Fletch

by Dustin Fletcher

  We’d been one point away from another Grand Final. I was stunned as I watched the Sydney players converge on Lockett, with the men in red and white forcing the big man to the ground and piling on top of their matchwinner. All I could do was stare at the scoreboard: Sydney 10.10 (70) to Essendon 10.9 (69).

  As the crowd rushed the field, we had to pick our way through a sea of red and white supporters to get to the change rooms. Something happened there that I’d never experienced before: Sheeds went completely batshit berserk. He started by smashing the door and then the drinks container was kicked over with water flying everywhere. No-one was allowed to move or speak. Then he started screaming at individuals. It went on and on and on.

  It was one of the few times in his whole career that Kevin Sheedy completely lost it. We were left in no doubt about the opportunity we’d just let slip. It would haunt all of us for many years to come.

  *

  The dawn of professionalism in football spelt the end of my promising university career.

  That might be stretching it, but after passing my VCE I’d completed the traineeship at the club and then started a sports and recreation course at Victoria University. I got through two years of the three-year course before the demands of training meant I had to put away my pens and notebooks.

  While I’d been a part-time university student and footballer I’d remained living at home, but at the age of 22 it was time to spread my wings. Through a mutual friend I’d met an English girl, Suzie Bourne. She was a few years older than me and we’d started off very slow. Most weekends we seemed to cross paths and for a long time it wasn’t a boyfriend/girlfriend thing. She wasn’t into footy and didn’t really know much about it. We found ourselves enjoying each other’s company and eventually the attraction became stronger.

  Suzie lived in St Kilda, which was a fair hike from Greenvale; we decided after a couple of years together to take the next step, and moved into a unit together in Ascot Vale.

  Suzie was originally from Burnley, just outside Manchester, but had lived in a number of different places, including Africa, as her family followed her father’s work as a stonemason. Her uncle, Peter Bourne, was a soccer player who came over and played with South Melbourne Hellas, and it was his recommendation that eventually brought the family to Australia.

  I was happy with his work.

  *

  When I started back in ’93, I never thought that a few years down the track I would be able to say my job was playing footy.

  Back then everyone had full-time jobs and footy just fitted in around them. Training began at 6 pm and was only a few days a week, and there wasn’t really anything that could be classed as a recovery session. If you played on a Friday night or on Saturday, you didn’t do anything until the Monday night and that would most likely amount to just a jog around the oval at Windy Hill.

  The new dawn had two sessions a day, often including an early morning one. After that, those who still had jobs could attend them and then come back later in the afternoon for another hit-out. AFL was edging closer and closer to a world of full-time footballers, with more clubs starting to employ coaches and fitness staff.

  None of this helped us in 1997, with the fallout from the previous year’s preliminary final loss hovering over us like a dark cloud. After winning our opening three games, it all fell apart as injuries seemed to pile up one after the other. We lost six in a row through the middle of the season and fell from flag contention. In the end our year was summed up in the Round 15 preliminary final rematch at the SCG. The result? Sydney won by a point.

  We finished the season 14th, which sounds worse than it was given we were only a game and a half away from eighth position. The silver lining to such a disappointing season was that there was a new wave of exciting talent coming through the ranks.

  Lloydy won the goal-kicking, while Camperdown boy Scott Lucas, who had arrived at the same time as Lloyd, was making his mark at centre half-forward. Hard nut Jason Johnson got a taste for big-time footy, with the classy Blake Caracella, Chris Heffernan and Justin Blumfield also making the jump.

  Our disappointing season after the highs of the previous years had dyed-in-the-wool Essendon natives restless about Sheeds, who had been at the helm as coach since 1981. I found myself in an awkward position as Dad was on the board. At one stage he actually voted for Sheeds to be sacked; thankfully this didn’t occur. Dad was a very honest character, so when the vote was held for Sheeds to get a contract extension he went straight up to Kevin and told him how he’d been against it originally but as Kevin was now staying he would be 100 per cent behind him. The thing I loved about my coach was that he never once brought this up with me. Sheeds was a class act and gained my ultimate respect for that.

