Sacked podcast: Former Melbourne and Essendon boss Peter Jackson on his tumultuous years at the Bombers and Demons
As far as first days on the job go, when former Essendon boss Peter Jackson took over as Bombers’ chief executive on April 1, 1996, there was a smoking gun awaiting at Windy Hill that was the worst possible introduction. SACKED PODCAST
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It was the rudest first-day shock a new chief executive could have imagined.
Peter Jackson had already been reluctant to give up a successful business career to take over as chief executive officer of the Essendon Football Club. His long-time passion for the red and black, however, forced his hand.
But after a routine walk through the club’s Windy Hill offices on April Fool’s Day in 1996, on what was meant to be a meet-and-greet with staff on his first day in the role, Jackson had every reason for regretting his decision.
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In a small, pokey room tucked away from the main offices, he ran into what he thought was a “staffer” who was in the midst of unearthing footy’s equivalent of an unexploded hand grenade ticking towards ignition.
By the time Jackson had made it back to his own office, he knew the bang was coming.
“I started on the first of April, which is sort of interesting, given the circumstances,” Jackson told the Herald Sun's Sacked Podcast.
“I remember walking around the office and introducing myself …
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“I walked into the smallest, most uncomfortable office in the place and there was this guy rifling through files. I said ‘Hi, I’m Peter, who are you?’. He said: ‘I am Michael Easy’.
I said to him: ‘What do you do here?’. He said: ‘I don’t work for you … I’m the salary cap investigator from the AFL’.
“That was literally the afternoon of my first day.”
Essendon had cheated the salary cap. Now the incoming chief executive – who hadn’t been there for the transgressions – had to unravel the mess with the AFL.
“I went to see (AFL general manager of football Ian Collins) … I said: ‘Collo, we’ve got a problem’,” Jackson recalled.
“He reached around and grabbed this two-inch thick report and said: ‘You better have a read of that, son’.”
The Bombers were fined $638,250 and forced to forfeit a number of draft picks after the joint Australian Taxation Office and AFL probe.
The “systematic” salary cap breaches totalled $514,500 between 1991 and 1996, including $110,000 from Essendon’s 1993 premiership year.
“The (AFL) had (earlier) offered a moratorium – well, Collo did – and Essendon was the only club that didn’t take it up, as I am told,” Jackson said.
None of this had been Jackson’s doing, but he was left to pick up the pieces.
Asked if the breaches had been inadvertent or payments made in ‘brown paper bags’, he said: “Basically the latter … they (Essendon) won the premiership in 1993, and they wanted to keep them (the players).”
SHEEDY v THE BOARD
Legendary coach Kevin Sheedy led Essendon into 19 finals series across 27 seasons, but Jackson conceded he was always on knife’s edge in board support.
No one doubted Sheedy’s greatness.
But for much of his time in charge, the board was split on whether his eccentricity got in the way of his football strengths.
Jackson couldn’t believe that even when Sheedy was coaching at his best, the board was regularly split.
“I think Kevin Sheedy was the most important thing that has happened in the modern history of the Essendon Football Club,” Jackson said.
“As Kevin would say proudly, he helped to turn a suburban football into a national brand.
“The problem was not with Kevin; the problem was, if you look at the board that existed at the time, it was roughly split half and half.
“It was always a marginal decision. There were people who had problems with Kevin’s work style. I don’t think anyone ever said to me ‘He can’t coach’.
“There were times when he spent too much time worrying about new ideas and growth and playing here or there, but, to me, he always got the job done.”
‘WHICH ONE OF YOU BASTARDS TOLD THE PAPER’
In the late ‘90s, there were pockets of angst on the board and in parts of the playing group, which president Graeme McMahon intended to quell.
Folklore has it McMahon called a group of recalcitrant players into a room one day after a negative headline in a newspaper about player unrest, and tore strips off them, saying: ‘Which one of you bastards told the paper?’.
Jackson detailed: “I think we won that week, so people want to romance it, but it (the meeting) didn’t really impact the future long term performance of the club.”“The thing that impacted the club long term was changing the culture of the place.
“At various times, (Sheedy) had trouble with individual players, all coaches have a problem … with the ones who are not being picked who think they should be.
“I don’t think it was a Kevin per se; it was a symptom of the problems around the footy club.”
Essendon cleared out the ‘troublemakers’, brought a good team of assistant coaches around Sheedy and reaped the benefits.
“Graham and myself cleared all that up at the end of ’98, and you know what happened in 1999, 2000 and 2001,” he said.
“It set the club up for the next five or six years.”
THE WORST MOMENT
Essendon looked unbeatable in 1999 … until Carlton produced one of the greatest finals shocks in history, with a one-point preliminary final victory.
“We came from nowhere … we finished on top of the ladder, crowds came back, everyone was happy, and then bloody Carlton beat us by a point,” Jackson said.
