Declaring “I’m back and I’m feeling good about myself”.” Thompson said “I lost my way. In the end I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about the hurt. I just had no feelings, you know. Life had no reward.”

Thompson’s first steps on the road to recovery took place in early 2018 in intense therapy sessions with a psychologist organised for him by mate James Hird and Adrian Dodoro.

“On the first day I met her, within five minutes, I was bawling my eyes out,” he reveals.

“She picked it in one (he was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder),” he said.

His illness had been triggered by the Essendon drugs scandal — a bitter, drawn-out saga that saw 34 Bombers players wiped out for doping by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in January 2015.

Thompson spent years obsessively fighting in the background in the hope of exposing the “injustices” of the verdict.

But the mission would consume and ultimately overwhelm him, leading to the destruction of his marriage and abuse of methamphetamines living alone in his Port Melbourne warehouse apartment.

Now, Bomber has opened up to the Herald Sun’s Michael Warner about the road to redemption, reconnecting with his family, the recent death of Shane Tuck, the fake world and his new life.

MW: Good to see you again, Bomber. What’s a normal day look like for you now?

MT: A normal day is, I get up about 7.30am, I have breakfast and then I go to work.

MW: You’ve found a new passion for woodwork out at your factory in Airport West. How did that all come about?

MT: Since I stopped working in footy, I realised pretty quickly that I didn’t know much about the world. I’d been in this little bubble – the footy bubble – where you know a lot about footy and people in footy and what is going on in footy, but you don’t know much else.

I missed what’s going on in the real world. Sometimes I was home, but I wasn’t really home, you know, especially when I was coaching at Essendon. The job was consuming.

I stumbled across resin tables and thought, ‘Geez, they are fantastic’. It’s something I’d never seen before.

MW: Tell me about the resin tables.

MT: They’re just tables with coloured epoxy glass in them. It’s two-pack epoxy resin. You just mix it up then you put the colour in it, the dye — lots of varieties of colour.

So I make tables and breadboards and food servers, and I like it.

Here, I got this recycled timber from Welshpool pier, down in Gippsland, off a merchant in Geelong. And it comes in big blocks and we just chop it up.

It’s all rotted and he was trying to talk me out of buying this wood. He said ‘It’s not going to be any good mate’. I said ‘Well, you don’t know what I’m going to use it for, just relax’ (laughs).

And so I’ve bought a fair bit of it and it’s come up fantastic. Great character in the timber. It’s got a history and it’s being renewed and reused so it’s a great thing. I’m just learning.

MW: So it’s a bit of a passion for you, you’ve been through some tough times and it gives you a bit of comfort?

MT: Well it’s nice when you can actually make something and people come and say ‘I’d like to have that’ or ‘That looks great’. It’s pretty rewarding, it gives me something to do, it gets me out of the house and keeps me busy.

MW: Has it helped with your recovery?

MT: It certainly has, yeah. When I left footy I didn’t really do much for four or five years, so now I have something to do. I’ve made the tables, now the next job is trying to sell them! (Laughs)

MW: Were you always good with your hands?

MT: Yeah. I was an electrician. I enjoyed building and renovating homes, I always liked to use my hands to build things. It’s been good up there (at the factory) because my brother (Steven) is there. He employs his two sons, so there’s me, Steven, and his two sons and me and my son works for Steven, too, so that’s five Thompson boys in there during the day.

MW: Has it been good to reconnect with your family?

MT: Yeah. Even Steven’s family, I’ve been up at his house a lot for dinner. I hadn’t done that for a couple of years.”

MW: You had your ex-wife and three kids turn up to court last year to support you.

MT: That’s been a good thing to come out of it. It was an unexpected support which I appreciated. Since then I go around there for dinner from time to time. I went there for Christmas Day too.

My mum and dad turned up for a bit, and my sister and some of her family.

MW: What about cryptocurrency? Are you still into that?

MT: Not much.

MW: What was the last year like, being on a community correction order?

MT: It just entails having someone look out for you and look after you. Mine entailed psychology. I had to go and see an officer every two weeks.

