He’s selfless almost to a fault. As captain I’d sometimes find myself in a game saying to Fletch: ‘We’re not defending well enough! If I was fullback and being left the way you are, with 50 metres of space in front, I’d be yelling and screaming at the other defenders to get back there and help me out!’ But Fletch was too nice a bloke to yell at a teammate. That’s why people love him.
Fletch hasn’t got a bad bone in his body. He will always put others in before himself. He loves his teammates and you’ll never hear him talking behind someone’s back or knocking anyone. He’s just been a brilliant teammate and friend and none of us have ever heard a bad word about him.
One thing that did piss Fletch off was people questioning if he still played on the best forwards. Wayne Carey was behind that and I know it frustrated Fletch and his family to be maligned that way.
We all marvel that he is still going and going and still playing at such a great level, but the fact is Fletch has been at it so long the game has changed around him. Why would you have your best attacking defender simply nullifying full-forwards? It’s just smart coaching to take him off the best and use him as the attacker when no-one can question that Fletch is a weapon in his own right.
CHAPTER 14
RETURN OF THE
MESSIAH
The mobile phones scattered on the tables around the bar went off simultaneously. A cacophony of different beeping noises signified that a text message had arrived for the Essendon playing squad.
We reached for our devices and read a terse, blunt message sent from the football club: ‘Be at the club at 3 pm for an important announcement.’ Eyebrows were raised. Heads nodded and shook. ‘Uh-oh’ was the general reaction. We all knew what it meant – Matthew Knights had been sacked.
It was only 16 hours since the last game of the 2010 season, a 29-point loss to the Western Bulldogs. I’d missed the last three games of the year because of injury, but for better or worse I’d been passed fit to be at the Geebung Polo Club in Hawthorn for end-of-season drinks from high noon on. It had been a year to forget and we were keen to drown our sorrows, but the text message threw a spanner into the works. We all piled into cabs and headed across town to Windy Hill, where we were met by chief executive Ian Robson and president David Evans.
There had been speculation for weeks about the coach’s position and my name had even been thrown out there as part of the conspiracy. According to media reports and scuttlebutt on the street, I was threatening to retire if Knighta continued on as coach. Such rumours were, of course, complete rubbish. I had not been contacted by any board members or the executive about my opinion on the coach’s status. But I, along with everyone else around the club, had clearly seen the signs of trouble. Take it from someone who spent their boyhood and adult life at the football club: when you notice board members, normally not sighted around the joint other than on game day, appearing regularly during the week and talking quietly in huddles, then something is up.
From the start Knighta had been up against it in many ways. Any man who followed Sheeds into the hot seat as Essendon coach was always going to have extra pressure and scrutiny come his way.
You certainly couldn’t fault the man’s work ethic. He’d get to the club at 6 am and sometimes not leave until 9 pm. Such long hours were all focused on putting his own stamp on the place, and while I understood a new coach having to do that, the method Knighta used was wrong. For mine, he was much too bull at a gate in the way he went about things. Alienating the older players was a big mistake. Everyone understood that a new generation had to be brought on, but there were means and ways of doing it as a cohesive unit. Sadly for all, that didn’t happen.
As the decision to sack the coach was being relayed to the players by the Essendon hierarchy, a wave of anxiety suddenly hit me. I was 35. Was a new coach going to want me to stay around? Could I be a part of another rebuild?
There had already been speculation about my former captain James Hird taking over as coach. Since retiring from the game in 2007, Hirdy had become a successful businessman, so while I hadn’t spoken to him directly, the mail I got from people on the inside was that the former champion was unlikely to do it.
Then again, I’d been around long enough in football to know that things can change – and quickly.
*
Post-season festivities had occupied me for the past couple of weeks, and my private bike session behind closed doors was to sweat some of those beers out of my ageing system.
I had to get ready fast for another international rules series trip to Ireland under new Australian coach Mick Malthouse, who’d just won the premiership with Colling-wood, so I’d snuck into the Windy Hill gym and was suffering in silence while clocking up the kilometres on the bike.
Then Tania Hird and her kids walked in. This brought a smile to my face and relief to my aching legs. It meant James Hird was my new coach. Speculation about the Essendon coaching job had gone into overdrive in recent days and now I had confirmation.
Our captain, Jobe Watson, was next to arrive. Before I knew it my training session had been abandoned and I was involved in a photo shoot with the new coach and his family.
When I got home I told Suzie: ‘This is going to be good for me.’ It wasn’t because Hirdy was a mate and that meant he would give me a game. It was quite the opposite.
Hirdy and I had a great relationship. We wouldn’t go around to each other’s place for dinner. Instead, we were friends who didn’t live in each other’s pockets. The crucial thing I knew about my new coach was that he would give me honest feedback about how I was playing and where I was at in my career.
A couple of weeks after the announcement he did just that. ‘I still think you have a year or two of playing at the top level,’ he told me in a quiet moment. That was music to my ears, as was his belief that it was unrealistic at my age to expect to play 22 games in a season. Instead, Hirdy said, he wanted 16 good games from me every year. No more, no less.