“I hate Carlton.
“I think we probably were thinking about next week a bit. They were four goals up at half time, and we came out and kicked seven goals seven behinds. You only have to kick eight goals six behinds and we win the game.”
But that heartache fuelled what came next.
“I know James Hird took the whole team to the Grand Final in ‘99, and sat up in the old northern stand and said ‘Watch this’.
“2000 started from that day. I am not sure 2000 would have happened without ‘99, as crazy as that sounds.”
THE BEST MOMENT
In 2000 Essendon won every game except one – the Round 21 clash with Western Bulldogs – in one of the greatest AFL seasons, which resulted in Sheedy’s fourth flag as a coach.
“The way they won games (in 2000), with such authority, it was very nervous going to the Grand Final because you think ‘Gee, let’s not do what we did last year’,” Jackson said.
“We won it, and it was a feeling for me and others within the club of relief, not euphoria.
“The players were euphoric, obviously, but at the club, it was like ‘wow, thank God that happened’.”
Essendon appeared likely to go back-to-back for much of 2001. But Jackson said the team finished the year exhausted, which may have come from the extraordinary Round 16 comeback win over North Melbourne.
“If you analyse that great comeback in the game against North Melbourne, I don’t know how many petrol tickets they spent that day,” he said.
“They would deny it, but I’m not sure they ever had the same edge after that game.”
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SACKING SHEEDS
Jackson had a candid chat on a pre-season camp with Sheedy leading into the 2007 season, forecasting the task he had ahead of him in terms of securing a new contract.
“I tried to say to him, ‘Kevin you’ve had a great time at the Essendon Football Club, you want to do this on your terms’,” he said.
“No decision had been made at that stage. I was saying to him … ‘This is going to be a bigger challenge than at any other stage previously, and I think you have got another chapter in your life. I think you should be in control of it’.”
Jackson maintained he was trying to look after Sheedy‘s best interests against a board angling for change, but he felt the coach said to himself: ‘You’re wrong, I’ll be OK’.
When it came to a vote, the board opted not to give the man who had been coach since 1981 a new deal.
Jackson insisted “rightly or wrongly” the decision had to be announced six weeks before the end of the season.
He vehemently denied there were ulterior motives, including the fact a few rival clubs were looking for a coach.
“That was complete rubbish,” he said.
“The issue was giving us a chance to celebrate (Sheedy).
“You can’t take a guy like Kevin Sheedy and what he has done for this club and during the week after the last game tell the Essendon people you are not renewing his contract.
“To me, that would have been outrageous.
“It was going to be painful for six weeks, but you owe it to the guy to do it that way, rather than hide behind it.
“I think if there were 10 directors, nine had already made up their mind … it wasn’t a board meeting (it was a decision already made) …”
‘LEAK THAT STILL HURTS’
Essendon’s decision not to renew Sheedy’s contract – effectively sacking one of the greatest coaches of all-time – was embarrassingly leaked.
Jackson is still furious about the leak to this day. He has no sympathy for those with loose lips.
“If you can’t stay quiet in these circumstances, you get what you deserve. If some people feel bad in those circumstances, then you got what you deserved,” he said.
Jackson and president Ray Horsburgh had to track down Sheedy the day after its momentous board meeting, with the news already out there.
“That wasn’t fun,” Jackson said. “Kevin turned up at a point in time and Ray told him what the board had decided. The conversation didn’t go for a long time, but it was polite and amicable.”
Sheedy coached out the rest of the 2007 season, and was afforded an emotional farewell in the last game against West Coast in Perth.
Jackson was part of the subcommittee which appointed Matthew Knights as Sheedy’s successor.
He left the Bombers in 2009, the same year Knights took Essendon to the finals, albeit for an elimination final flogging to Adelaide.
Knights was sacked at the end of 2010 – after three seasons and 67 games.
Essendon hasn‘t won a final since Sheedy left. In fact, they haven’t won a final since 2004.
DEMON OFFER
“Jackson was the chairman of AFL Victoria when AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou offered him a new challenge in 2013.
“The phone rang and he (Demetriou) said … ‘I need your help, are you prepared to be the CEO of the Melbourne Football Club?’.
The pair “hatched a plan.” Jackson was announced as interim CEO, as he wanted to see if the Demons were up for a challenge, but knew he had the job long-term.
“The Melbourne Football Club was up for change, the board was up for change … we had to be rebuilt from the ground up,” he said.
“It comes back to culture. People weren’t happy there. Not just because they weren’t winning, but players weren’t happy being there.”
Jackson found the source of some of the discontent came back to a decision to dump popular captain James McDonald at the end of 2010.
“The name I heard most talked about from the playing group was James McDonald,” he said. “How can a club do that to James McDonald?