It was really good. I’d meet with them every few weeks and they just go through a series of questions and they talk about your goals and what you are working on and whether you are achieving them.

At the start I found it really difficult to try and work out their system, but by the end of it I understood it and I sailed home very nicely.

In the end, it was beneficial. They are good people. They are there to rehabilitate people. That is what the program is all about.

MW: Were you counting down the days until it was over?

I was so much looking forward to it all being finalised, just to have it all wrapped up but the time came and we weren’t allowed to go out of our house (laughs). I would have gone away, probably.

MW: Overseas?

MT: Maybe. But I hadn’t planned anything.

MW: How did you cope mentally? When I last interviewed you when the court case was on, you did have depression.

MT: Yeah, I did, yeah.

MW: Have you got on top of it?

MT: I have. I was pretty messed up. I didn’t really know why I felt the way I did.”

MW: How did you feel?

MT: I just felt helpless. Like I just couldn’t do anything. Just things kept going over in my head that I shouldn’t have even been thinking about, like the supplements stuff. Even then, yeah. I just had post-traumatic stress.

MW: Do you think it was the Essendon supplements saga that tipped you over the edge?

MT: It was a combination of factors, but it certainly didn’t help. (You usually drive yourself away from what is hurting you. That’s where I went. People go somewhere.)

MW: How bad was it, Bomber?

MT: I wasn’t very optimistic. Life had no reward. There was nothing I could do to get the reward that I was looking for.

MW: Did you ever think that it wasn’t worth being alive?

MT: I was in a bad place and I thought about it. I never went to do it. Not even close. But I was in a bad place.

MW: What about friends? Who stuck by you?

MT: Do you know what, you get a lot of people who stick by you, an amazing amount of people. But then there’s another group of people who don’t even know me that well, that are looking out for me, too, and obviously, I think, they have had some sort of form of mental illness themselves and they recognise how important it is to talk to people and to have people look out for them.

MW: Anyone you want to mention?

MT: Not really. Just random people you’ve only met once or twice”

MW: What about people in football?

MT: Blokes I played with and worked with have been pretty good. As soon as I got charged, the next day Hirdy (James Hird) and (Adrian) Dodoro came over and said we are taking you to go and see someone. A psychologist.

I went and saw the psychologist. And on the first day I met her, within five minutes, I was bawling my eyes out. She picked it in one.

MW: What did she pick?

MT: The post-traumatic stress disorder.

MW: Do you still see her?

I haven’t seen her since the order stopped … but I want to continue to see her just as some little refreshers to keep me on track.

MW: Can you believe what happened to you?

MT: No. I can’t believe I got to that place. I can’t believe it. I lost my way. In the end I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about the hurt. I didn’t care. I had no, yeah, I just had no feelings, you know.

MW: Did that surprise you that you could get yourself to that place?

MT: Yep. And the thing is, all my life has been footy people and that was the thing I had to get away from because it was the thing that was driving me crazy.

I didn’t want to mix with football people. So, I’m getting away from my work and my social group and I’ve lost my wife (Jana).

I was heartbroken for six months. The world wasn’t doing me favours, mate. And I wasn’t doing myself favours.

MW: Shane Tuck took his own life recently. Is it a fake world, football?

MT: Not just football, mate. It’s a fake world. Full stop. Because six men kill themselves every day in Australia. When we have deaths during COVID it makes sensational news, as it should.

It’s a stressful world and the few times I have spoken to psychs and mental health practitioners, I feel good when I talk to them.

I’m not one that is forthcoming in giving information about myself, my weaknesses and where I am hurting and everything else.

So to feel confident enough to go and talk to a person and for them to give me some reasoning as to why and how I am feeling and why I have done what I have done is a great thing, because I didn’t know why it had happened.

My industry is football and I’ve seen a lot of people leave the industry and struggle. I’d seen it and I knew it would be hard but I thought, ‘I’ll be right’. But I wasn’t right.

MW: How good is life now Bomber, compared to where you were a few years ago?

It’s a lot different.

DON’T MISS PART II in Monday’s Herald Sun: Bomber and the police raid that saved his life