Bombers fans deserve the truth
COMMENT: Patrick Smith | August 01, 2007
ESSENDON's problems grow worse by the day. The sacking of Kevin Sheedy highlighted both the arrogance of the club and its ineptitude.
The legendary coach was sacked without any public explanation and so trouble bubbles and boils all about the once-revered club.
Papers and talkback radio monitor groups of supporters and members who have initiated, if not challenges to the club board then, at the very least, embarrassing demands. Names are being gathered, petitions grow.
There has been no transparency. The club chairman Ray Horsburgh lied after a board meeting last week. He was asked whether Sheedy's position had been discussed at the meeting on the Monday. He said categorically no and flicked through documents to show that Sheedy's future was not even on the agenda. If anyone wanted to reprise clowns Zig and Zag, we offer them Zag.
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That is not correct. The right moment for Sheedy to step down would arrive inevitably but picking that instant and handling it with sophistication and care had to be identified and carried out.
Essendon has failed miserably, as have the commentators who failed to comprehend that.
Sheedy's sacking has been an execution and club chief executive Peter Jackson has appeared too eager to don the black cap. Jackson's biggest failing in this saga has been his failure to explain in detail why Sheedy was moved on.
It might not have been easy, it might have been personal and it might have been hurtful but the supporters needed to know. By deliberately hiding the reasons from the Windy Hill faithful, Jackson and the board have turned this moment of great significance in football history into a shameful mockery of good management. They should have spent more time considering their future than that of Sheedy.
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Bombers' board must remove lost soul
COMMENT: Patrick Smith | August 07, 2007
THIS is so sad. For Essendon. For Kevin Sheedy. For the players and the supporters.
For football and sport in general. Sheedy should leave the club immediately. What should have ended with a hallelujah dies with an amen.
Chief executive Peter Jackson meant well and never wanted Sheedy to finish off such a lost soul but the coach's exit from the club he coached for 27 years has come to a shabby, miserable end. Not wanted at Essendon, maybe not wanted anywhere.
The board must take responsibility for this limp end to the tenure of Essendon's most famous man. It acted in haste and without enough thought when it voted to sack him.
Nothing any board member has said has sounded transparent or honest after the chairman, Ray Horsbrough, lied about Sheedy's demise immediately after the meeting on July 23. Whether Sheedy was the right man to coach Essendon next season and beyond is not the issue. That always remains a matter for the board.
The club's problems are these: It failed to tell the supporters and sponsors, who have invested heavily and eagerly both with money and emotion into Essendon because of Sheedy, why the coach was being replaced. The chairman was not present at the media conference that killed off the coach.
Unforgiveable. And, having sacked Sheedy, the club did not have a worthy, workable plan to see him leave with dignity.
The board should be challenged and rolled on these two issues. The 11 directors, who collectively have contributed 0.001 per cent of what Sheedy has to the club, the Bomber brand and the sport, had a responsibility to manage Sheedy out in the appropriate manner.
They have fumbled and bumbled from the moment they were panicked into sacking Sheedy because they feared Michael Voss might end up filling one of the three vacancies that became available almost overnight.
Suddenly there is a stench about Essendon. A month ago it appeared a slick, wealthy and well-managed club. Now we see it as ham-fisted as the worst administrations that have dogged football for more than 100 years.
Horsbrough, who sensitively told us on Sunday night that he had sacked millions of workers, forcing them to pack their bags and then sent them home, said Sheedy had not been sacked just his contract would not be renewed. Which is like Horsbrough saying he did not lie the night Sheedy was sacked, rather he just did not tell the truth.
The footage of the chairman offering up the agenda to prove that the club had not moved on Sheedy will remain some of the most infamous in sport.
If Horsbrough cares about Sheedy he will ask him to step down immediately. And he will hand over to the AFL the responsibility of sending Sheedy off in style. Essendon cannot be trusted to do it with any grace or class. Horsbrough might just ask him to clean out his desk, capture it on video and flog it at the Bombers Shop.
The chairman is an interesting study. He was a most successful businessman, highly regarded and well liked. But like so many corporates who take on roles within football clubs, the exposure to a rabid media and a locker room of football stars somehow blows their mind. They do and say things that would not have entered their heads back in the business world.