“To everyone else’s mind, he was one of the great stalwarts of the club. I wasn’t there at the time, but they parted company with him, as we did with quite a few other senior players, and went back to a youth policy.”
SACKING NEELD
Jackson started in April 2013. By mid-June, after the 88-point Queen’s Birthday loss to Collingwood, he had to sack Mark Neeld as coach after only one-and-a-half seasons.
He wasn’t convinced Neeld had been able to build the relationships required of a senior coach.
“There was no way known this was a preconceived idea (to sack Neeld),” he said. “I think if you are going to be a successful senior coach – and I would hate to be a senior coach – but your relationships are the most crucial thing.
“You have to build really good relationships, deep relationships.”
Jackson didn’t enjoy it, but decided Neeld had to be replaced.
“Mark Neeld was very professional in the way he (accepted the decision),” he said.
“He conducted himself really well during his conversations with me, and at the media conference.
“When he got the phone call at 8am in the morning, I think he said to someone ‘I know what this is, he wouldn’t be calling me to see if I had a good weekend’.
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‘YOU’VE GOT NO EFFING HOPE OF MOVING HIM OUT OF HERE’
Jackson’s No.1 target was Paul Roos.
But prising Roos out of his Coogee mansion was always going to be tough, as was finding the right remuneration for his massive coaching deal.
“I happened to be up in Sydney one day on something else and rang him up,” he said.
“We had never met. I just said to him, ‘Paul, Peter Jackson here, can we have a chat?’ He said ‘Probably best you come around to my house, I am at Coogee, so we are not seen’.
“So I caught a taxi around there, knocked on the door, I remember (Roos‘ wife) Tami was there and they had a split level home. I walked in and upstairs was the lounge room and as you walk in, there is the family room and Tammi is there and she has a look on her face like, ‘What are you doing in my house … I am not moving.
“So we were up the top. I can remember looking out the window and it was July, blue sky, not a breath or wind or cloud in the sky, you could see the water and I remember thinking, ‘Peter, you have got no effing hope of moving them out of here’.”
The talk continued afterwards, and centred on Roos taking over the Demons with a succession plan.
Asked if the deal was signed on a napkin as Ron Barassi’s famous North Melbourne deal was, Jackson laughed: “There was no napkin, it was a lot more than a napkin, I can assure you of that.”
“I am not going to say anything about the finances. He wasn’t cheap but he’s paid for himself twice over.”
BUYING TIME
Roos gave Melbourne credibility and bought them some time.
“Roosy was important to say ‘I am in, I will get decent people to come’,” Jackson said.
“He brought decent assistants … a few players say ‘this looks like an interesting journey’, a few execs started listening to me.
“The sponsors started knocking the door, then crowds started coming.
“He bought time.
“If I had appointed Simon Goodwin (at the time), both he and I would have been sacked after two years.”
Jackson dismissed suggestions the AFL had paid part of Roos’ deal: “No, I have heard that. There are a lot of myths that get bandied around.”
Roos won four, seven and ten games in his three seasons as the Demons settled on Goodwin as his understudy to take the job on long-term.
He hopes the succession he helped to orchestrate can still result in that long-awaited 13th Demons’ premiership.
WHY DONS REALLY OVERLOOKED DIMMA
Former Essendon chief executive Peter Jackson has finally revealed the real story behind Damien Hardwick being overlooked for Matthew Knights, adamant speculation a failed PowerPoint presentation costing the duel premiership coach is “complete and utter bollocks”.
Beloved premiership player Hardwick was pitted against Essendon assistant coach Matthew Knights in final interviews to replace club legend Kevin Sheedy for the 2008 season.
Jackson told the Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast he still wonders what might have been had Hardwick taken the reins in what was in hindsight an impossible task to replace premiership legend Sheedy.
Hardwick was not allowed to take his computer from where he was coaching at Hawthorn because of the intellectual property it contained and had to borrow another laptop for his PowerPoint presentation.
He has said of that final interview: “I had a bad presentation, I had a shocker”.
Jackson told the Herald Sun Knights just kept on getting better through the series of interviews and while Hardwick battled computer issues former Tigers star Knights was the best candidate.
“It’s an interesting situation. I would be interested to hear it from Damien’s perspective but fundamentally he came in and he didn’t have his computer from the club because he wasn’t allowed to keep it and it didn’t work properly and he got a bit rattled. It wasn’t the be all and end all. Everyone romances that he didn’t get the job because his computer didn’t work. That is just nonsense,” Jackson said.
“It didn’t go pear shaped. It’s getting out of proportion. It was an irritation of him that started off in the beginning.
“There wasn’t a conversation at the end, which one do we pick and you can’t pick Damien because he can’t operate a computer. That was just bollocks, complete and utter bollocks.”