After that conversation I was really excited about the road ahead. The coach had shown faith in my abilities and my potential in future seasons where others hadn’t. Now the key thing in my mind was not to let him down. I didn’t want Hirdy, as a coach in his first year, to have the added pressure of having to make a decision about my career.
If that meeting had gone a different way, I’d have retired on the spot. If he’d started our conversation that day by saying ‘So what do you think? Do you want to go on?’ it would have told me that he had doubts. I would have made the decision then and there to hang up my boots and quit for good, because the game is always bigger than the individual.
But no, he believed in me and now I had to repay the faith.
*
From that moment I upped the ante in my training.
During breaks between seasons I wasn’t a compulsive trainer but I liked to do something every day, generally just to break a sweat. If I was over in England visiting Suzie’s family, I’d get out there in the snow or the freezing rain to pound the pavement and keep the cold reality of the long, hard seasons gone from creeping into my bones. We’d been over there a couple of times with the kids and on the last visit I had an interesting experience on my daily jog when I was mistaken for a famous English soccer player, Peter Crouch.
It had been bucketing down so much that the grass was too wet to run on. There was a school near where Suzie’s relatives lived and I jumped the fence to get in because there was a running track I could use. I had a beanie on and Essendon training gear and there were no signs of kids when I started doing some 400s. I had a Sherrin with me and was kicking it up to myself and mucking around with it. Halfway through the session I heard some noise and noticed I now had an audience as it was obviously lunchtime.
I kept doing my sprints and when I got close to them I heard a few comments coming my way.
‘Hey, Crouchy,’ they said.
I didn’t know what they were on about at the start but then it twigged. Peter Crouch was
a tall, skinny striker who’d played for England in two World Cups and was now at Stoke City.
I was out there for almost an hour and by the end the ribbing had gone up a level.
‘Crouchy, you’re a wanker.’
I had a bit of laugh because here I was slogging it out in the rain and hail in a foreign land and I was copping abuse.
At home I had a 4-kilometre run along the river as my regular work-out. I’d battle through it and tick it off as job done, minimum fuss. Now, to make good on my promise to the new coach, I was doing two laps of the river and timing myself on each circuit. I was pushing myself like I hadn’t done in years, and a most unexpected by-product of it was that those dreaded skinfold measurements started to go down.
I even tinkered with my diet, albeit only small things like eating no butter or cheese with a sandwich. It all added up to me fronting up to pre-season in the best shape of my career.
Having played with Hirdy for so long, I knew his philosophy on training would be hard-nosed, and sure enough this was evident in the programs he mapped out for us when we reconvened for the year ahead. As a player, Hirdy had always been one of the hardest workers on the track. He had intensity about every drill he did, and that was how we, his players, were now going to train.
Immediately the defensive side of our game, which had fallen away so steeply during the Knights time, was back on the agenda – full ground defensive pressure was paramount from the start for the new coach.
Having the favourite son back at Windy Hill instantly lifted morale for everyone: fans, staff and players. And it got even better a couple of months later when a familiar face made a surprise visit to training. We were doing a session at Essendon Grammar’s ovals down at Keilor Park when out of the corner of my eye I noticed someone walking on to the ground. His appearance was a bit odd given we were in the middle of the session, but it made perfect sense to see my former captain – and driver – Mark Thompson strolling out in his new guise as Hirdy’s senior assistant. At one stage ‘Bomber’ was even thought to have been the frontrunner to replace Knights but on the same day Hirdy took the job, Bomber walked out on Geelong, where he’d won two flags in the past four years. At the time of his decision he’d cited the need for a break, so no-one knew whether he was going to take up the offer to help out his former club.
Now we were sure.
There were surprised looks on the faces of some of the boys when he walked through the middle of training, but that was typical Bomber. You never knew what you would get from him. His arrival completed Hirdy’s coaching dream team. Our premiership teammate Sean Wellman had come back to the club from Melbourne, as had one of my favourites, Dean Wallis, who’d been working over in Fremantle. Former Adelaide captain Simon Goodwin had also signed on.
The big one had been the acquisition of Brendan ‘Macca’ McCartney, who’d worked under Bomber at Geelong for 11 years. He was regarded as one of the best assistant coaches in the business, with his strength being the development of young players. Getting him to Windy Hill had improved the chances of Bomber following, and that was exactly what had transpired.
The first time I met McCartney I instantly liked him. You know sometimes you meet people and straightaway you have a good feeling about them? I didn’t know much about Macca, but he was honest and down to earth and I knew our club would be better for having him a part of it.
Hirdy also scouted Danny Corcoran, who’d been football manager under Sheeds for many years, as his right-hand man. The mix of old faces and fresh appointments certainly got the whole place buzzing, and the players responded, training harder than we had for a number of years. Personally, I was just glad Windy Hill was back to being a place I wanted to be around.
*
Our new-found enthusiasm was evident in the way we played in the NAB Cup, with the new-look Bombers reaching the Grand Final of the pre-season competition. Even though reigning premier Collingwood had our measure in the final contest, winning by 22 points, there was a good vibe around Windy Hill that kept on leading into the new season.