What has happened at Windy Hill is so sad. It has not been brought about by malicious thinking but jangled nerves. If Essendon does not remove Sheedy immediately he will see out his mighty career as a man not wanted by his club or his players. Now rounds 20 and 21 against Carlton and Richmond seem colossal opponents.
Sheedy deserved so much more. And so did Essendon.
The reason Sheeds had to go
By Patrick Smith
August 14, 2007
KEVIN Sheedy cut a sad sight as he walked around the Subiaco boundary line on Sunday night.
His team had been walloped and his opposition coach Mark Harvey got the better of him in the box. A trouncing all round.
The Fremantle crowd had been generous before the game, giving him a standing ovation as he appeared on the oval. The supporters did so again as he made his way to the sheds after the game.
Sheedy will be back to Subiaco Oval one more time as Essendon coach when the Bombers play West Coast in the final round.
These final handful of matches should have been a celebration of one of the great men in Australian sport. They aren't. We watch as mourners.
This is to the eternal shame of the Essendon board that panicked when Denis Pagan was axed and the chances of getting first dibs on Michael Voss diminished.
So Essendon sacked him, the president Ray Horsburgh lying to the media that the board had even discussed his position.
Because the board acted so secretly and so hastily it had neither a succession plan to work on, nor any sense of a send-off for the club's greatest contributor.
Whether Sheedy coached on in 2008 was the board's business. The issue was the manner in which it was done. It was imperative that Sheedy leave with style and respect, for his is a great legacy. That did not happen. The president didn't even attend the news conference announcing Sheedy's termination.
Worse, the thousands of members, supporters and sponsors were not told why he was being moved on. They deserved to know for they had invested much in money and emotion but the board will not publicly or privately articulate why Sheedy is no longer the right coach for 2008 and beyond. Just be told that he isn't.
Well, we can now tell you why he was boned. And the principal reason is that Kevin Sheedy in his first season at Essendon in 1981 is the same Kevin Sheedy of 2007.
While he has learnt more, kept up with the newest trends, visited leading clubs overseas and remains innovative, as witnessed with his early season game plan, he is the same quirky, eccentric Sheedy who began at Essendon 27 years ago.
Sheedy does things his way, which is invariably inspired by vibes, his mojo and gut feelings. He is a one-man operation which was fine when every team was exactly that. A senior coach surrounded by witches' hats and nothing else.
When asked why he thought he was sacked, Sheedy told us: "Because I have been there 27 years."
That is, of course, no reason to dismiss anyone but it shows how bewildered and unprepared Sheedy was for last month's decision not to renew his contract.
So Sheedy at his core is the same man who took his first training session for Essendon in the pre-season of 1981. The environment about him in football has changed wildly. Sheedy might not have embraced utterly the new science of football but he has not ignored it. He looks and listens.
The fitness boffins report to him about satellite tracking, heart monitors, blood results, lactic acid levels and well-being charts.
Assistants plot opposition clubs, how they set up, how and when they switch play, how often they interchange. But all this information will not necessarily define his decision.
A gut feeling might. A hunch. Sheedy always did it his way. If the Essendon board was to tell us success in 2008 and beyond must be more precisely charted you could hardly quibble.
Often Sheedy sees something in a player that others might not determine with a telescope. They are given chances that other players might not. He has done that all his career.
There are other things that when Essendon is winning are treated as loveable idiosyncrasies but when losing might be interpreted as unprofessional.
An afternoon at a TAB when Essendon's secondary team was playing, for example. Sheedy could always catch up with it on tape but young players notice he is missing. It is a rare happening but it is noted.
When Essendon was winning he could have ridden Bel Esprit to training and no one would have blinked an eyelid.
A survey of players did not help him. There was strong indication that players felt communication was a problem. Because Sheedy has such a heavy schedule, time is limited to get his ear. When he did speak to a player over a coffee and a bun the young footballer did not always gain much from it. At times Sheedy can speak in tongues.
It is common knowledge Sheedy has never had the full support of his board. Only strong chairmen have kept him at the club during regular boardroom-attempted coups. But, since taking Essendon to a premiership in 2000 and a grand final in 2001, everybody has become less forgiving.
