The man with the golden mane, who floated through packs as if he was on a different plane to everyone else on the football field. For that is how he is seen in the eyes of legions of Essendon fans, as their messiah. A modern day Dick Reynolds, a Brownlow medallist who captained Essendon a premiership with the hope of adding another accolade as coach. It’s how he secured the lucrative job in the first place. By subtly ousting Matthew Knights, and then effectively given every chance to succeed.
The club reunited Hird with his 1993 premiership captain Mark Thompson as senior assistant, as well as former Essendon football operations manager Danny Corcoran, who had presided over the Dons during Hird’s early playing days.
While blessed with incredible leadership qualities, Hird had next to no experience as a coach, and that inexperience has shone through in the long-running soap opera known as the Essendon supplements saga.
It has become clear that Hird’s naivety and drive to be at the helm of the best club in the land led him to be at the forefront of a supplements program which has been found to be reckless and void of necessary duties of care.
He, along with other senior figures in the club, failed to contact sports scientist Stephen Dank’s previous employers: if they had, they would soon realise that he had been terminated from his previous position at Cronulla, a club which itself is in the middle of an ASADA investigation.
The records of what the players took have mysteriously disappeared.
The players were not aware of what they were taking, or whether what they were taking was legal.
The players were also subject to an inordinate amount of injections.
If you take former strength and conditioning coach Dean Robinson’s word, James Hird had an autocratic control over the football club, one that has rarely been seen in AFL clubs.
On February 5, the day the club ‘self-reported’ its findings, Hird took full responsibility as the senior coach, and for the ensuing six and a half months did everything but assume responsibility.
Imagine, if you will, that the former Richmond skipper was still at the helm in February, and he was seated beside David Evans and Ian Robson. It is quite likely that, as Knights admitted full responsibility, that he had simultaneously lost his job. But not Hird.
He shirked the responsibility as journalists such as Caroline Wilson and Patrick Smith closed in on him, despite outcry from Bombers fans who failed to understand the intricacies of media law and began calling for defamation suits.
The Ziggy report commissioned by Essendon painted a disturbing picture of what it described as:
“The rapid diversification into exotic supplements, sharp increase in frequency of injections, the shift to treatment offsite in alternative medicine clinics, emergence of unfamiliar suppliers, marginalization of traditional medical staff etc combine to create a disturbing picture of a pharmacologically experimental environment never adequately controlled or challenged or documented within the Club in the period under review.”
When it came to pass that Hird’s role in the program was larger than first envisaged, Hird continued to fight, and while he did deal with the constant media attention quite admirably, his assertion that his fate was a ‘trial by media’ was somewhat absurd, and his swift backflip in face of the issues is evidence of that.
Hird, by all intents and purposes, is not a malicious human being. He did not intentionally set out to harm the players he supposedly cares for. But his actions over the 2011-2012 seasons stem from his naivety since coming into the coaching role.
An interesting binary to draw is the correlation between Hird and Voss, who as players shared the Brownlow Medal in 1996, and as coaches lost their jobs weeks apart.
They both came to their jobs in similar circumstances, with Voss knocking back an impressive deal as senior assistant at West Coast to assume the reins at his former side, with no senior coaching experience.
The two champions of the game both expressed an attribute that was never seen by either on the football field: naivety. They were incredibly naive in the way they assumed the roles, and their subsequent actions that will ultimately besmirch their mark on the game.
For Voss, it was the shameless hunting for high profile players such as Brendan Fevola, as he grossly misinterpreted the strength of the club’s list from the year before, scraping past a Carlton side containing Fevola in a 2009 Elimination Final.
As an aside, only two players Voss recruited from other clubs that pre-season still remain at the club, while alienating big names such as premiership player Daniel Bradshaw and club champion Michael Rischitelli.
Voss was reckless and naive, firstly in his estimation of the list and then in his management of the list.
Leigh Matthews once said coaching was an addiction, and it took him a good few years to kick the habit. How many naive drug addicts have you seen wandering the streets in the early hours. These people typify what Hird and Voss were to the coaching caper. Naivety can be the curse that leads you to an early coaching grave. Voss found that to be the case, and Hird is in the midst of a similar feeling.
He was naive coming into the job, and his naivety has now cost Essendon its 2013 season.
Naivety, thy name is James Hird.