  Sheeds remained, but there was certainly a different feel about the place the following year, with the head coach now surrounded by quality assistants in the form of club legend Terry Daniher, Robert Shaw and my recently retired former teammate Mark Harvey.

  Another significant appointment was athletics guru John Quinn, who left us in no doubt about his plans for the playing group. ‘You’re not going to like me, but I’m here to make you a better footy side,’ Quinn told us in his first address. And he was right: there would be plenty of times in the coming years when I loathed him.

  Quinny created what he liked to call ‘The Coffee Club’ but which was known by another, less glamorous name throughout the Essendon playing group: ‘The Fat Club’. It all had to do with your skinfolds. Despite my tall and skinny frame, I had always had problems with my skinfold reading. Most players would sit in the mid-40s, some a lot lower. Alas, I floated around 80–85 and that meant I was a permanent Fat Club fixture for extra training. Under Quinny’s reign, you had to get to a certain level of skinfolds to get out of Fat Club – and it was virtually impossible.

  Over the pre-season we would train as a group at Essendon Grammar, then the Fat Club members would get in our cars and drive down the road to the Maribyrnong River. Quinny would meet us there and hand us each a backpack with a few 10-kilo weights inside. ‘Okay boys – walk,’ he said.

  The route would take us an hour and often the bags would rip open and spill their contents so you’d have to walk up hills carrying the weights with the sun burning and sweat pouring off. After completing the walk, we’d hop in our cars and drive back to the club for the weights sessions that the rest of the team had already completed.

  We were tested every two or three weeks, but there were times when I would be in the extra training group for the whole year. Joining me as Fat Club regulars were Joe Misiti, Alessio and Hardwick, while Paul Barnard, Gary Moorcroft, Dean Rioli and Blumfield claimed temporary membership with occasional stints. A couple of times we tried to cheat the system by getting a teammate to do the pinch test and write down the results. I was always pretty high on the stomach folds but instead of a flabby 18 I would say that I was a sleek 15.2. It wasn’t exactly a foolproof system, and I was unceremoniously busted when a member of the fitness staff did my measurements and noticed alarming discrepancies in the results. Sometimes the fibs bought us a couple of weeks grace, but in the end Quinny always got his man.

  For all my angst at the extra sessions, Quinn’s influence was significant over the summer of 1998. Our much-improved fitness base saw us come home strongly over the second half of the season, outlasting opposition teams to win six of our last eight games and fall into eighth place.

  The finals system in ’98 meant eighth played first. For us, that meant a match-up with North Melbourne, who two years earlier had defeated Sydney in the Grand Final we felt we should have played. Not for the first time Wayne Carey had got his team home, kicking 5.6 in the 22-point victory.

  While I’d played on all the great forwards throughout the 1990s, I hadn’t played on Carey much at all – probably because Sheeds liked to keep me deep, where the Roos had some more than handy goal-kickers, including John Longmire and Corey McKernan.

  Losing a final was
never easy to take, but there was a sense that something was building again at Windy Hill. Another big summer under Quinn’s direction confirmed that, and there was a bit of the ’93 team about what was happening. The hard edge that had been so important then was back. There was once again a good mix of personalities in the group and it actually felt like a more complete unit than the premiership team from six years earlier.

  The backline in particular had clicked. We’d found a good hard nut in the back pocket in promoted rookie Mark Johnson, while Hardwick, who’d won the best and fairest in 1998, had a great sense of humour off the field but once he crossed the white line was one of the most ruthless men in the competition. Dean Solomon liked to relax and have a drink with the best of them but again, on the field he was seriously tough. Wally was still kicking around, too, and still helping me out with the square-ups. Centre half-back Sean Wellman, who came from Adelaide, was quieter but went about his footy the right way. Further up the ground there were more hard heads, like centreman Jason Johnson, swingman Barnard and small forward Moorcroft.