At the end of the 2001 season Sheedy had coached Essendon to victory 66 per cent of the time the Bombers took to the field. That's an amazing 325 wins from 497 games. Between 2002 and 2006, he coached Essendon to 51 wins in 116 games. That's a winning rate of 44 per cent. A prodigious drop.
This year he had Essendon in the eight but the season must be discounted for the sacking, the sight of him going to interviews with Melbourne officials and the offers of jobs at Fremantle might have broken the spirit of everyone at the club.
If Essendon had appointed a new coach in 2002 and the club finished sixth, sixth, 13th and 15th and then 13th with three games to go in 2007 would the club reappoint him for next year? Most unlikely.
It is not as though he did not have good players from 2001. Eight players from the grand final team remain on his list. He has some young players now who should develop into solid warriors for the club.
But it appears the club has cut Sheedy no slack in rebuilding a team. If he could not be successful with the players he brought to the club then he would be judged on that. And so he has gone. After 27 years someone else must take Essendon back to the top. According to the board's timetable it must be done by 2011.
Sheedy has not just shaped Australian sport but the country's culture, too. To sack him was the board's prerogative.
To farewell the great man with dignity was its duty. Seeing Sheedy walk the boundary line on Sunday night was to know how hopelessly the board has failed.
Bombers saving face over Sheedy
Patrick Smith | August 17, 2007
ESSENDON is an awful mess. The plunge from respected club to jibbering idiot was always going to happen the moment the club panicked when Carlton sacked Denis Pagan.
Rather than calmly go about its business maturely and with sophistication, Essendon voted to get rid of Kevin Sheedy.
That's when the club lost control of the most important mission with which it was charged. And that was to ensure an appropriate and proud exit for a man who had coached the club for 27 years, delivered the club four premierships and all but single-handedly built it into one of the most powerful sporting clubs in Australia.
To defend the club's actions, president Ray Horsburgh has publicly claimed that Sheedy is bitter and in danger of wrecking his own good name. He claims Sheedy, having grieved the loss of his position, is now lashing out at what he perceives the unfairness of his fate. Horsburgh also rehashed a player survey which showed the communication skills of the coach were being questioned. This was a fact published in The Australian two days earlier. The Bombers are about to eat their own.
Essendon's board had to ensure Sheedy moved on seamlessly. It was more important that Sheedy be let go with dignity and respect than the club be in first place to interview a posse of untried coaches. Horsburgh has called Sheedy an icon of the club. Then he should have been treated that way. The club will find another coach easily enough. They are lined up outside the door at Windy Hill. But the Bombers will never find another Sheedy. He is a one-off.
The board has made one blunder after another. The first was the decision by Horsburgh to lie to the media after the Monday board meeting that decided not to renew Sheedy's contract for 2008. Horsburgh said the club had not even discussed Sheedy. It had done more than that. It had sacked him.
The club then called a news conference to announce the decision but Horsburgh did not attend. The president was not available for the news conference that would end the 27-year career of the club's greatest figure. It was a slight on Sheedy and an obvious sign the club was in a panic.
Horsburgh would later say he could not make the news conference because he was at another business meeting. If that was the case, the conference should have been delayed.
It was essential the club be represented by Horsburgh.
At the news conference, the club would not articulate why Sheedy's career was over at Windy Hill. Supporters and sponsors who had invested emotion and money had to wait until Tuesday this week to read in The Australian why Sheedy would not coach the club again.
The club moved on Sheedy when it did because Carlton had sacked Pagan and the Bombers board feared the Blues might grab Michael Voss. Horsburgh has since said that he did not think Voss would have been appointed coach of Essendon. It became a moot point a week later when Voss said he would not make himself available for a coaching role in 2008.
When the board acted on Sheedy it had to know it would derail the season. Nonetheless, 2007 was sacrificed in the frenzy to sack Sheedy. A week later Essendon, which had won just three matches in 2006, was in the top eight. On radio yesterday Horsburgh said the Essendon list was not good enough to finish higher than seventh. So it would appear Sheedy was getting the maximum out of his players yet he was still sacked.