A 55-point win over the Western Bulldogs at Docklands Stadium was the perfect start to the year before we lost a thriller in Sydney against the Swans, going down by five points. Taking down one of the previous year’s grand finalists, St Kilda, by 52 points in Round 3 confirmed we were on track. The feature of the victory was again our even spread of goal kickers, with Michael Hurley, Jason Winderlich, David Zaharakis and Jobe Watson all kicking three each.
I had a significant win myself the following week, albeit by luck more than good management. It had been a close contest all day against Carlton, and with only a couple of minutes left the Blues led by one point. I’d matched up with a lot of different types of players over my time, but Jeff Garlett was one of the quickest. That’s why I was concerned when his fellow goal sneak Eddie Betts burst from the pack on the wing and lobbed a brilliant pass over the top on to the chest of Garlett, who was 35 metres out from goal. I was a couple of metres away when he took the mark and had an inkling he would want to play on, so I took a punt on how he would do it. And he played right into my hands.
Garlett headed towards centre half-forward, which was the exact angle I had cut in my chase. Before he knew it I was able to drag him down from behind and earn a free kick because he dropped the ball. A lucky break, perhaps, but it was good to show that the old dog still had something in the legs. We rushed the ball down the other end to Zaharakis, who had a quick snap from the boundary line that went through for a behind to level the scores. That’s how it stayed. Once again I found myself walking off not knowing how to feel. It was, incredibly, the fifth draw I’d been involved in over my career.
Better was to come.
The best way to find out about a young player is to see how he copes on the big stage, and there’s no bigger in the home and away season than Anzac Day and Essendon against Collingwood. We’d suspected that Dyson Heppell, our first-round pick in the 2010 national draft, was a talent, but he went up a few levels in everyone’s eyes with his performance against the Pies.
When he first came to the club, Heppell had a no-frills, hardworking country kid mentality, typical for a young bloke hailing from Leongatha down Gippsland way. He’d had issues with groin injuries, though, which was why he’d slipped down to us at No.8 in the draft. Not that it mattered. What stood out at training for us was his ability to have time with the ball – which is a great indicator of a player who is not likely to panic when the ball is in his hands.
In this game it was Heppell who played a key role across halfback in getting us back into the game after the Pies kicked four goals to three points in the first quarter. With Jobe Watson coming to life – he’d taken his career to a new level, winning our past two best and fairest awards – we fought back to within a point late in the third quarter. Unfortunately Collingwood kept finding answers even when we again closed to within a kick midway through the last term; they kicked away to win by 30 points.
I pulled up sore in a variety of ways. With the new expansion team, the Gold Coast Suns, as our next opponent, Hirdy took the opportunity to enact our new plans and told me to have a rest for a week.
*
Seeing Essendon versus Gold Coast as a fixture for the first time gave me a moment to reflect on the evolution of the game during my career. When I’d started playing in 1993, Fitzroy still existed as a club, there were 15 teams in the competition, and a final six played in the finals.
There were also only two field umpires and two players on the interchange bench.
Fitzroy disappeared and merged with the Brisbane Bears to become the Brisbane Lions. Shortly after that, Fremantle and Port Adelaide entered the competition. The Suns burst into life in 2011 and an 18th team, the Greater Western Sydney Giants, joined the fast-growing AFL ranks in 2013. By then the AFL worked with a final eight and had three field umpires, and the interchange had gone up to four and then down to three with one substitute. While I was missing the Suns game, I stil
l had to do a training session at the club in the morning. Normally I’d make sure, even if I wasn’t playing, to get there two hours before the bounce, but Mason was playing in an under-12 game around the corner from Windy Hill and I wanted to pop in for a look before heading to Docklands Stadium.
It turned out to be a close game and Mason was playing particularly well, so I lingered longer than I intended but rang our footy manager to say I was running behind schedule. I figured I wouldn’t be missing much. How wrong I was. In my absence my Essendon teammates kicked the highest score in an opening quarter in AFL history, 15.4 (94), to Gold Coast’s one behind.
I arrived midway through the term and watched the end of the goal feast from the players’ race. It was unbelievable.
At quarter-time I felt for my good mate Dean Solomon, who was now a member of the Suns’ coaching panel. I texted him after the match and he half-jokingly said he hadn’t wanted to walk out there at the first break because he was in charge of the defence!
Essendon ended up winning by 139 points, 31.11 (197) to 8.10 (58). Half-forward flanker Kyle Reimers had a day out with eight goals, while Angus Monfries and Stewart Crameri kicked four each. Two more wins followed, and suddenly Hirdy’s Bombers were flying in third position.
Then it happened. The increased training loads over the summer caught up with us, particularly the younger players. We’d probably done an extra 10 per cent across the board, and the fact was that at some stage it was going to catch up with us. Five successive losses saw us fall out of the eight, and it took the emotion of a match-up against Geelong to get us back on track. This game was much more hyped than usual because of the ‘Bomber and Macca’ factor against their old club. That’s what made it doubly special when we managed to hang on to win by four points.
We were pretty much up and down for the rest of the season and finished in eighth spot, which set up an elimination final showdown with Carlton. On our early-season form we were capable of anything, but did we have the legs to reproduce it?
Fletch Page 15