  Normally a premiership-contending team has one or two blokes who would run through a brick wall; we had up to six, which, as the season wore on, proved intimidating to other teams.

  However, we struck a couple of early hurdles in the new season to test our new confidence. James Hird suffered a serious foot injury in Round 2 that not only ended his season but threatened his long-term playing career. It was a savage blow for a player I had watched at close range blossom into one of the very best going around.

  *

  I remember one of the first times I saw Hird play was in 1992. I went down to the rooms with Dad, and Hirdy was getting wheeled out because he had punctured a lung.

  He had come down from Canberra and was living just across the road from Windy Hill. The first thing that struck me when I got to the club was how hard he worked. If you told Hirdy to do something, he would be up the front every time. If there was a pool session to be done, he’d go and smash it out himself. Usually, in our aquatic sessions, if it was a 1.4-kilometre or 1.2-kilometre swim, most of us would get to around 1 kilometre then say that was good enough. Not James Hird: he would do it all, and then some.

  I had to play on Hirdy in practice games in the early days. Even then he had this amazing engine that allowed him to get up the ground and chase the ball hard. He was never the best kick in the world, but his work rate was unrivalled and he had an uncanny ability, if there was a goal to be kicked when you most needed it, to pop up and do it in style with a freakish snap.

  In his first seven years Hird had already amassed an incredible record that included the 1996 Brownlow Medal, three consecutive W.S. Crichton Medals as Essendon’s best and fairest player, two All-Australian selections and the 1993 premiership medal.

  Having replaced Gary O’Donnell as captain in 1998, Hird’s absence as gun player and leader just two games into the new season was a savage blow. By Round 10 we’d also lost our centre half-forward, Lucas, to a long-term injury, but despite all of this something in the playing group clicked. We won 13 of our last 14 games to finish the 1999 season on top of the ladder, a game clear of the Kangaroos.

  I’d missed three weeks along the way after being suspended for kneeing Western Bulldogs ruckman Luke Darcy. It had been an act of frustration. We’d contested a boundary throw-in and Darcy swung his arm around and smacked me right in the mouth. I was stunned for a few seconds, then less than pleased. Shortly afterward the Dogs ruckman slid in for a ball and I slid in after him on my knees. Unfortunately I was a tad overzealous and collected him in the head. It was an ugly attempt, and straightaway I wanted to take it back. The judiciary didn’t like it either, and I copped my fair whack.

  That had been mid-season, so I was well and truly back in the swing of things by the time finals came around. Once again we had a date with Sydney, although this time it was at the MCG.

  This time we made sure there was going to be no room for error. After we kicked eight goals to one in the opening quarter, that qualifying final was effectively over. By the end of the game we had surged away to a stunning 69-point win. Essendon was rightly the talk of the town and our confidence was sky-high.

  Maybe too high.

  Our preliminary final opponent was Carlton, who had finished the home and away season in sixth but been pumped the previous week by 73 points by Brisbane in their qualifying final. Carlton had then bounced back to beat West Coast. In our two meetings with the Blues throughout the season we’d won comfortably – by 39 points in Round 1 and 76 points in Round 16. That’s why we didn’t see what happened in the first half of the preliminary final coming.

  Carlton kicked six goals to three in the opening quarter and then, while we managed a paltry five behinds in the second term, extended their lead to 24 points at the main break. Suddenly we were under serious pressure – foreign territory for a Bombers team that had breezed through most of the season.

  Sheeds made some telling moves. He sent Heffernan to tag Carlton’s Scott Camporeale on the wing, where he had been killing us all game. This released Bewick into the middle to provide some spark in partnership with Michael Long, and it paid instant dividends when Carlton veteran Craig Bradley handed us the opening goal of the third quarter with a mistake kicking in that gifted Longy a goal at the two-minute mark.