The club has indicated that Geelong's Mark Thompson and Port Adelaide's Mark Williams are at the top of its list to find Sheedy's successor. The club has also said it would talk to neither coach until the finals campaigns of both Geelong and Port were over. That could be the grand final at the end of September.
So the club sacked Sheedy when it did so that it could talk to Voss, a man it apparently did not want to appoint as coach and nearly two months before it could meet the two men it regarded as the best replacements for Sheedy. That is so absurd it is embarrassing.
It would appear from calls board members are making to disgruntled supporters and sponsors that the directors are split over the manner in which the club must push ahead. Williams and Thompson are being touted as likely coaches, although their chances of accepting a position at the club are remote. But it is a nice sop to settle supporters who will query why Sheedy was sacrificed if his replacement is an untried coach.
It is for this very reason that Neale Daniher must be favoured to arrive at Essendon in 2008. His appointment will soften the blow of Sheedy's exit. It is also disappointing that it is filtering back to the football community that the Essendon protocols to work through a list of replacements are considered to be haphazard and unprofessional.
Essendon is a mighty mess. If the unhappy supporters, members and coteries could ever harness their disappointment and fury at the Essendon board's actions they would have enough ammunition to sink it in an instant.
The Essendon board had every right to let Sheedy go, but it has mishandled his exit so manifestly that what should have been a tour to celebrate one of the great careers in Australian sport is now a miserable and distressing shuffle. And for this the Essendon board blames Sheedy. It is his entire fault. He should have taken his beheading with greater dignity, mopping up the blood before moving on.
A patronising Horsburgh repeats that the institution is bigger than the individual.
And we have also found one individual can prove so much bigger than a board.
Sheedy disciples get brawl rolling
Patrick Smith | August 25, 2007
FOOTBALL brings the most unlikely people undone. Sane men and women make remarkably stupid decisions once they become attached to football clubs. The right balance of business, emotion and expectation is difficult to establish. When anyone is out of kilter with the others professionalism turns to farce.
Essendon chairman Ray Horsburgh and his board members panicked when they sacked Kevin Sheedy. The decision charred the coach and seared the players.
The board effectively ended the season at round 16 even though the club remains in the battle for the finals.
Sheedy prepares his team for tomorrow's match against Richmond when he can find the time in between interviews for the vacant coaching post at Melbourne. James Hird must defend Sheedy on commercial television. It is a grubby affair.
The repercussions of the startled board's decision to sack Sheedy, coach for the past 27 years, are vast. A group of members has quietly and meticulously gone about collecting the required signatures to force the club to hold an extraordinary general meeting of the club. Save Essendon will announce its complete strategy next week.
If no compromise can be met between the board and the Save Essendon group the club will face great embarrassment. Presently, concerned members are being asked to sign a resolution that reads: "That Peter Jackson be removed as a director of the Essendon Football Club".
Jackson is the club chief executive and the most powerful man at Essendon. In the preamble to the resolution, Save Essendon notes: "We are Essendon Football Club members who do not wish to destabilise or damage our club. Recent events, however, have raised concerns about the competency of the board and the lack of credible management. The chief executive's press statement compromised the club's president, humiliated the senior coach and harmed the good name of the Essendon Football Club.
"Moreover, the manner in which the CEO was appointed to the board appears flawed in process and lacks credibility. We believe an inherent conflict of interest exists in being an appointed director as well as being managing director, secretary and CEO of Essendon Football Club."
It is some fight the Save Essendon group has picked because Jackson is highly regarded at both club and league level and is seen as the architect of Essendon's strong financial position. But, rightly or wrongly, he is seen as the man who drove the sacking of Sheedy.
The Essendon board did not think through the timing of Sheedy's dismissal. And a personal attack on him by Horsburgh was petulant. So the club faces being dragged to a messy general meeting where the future of one of the game's better administrators will be debated. All because expectation and emotion overwhelmed a sensible business approach to ending Sheedy's reign.
The St Kilda administration has proved not much smarter than Essendon. Steven Baker is out for seven matches because the club prepared a poor defence to his charge of colliding with Fremantle's Jeff Farmer.
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I'm sure that there will be more to come.Essendon bombs search for new coach
Patrick Smith | September 04, 2007
MELBOURNE did not handle Neale Daniher's removal very well at all. Shabby and mean-spirited. Both president Paul Gardner and chief executive Steve Harris should have been by his side.
