 1994, the Superboot soon found himself helming a side without a single one of that talented trio as all immediately departed for more financially secure futures elsewhere. Even for an experienced coach it would have been a tough ask.
But for all the goodwill extended to Quinlan and the almost universal appreciation of the fact that he was good bloke, as early as his first meeting with the players it was abundantly clear that the club legend was out of his depth. “He had no self-confidence, it was like he was embarrassed,” one anonymous player confided in football journalist Andrew Maher. “Some of the things I could tell you about what he did would crack you up,” another Fitzroy insider said. “There were times that he had no idea what to do. It was obvious.”
But by the time Fitzroy’s former goal-kicking hero was sacked in late August he’d suffered the indignity of months-worth of whispers that he’d lost the faith of the players and was fighting a civil war against one of them in particular. The final misery was a 16-goal haul from Tony Lockett in the club’s spirit-sapping 126-point loss to Sydney in round 19. Even that could have been worse; the Swans spearhead might have demolished Fred Fanning’s famous record had he not misjudged coach Barassi’s message to “cool it” following a heated clash with Roys defender Mark Zanotti and taken himself off the ground for the final 12 minutes of the first half.
In the aftermath of his removal Quinlan revealed that “a senior player” – soon revealed to be former North Melbourne forward John McCarthy – had “started to chip away” at his standing among the rest of Fitzroy’s squad. “He had the ear of a couple of younger players,” Quinlan would disappointedly conclude.
But it was what came after that cryptic suggestion that shocked the football world most. Door-stopped by a reporter and fed the news of his coach’s sacking soon after emerging from surgery on an injury, McCarthy revealed beyond doubt that he’d been the chief antagonist to whom Quinlan had been referring, telling the football public in no uncertain terms that few players at the club had any respect for the ousted coach. Seven weeks earlier McCarthy had been in the news for scuffling with team-mate Jason Baldwin in the player’s race following Fitzroy’s narrow loss to Richmond in round 12, further entrenching the embattled club in crisis.
But if, as Quinlan imagined, McCarthy had the ear of younger players, he certainly didn’t speak for the likes of veterans like Doug Hawkins, who staunchly and publicly defended the football legend and brayed at the initial rumours that it was he and not McCarthy who had led a player revolt against the boss. In truth Hawkins had actually gone out of his way to stop or at least wash his hands of the back-stabbing, storming out of a heated player meeting following the Sydney loss. “I’ve always supported Bernie and still do,” Hawkins said. “The reason I went to Fitzroy was Bernie Quinlan and still I have enormous respect for him.” That same week, both were also reeling from the death of their friend Ted Whitten.
In the weeks following, the scorn for McCarthy and his role in his boss’s departure was both swift and strong. Former Adelaide coach Graham Cornes questioned the veteran forward’s own bona fides: “If it was Paul Roos or a young fella like Brad Boyd, who plays with passion and commitment, maybe then you’d have to listen, but when it’s a player who has never played to his full given potential you have to question it.” Cornes had some other ominous words about the club as a whole: “How can anyone contemplate working for an organisation like that?”
And for all their various stresses and indignities, both Quinlan and his successor Mick Nunan were paid a reported $65,000 per year – less than a third of the wage afforded to their cross-town colleagues at the bigger clubs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, McCarthy did find one major ally in Brad Hardie. “I see no reason why John McCarthy shouldn’t have come out and at least tried to justify himself because he’s been the named one,” Hardie said. “He’d have suffered innuendo for the rest of his life so I admire him now because people would have run around talking about him if he didn’t say something. Once you get past the point of no return and you back yourself into a corner, you’ve got to go on with it.”
Quinlan’s axing inarguably damaged the club’s reputation and was among a number of clear indicators that its struggle for survival was close to fait accompli. As Tim Lane would soon put it, the sacking “might just have lost the Lions their strongest remaining card: public sympathy”.
Ken Sheldon v Craig Devonport
More a spur of the moment rev-up than a meaningful feud, Ken Sheldon and Craig Devonport’s boundary-side tête-à-tête during St Kilda’s Queen’s birthday encounter with Collingwood in 1992 must surely go down as one of the most productive one-on-one sprays an AFL coach has ever delivered. What it lacked in long-lasting hostility it made up for with highlight-reel intensity.
The kicker here was not only the fact that Sheldon had marched down the aisle to deliver his message in person, but that he yanked the young Saint by the collar of his guernsey and screamed it straight into his face. Devonport’s sin was to have given away a free kick shortly before half-time.
Whatever was actually said clearly worked, for following both that and a half-time brawl, St Kilda produced some inspired football and it was none other than Devonport himself who shimmied onto his left boot to snap the goal that sealed the game – a one-point victory on an MCG bog-heap. “It certainly fired them up in the belly,” Sheldon later said of the half-time barney. Devonport had kicked a few bags in his then 46-game career, but never again would he capture the public imagination like he did that day pressed up against Sheldon’s contorted face.
