Kevin Sheedy uses marshmallow jab to spark 17-year Essendon and North Melbourne rivalry

DENIS Pagan knew Kevin Sheedy would react when Mick Martyn yanked James Hird’s jumper over his head and dragged him 25 metres across the MCG.

KEVIN SHEEDY AND DENIS PAGAN Marshmellow game North Melbourne v Essendon Picture:Wayne Ludbey

DENIS Pagan knew Kevin Sheedy would react when Mick Martyn yanked James Hird’s jumper over his head and dragged him 25 metres across the MCG.

It was Round 14, 1998 and the powerful North Melbourne outfit were on the march to another Grand Final.

What he couldn’t know was how it would kickstart one of football’s most bizarre feuds, the “Marshmallow Wars” between rivals Essendon and North Melbourne.

Only Sheedy could use the perception a rival believed his club, offend that team’s officials and yet still use it as motivation for his own team.

It would kickstart an episode that would see him being bombarded with marshmallows after a final only weeks later.

Kangaroos coach Brad Scott watches over training. Picture: Colleen Petch

Seventeen years on, North Melbourne and Essendon are again battling it out for respect on the big state of Friday Night Football.

“I know Kevin was going to be furious about it,’’ Pagan said of the Hird-Martyn battle.

“North held an edge over the Bombers at that stage and Kevin didn’t want anyone to get a break.

“Virtually the next week he came out and said to his players that North Melbourne believe you are soft — Mark Dawson and Greg Miller. And we have to do something about it.”

Sheedy and Pagan are sitting together at a cafe at Essendon’s Melbourne Airport headquarters and the four-time premiership coach feels the need to interject.

“Greg was the white one,’’ he says with mock gravity, which of course makes fellow Roos official Dawson the pink marshmallow.

Sheedy’s taunt was that if Essendon were soft, Dawson and Miller were a pair of marshmallows.

It would culminate in a knockout final where Sheedy would make it rain — albeit with marshmallows bombarded upon him by North Melbourne fans.

And yet Sheedy can still remember the crowd of 71,154 with as much clarity as his side’s loss, which for him makes the ploy a success.

“I had a person at North training dressed up in North Melbourne gear who was an Essendon fan and he said North Melbourne reckon you are soft,’’ he says.

“I am not sure who held Denis back in the seconds as a coach, but I always thought it was Greg Miller, so I thought he would get named the white marshmallow.

“So in the end that’s what I went with. I thought I would try something different to get a crowd next time and that next time 71,000 turned up.”

Denis Pagan and Kevin Sheedy eating marshmallows. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

Both champion coaches can laugh about it now, but that bitter rivalry sparked by Sheedy would grow until that year’s qualifying final, where eighth-placed Essendon took on the minor premiers.

Essendon went down by 22 points, his coaching career was seen to be in jeopardy (he would win a flag two years later), and Sheedy had a decision to make.

“They got up and beat us. If we had got one more goal (to make it tight), but that’s the way it goes,’’ says Sheedy.

“Then I had the alternative to go down the back of the grandstands or cop your medicine and go down the front and walk around the boundary.

“I thought, you better go down the front, you have started something. (Assistant coach) Bomber Thompson was three metres behind me and drifted back as the marshmallows rained in.

“He said, gee you can get yourself into trouble, coach.”

The next morning Pagan would wake up to find his own Moonee Ponds front garden showered in marshmallows too.

“I said what’s going on. They were everywhere. But Kevin just having a bit of poetic licence made it a real rivalry.”