  It was the kickstart we needed, and over the next 15 minutes we totally dominated the game. The Blues hardly touched the ball and I found out later we’d gone inside 50 metres 11 times during that period and kicked six goals while Carlton only went in once. We could have been further ahead, but I blew a gettable shot after sneaking forward. Lloydy and Rioli (who’d already kicked two goals for the term) also muffed easy chances at goal. Carlton got a couple of majors late to reduce our lead to 11 points at three-quarter time. It had been an unbelievable quarter of football but in truth it was only the entree. The main course was about to be even wilder.

  Alessio kicked the opening goal to extend our lead, but then Carlton star Anthony Koutoufides took over, moving into the middle of the ground and making himself instrumental in the Blues kicking the next four goals of the game. I found my anxiety from the first half flooding back until, thankfully, Lloydy broke from the pack again and kicked two in a row to take his tally to five goals for the afternoon. With six minutes left, we led by four points.

  Then Aaron Hamill marked strongly to kick his third goal and put Carlton back in front. Two minutes later the Blues’ other key forward, Lance Whitnall, marked in front of Barnard on the half-forward flank. He was outside the 50-metre arc and clearly thought he was too far out to goal so kept looking to pass it off.

  When we covered all leads it looked like Whitnall was going to lob it to the goal square and hope for one of his teammates to take a big mark. Instead, he made perfect contact with a drop punt that kept going and going and going, then swung back at the end for an incredible goal.

  With four minutes left, Essendon were eight points down. Enter Mark Johnson. Our first-year player showed nerves of steel, marking strongly 45 metres out and going back to slot just his second goal for the season to get us within two with just over two minutes remaining. Our next foray forward ended with Mark Mercuri getting a quick dribble-snap out of the pack that barely slipped the wrong side of the post for a behind. One minute to go, one point the difference.

  Surely we couldn’t lose another preliminary final by a point? Surely?!

  Bradley kicked the ball in but it was marked by Barry Young and he sent it straight back into our forward line. Players converged from everywhere. Carlton’s Dean Rice managed a quick clearing kick but it landed in the arms of Wally, who was standing by himself in the middle of the ground.

  I was only 5 metres away and I ran towards him, thinking I might be a chance to get a handball, unleash a bomb from 60 metres and, at the very least, snare a behind to level the scores. Wally had a similar idea – not the handball but the long kick. He played on straightaway but was confronte
d by Carlton midfielder Fraser Brown. If he got around Brown, he was free to launch.

  He didn’t. Brown stuck an amazing tackle to dislodge the ball, which was picked up by Carlton’s Justin Murphy. He quickly kicked it forward, and in the blink of an eye our shot at another premiership was gone. As I sprinted back to defend, I was praying there was still time on the clock, but there wasn’t.

  It was difficult to comprehend. We had been the dominant team in the competition and had handled Carlton with ease previously. We’d played an incredible third quarter in this game, kicking 7.7, but those missed opportunities were now going to haunt us forever.

  Koutoufides’ last quarter and Brown’s tackle were the talking points afterwards. Wally was going to cop it for taking him on, but I would have done exactly the same thing. There wasn’t the anger of the 1996 preliminary final loss; it was more disbelief than anything. Hirdy decided the pain wasn’t over. He approached Sheeds to suggest the whole team attend the Grand Final between Carlton and North Melbourne to ram home what we were missing out on. I wasn’t keen, but Sheeds and Hirdy insisted we would learn something from it.

  We met across the road from the MCG at the famous Italian restaurant Geppetto’s at 12 pm for lunch, then walked through the car park to the stadium with Carlton fans giving it to us all the way. There was no private box this time. We were out with the punters, sitting up on Level 3. It was tough watching the game as I couldn’t help but think what we would have done if we’d been out there. As it was, North Melbourne got control early and were never really threatened, running away with the game to win by 35 points.

  We left five minutes before the end and headed back to the restaurant. As dinner was being served Sheeds spoke while assistant coach Shaw handed out a document that analysed our main challengers next year, their key players and how we would beat them. The message was clear that we had to learn from what had happened seven days earlier. It was time to begin planning our redemption.