By the end of the presentation to the board Jackson has said Knights was twice as good as his initial interviews, meaning it was an easy choice for the selection committee.
Knights played finals in his second season in charge but was gone by August of his third season, with the current Geelong assistant saying recently he would still love to coach again.
“He was in there. Because he was coaching the reserves he already had relationships with the younger players who spoke highly of him,” says Jackson of Knights.
“Do Essendon people, and I am theorising here, do Essendon people think of Damien Hardwick and who he was as a half back flanker, rather than the coach?
“He nearly didn’t get the ultimate support at Richmond. Who would know how he would have gone at Essendon.
“I do ponder that thought from time to time, especially how he has gone at Richmond in his last three years, but I don’t know, it would have been an interesting thing. Essendon is a very interesting football club.”
Jackson had left the club by the time Knights was sacked.
Knights has never opened up about the details of his sacking despite admitting in 2011 he had kept notes about the “gory details” of his departure.”
“The first two years were exhilarating. There was such a sense of unity and purpose, and it was an outstanding football club to coach.
“Last season, it was just different. There was a sense that it was different and there was input from outside and the second half of the year wasn’t enjoyable to be a coach, when you sensed potentially what was going on behind the scenes.
“There will be a time and place when we cover off everything and go into the gory details of the last two or three months. I kept a lot of documentation in the last two or three months.”
ESSENDON’S BIG ERROR AFTER END OF GOLDEN ERA
Former Essendon chief executive Peter Jackson says the club’s failure to rebuild in 2002 after trading stars Blake Caracella, Justin Blumfield and Chris Heffernan because of salary cap issues helped consign it to footy’s wilderness.
Jackson said there was rigorous debate around the club’s board table about whether it was time to restock the club’s list with young talent instead of older offcuts.
The Dons had believed the AFL salary cap would increase by 10 per cent the following season but instead the rise was a third of that figure, with the trio of beloved premiership players all cast off.
A year earlier Damien Hardwick was also traded by the Bombers given their cap issues.
Jackson told the Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast the Bombers’ determination to keep the club’s flag-winning list together ultimately meant it failed to join Geelong and Sydney as clubs able to keep in the premiership window long-term.
Essendon has not won a final since 2004 and never finished higher on the ladder than sixth in that time.
Jackson regards the 1999 premiership defeat to Carlton as the one that got away rather than 2001, when the Dons were run over by a fresher Brisbane side in the Grand Final.
But he says Essendon’s attitude was to go again rather than accept a brilliant premiership run had come to an end and the list could quickly be revamped by bringing more exciting young kids.
In that time the Bombers topped up with senior players like Mark Alvey, Ty Zantuck, Justin Murphy, Matthew Allan, Adam McPhee and Steve Alessio.
“We figured (the salary cap) was going to be a problem way back in 2000, sooner or later,” he said of the club’s tight cap.
“The salary cap had been going up quite significantly rightly or wrongly we were led to believe it was going to go up 10 per cent that year, before officially it didn’t, and when you have names like (James) Hird and (Matthew) Lloyd and (Scott) Lucas and (Dustin) Fletcher, coming on, they have got to look after them. You don’t want to be the guy who people blame for losing one of those, at another club because of finances.
“Then the salary cap went up three per cent instead of 10 per cent, so all of a sudden it just wasn’t there, the money wasn’t there, it was arithmetic at the end of the day.
“What we didn’t do as a club was go back — not to ground zero because we were never going to do that — but we didn’t go back to going after draft picks.
“To be fair to the board, I know there were some debates around the board table that we ought to be doing that.
“We got players in from other clubs and they were OK, I mean Scotty Camporeale for example was good.
“Other players we brought in we thought might fill a few holes, but they didn’t.
“In hindsight, I would have preferred to have gone back to the draft, and rebuilt around those names, because those guys weren’t old.”
Legendary coach Kevin Sheedy has said in hindsight he should have moved on after that trio of stars were traded.
“If I had any regrets, I should have left Essendon earlier, but we were trying to get our list back on track,” Sheedy said.
“I thought, if that is the way we are going to run the club, I am out.
“This wasn’t letting (Gavin) Wanganeen go back to Port Adelaide. This was losing four players (including Damien Hardwick at the end of 2001) all in the prime of their footy careers.”
No.10 pick Jason Laycock was secured in the Heffernan trade, No.28 pick Tristan Cartledge was taken after the Blumfield trade and Brisbane’s Damien Cupido secured in the Caracella trade.
The Dons still went to the draft in the seasons, securing players such as No.6 pick Kepler Bradley, No.7 selection Paddy Ryder, father-son Jobe Watson and No.14 selection Angus Monfries.
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Originally published as Sacked podcast: Former Melbourne and Essendon boss Peter Jackson on his tumultuous years at the Bombers and Demons