The Melbourne officials said Daniher wanted to front the media by himself. But they should have insisted.
After all, he had coached the club for 10 years and taken the Demons to a grand final and 11 other finals matches. He had given the Demons everything he had. But after that error Gardner cannot be faulted. He has overseen a strenuous and meticulous search for Daniher's replacement.
The easy decision would have been Kevin Sheedy. He had 27 years experience at Essendon and won four premierships. That's 635 games and 43 finals. That is a tad of knowledge. More than that, he might just be the most famous name in football history.
His energy and vision - and a healthy dose of eccentricity - allowed Essendon to become the first national club with bulging bank accounts, rich assets and a big, broad membership and supporter base. Essendon became a national brand.
Harris has not been able to succeed at Melbourne. He has not found the necessary new revenue streams and the AFL watch the Demons carefully. Harris would have been greatly helped by Sheedy's vision.
Chris Connolly could have done the job. He is a good coach and an effective front man for any club. He coached at the dysfunctional Fremantle for almost six seasons and took the club to four finals, including a preliminary against Sydney last year.
But Gardner made the only choice he could. He determined that Dean Bailey, a low-profile assistant coach at Port Adelaide, was the best man to deliver Melbourne on-field success. It was a brave decision but Gardner is confident that he, and the coaching selection panel, got the decision right. Winning games is the ultimate driver for the divisions within a club.
Gardner went looking for a coach that was not only reading the trends in a game that now change so quickly but predicting new directions. There are more than 90 coaches at AFL clubs. You need a smart man to keep ahead of the pack.
Two points sold Melbourne on Bailey. The Port Adelaide assistant presented a game plan that had a vision of football, not as it is played now but might be in the future. Bailey was then able to make it work in match simulation.
He married theory with practice so impressively that Melbourne knew its protracted but thorough process had delivered the Demons a replacement for Daniher.
The manner in which Melbourne got its man has shown up the inept and insensitive manner Essendon sought to sack Sheedy and find his replacement. It has ended in embarrassment. A group of disenchanted supporters has served the club with a petition for the removal of chief executive Peter Jackson from the board and the replacement of president Ray Horsburgh. If they don't get their wish there will be a move on the board at an extraordinary general meeting.
Horsburgh's position is the least tenable. He lied directly after the board meeting that sacked Sheedy, did not attend the news conference that announced the end of tenure for the club's most famous son, then claimed publicly and churlishly that Sheedy was bitter and in danger of harming his reputation.
The board is culpable, too, for the timing of its decision to sack Sheedy. The team was very much in contention for a place in the finals but the club panicked when Michael Voss was being wooed by Carlton.
It was imperative that the board see Sheedy off at the right time and in the right manner and the hard work of the players from pre-season was not jeopardised. Supporters are right to make the board and the president accountable for sacrificing a coach, the players and ultimately the season.
Like clockwork.
No time to sit on fence over Laidley
Patrick Smith
CLUB administrations have never been exposed for their inadequacies quite like this season. West Coast and Essendon were confronted with issues that no club had faced in AFL history.
West Coast had its poster boy and others on drugs. Essendon had to call time on coach Kevin Sheedy's 27-year tenure. Collingwood had an old issue of late nights, footballers and alcohol. It took the easy option.
This from a club whose president railed against the elevation of Gary Ablett to the Hall Of Fame. Collingwood is a club that has selective moments of moral outrage.
West Coast badly bungled the Ben Cousins addiction and rehabilitation. The club was not transparent, at times deliberately vague. It should be cut a little sympathy, for no club had experienced such a serious and public problem. Chairman Dalton Gooding is now convinced his club is clean and well-placed to ensure it remains that way.
Essendon had not sacked a coach in 27 years. No club had sacked someone so widely known and respected as Sheedy. So Sheedy was sacked in a panic and in a most amateurish way that belied the sophistication of the club on all other matters.
The club now faces an extraordinary general meeting, something it could avoid if it publicly admitted Sheedy's sacking was both poorly timed and executed.
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How does "I'd swear you had MADE THAT UP yourself" go?