Mark Robinson goes 1-on-1 with Essendon president David Barham on their 2024 season
Essendon’s past two seasons have been near-identical and not in a good way, but president David Barham knows the future is bright at the Bombers. Barham goes one-on-one with Mark Robinson.
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It’s been another topsy-turvy year at the Bombers. Finals fancies in June and July, but set to miss out again.
Chief Football Writer Mark Robinson talks to Bombers president David Barham about what’s happened and what’s to come at Essendon.
MR: Describe the season you have just endured?
DB: It’s probably a bit frustrating given where we were in the middle of the year, but if you asked me at the start of the year where I thought we were, it’s about where I thought we were.
MR: What, 10th, 11th or 12th?
DB: Yeah, I think we’re in that bracket. There’s the frustration and I wish we made finals, and everybody feels that, but I like some of the things that happened and I like the fact we are competitive every week. I like the fact that Brad (Scott) has made us a competitive club. That’s important.
MR: When do you cross over from being satisfied with being competitive and …
DB: It’s not being satisfied, but you have to have a base to start from. And I don’t think for a long time our club has been super competitive. So, I think he’s done a really good job in lifting standards and making us competitive. And even though we haven’t finished off the year like we wanted to, it’s only two weeks ago we beat Fremantle by a point. Yeah, we lost to Gold Coast by a point, but we kicked 1.9 in the last quarter. It wasn’t effort, it was skill.
MR: What do you mean when you say “lifting standards’’?
DB: Training standard, level of professionalism, unity, togetherness, culture, they have improved out of sight. We are a really united club now, a really strong, united club, everyone’s on the same page.
MR: Were there divisions previously?
DB: I don’t know if there were divisions.
MR: I’m not referencing the board takeover.
DB: I think we needed a really strong coach to come in who had 10 years’ coaching, and he’s come in and been a real positive influence on the club. The same with Craig Vozzo. Those two have made an enormous difference to the club because they are strong football leaders and they have put a strong footy culture into the business. We are a much, much better set up because we are united and aligned.
MR: I will ask again, were you not united?
DB: I don’t want to comment on the past too much, I can only tell you what we’re doing now. Brad, Vozz and I are absolutely aligned and we talk all the time.
MR: You may not want to talk about the past, but clearly there was not a united board two years ago.
DB: What led me to take control of the board … is Paul Brasher (former chairman) and I had different philosophies. He liked internal reviews and I liked external reviews and I felt we really needed to find out why we had not been successful for the past decade. And I think it’s the best thing we’ve done at this club ever. Because Brendan McCartney and Jordan Lewis came in and reviewed our whole football department and came up with four for five things we were clearly below-standard on. That gave us a blueprint. And we’ve been able to address all those things and because they’re better, I think everyone is happier, the club is happier. We have enough resources, we spend our salary cap, we spend our soft cap.
MR: OK, the processes are better, you’ve said you’ve attained competitiveness, so what’s the next goal?
DB: Winning.
MR: The point I’m making is, will you be demanding success next year?
DB: My job is to give Brad and Craig every support possible to do their job so we can win games of football, and create a great club. That’s what our fans want, they want us to win games of football.
MR: Dave, that demand has arrived from fans.
DB: That’s OK, that’s footy. What can’t happen now is Brad and Craig and the rest of the football people in there can’t be held responsible for what’s happened over the past 20 years. People can’t say it’s been going on for 20 years it’s their fault. That’s wrong.
MR: Are the demand-expectations from the fans too high?
DB: No. When I was talking to Brad about going into the process about being the coach, we talked about long-term sustained success. It’s something we haven’t been able to achieve for a long time. Look at Sydney, look at Geelong, they can do it, so why can’t we? Brad said this is going to take time, it’s going to take steps and we have to build it properly to do it. That’s what we’re doing. You might be lucky like the (Western) Bulldogs – get there, win one, you beauty, but I think you have to be in the zone for four or five years at least to give yourself a chance.
MR: Hawthorn won three flags, changed coaches, stripped the list, rebuilt the list and have flown past Essendon this season at a million miles an hour. Do you ask yourself, what are they doing that Essendon is not?
DB: No. I’m too busy looking at what we’re doing and what we have to do next. We know what we have to do.
MR: Which is exactly what?
DB: Build a football program which is elite, give them all the development in the world, recruit properly, and play well. That’s what we have to do.
MR: How many of those aspects are …
DB: Our development program is now competitive with anyone in the league and it wasn’t for a decade. I look at the improvement of Sam Durham and Jye Caldwell, there’s a lot of players who have improved under this model, and there’s others who are still improving. Craig Vozzo has put more money into recruiting and list management. We needed more coaches. The hard part is it just doesn’t happen overnight.
MR: It was said last weekend that Scott has “coached with an arm tied behind his back’’ and the names of Kevin Sheedy and Adrian Dodoro were mentioned. What are your thoughts on that?
DB: Brad Scott has had all the support he could possibly get.
MR: Has he been coaching with one arm tied behind his back?
DB: Brad Scott’s got every bit of support he could possibly need.
MR: How much are you aware of the saying, perhaps criticism, of “old Essendon”, which is curious because football clubs are built from history.
DB: Up to a point. We are really successful. I made the 150-year documentary for Foxtel, the eight-part series. I loved every second of it. I could’ve made another eight parts to it. We’ve won 16 flags, we have heroes coming out of our ears, but what I’m looking forward to is the next bunch of heroes, our next premiership. History is important and we respect it, but our future is more important.
MR: There’s been negativity around Sheedy’s departure from the board and that he was part of “old Essendon”.
DB: You don’t burn legends. You don’t disrespect your legends.
MR: So, why is the football club allowing people in the media to disrespect him without saying anything?
DB: If I jumped up and down every time someone said something wrong in the media, I wouldn’t do anything else. To be honest, unless you’re inside a footy club you really don’t know what goes on. I don’t pay much attention to the other stuff because I know what’s going on. Kevin’s made another good contribution.
MR: Did you have a view on whether Dyson Heppell should’ve played last weekend?
DB: The coach’s job and the match committee’s job is to pick the best team. We were still a chance of making finals so I have 100 per cent (support) for the match committee to pick the best team to win the game. What else do you want them to do? If they had picked him and we lost, some people would’ve said, ‘old Essendon, soft, giving out games’ … we would’ve copped it the other way.
MR: I got an email on Monday from a fan who said he and his daughter left last weekend’s game at three-quarter time – his name was Andrew Kidman – saying the club basically had lost its soul.
DB: I get these emails.
MR: What do you say to disillusioned Essendon supporters who – two years after the club was blown up – still haven’t played finals and …
DB: Are you saying two years is plenty to make finals?
MR: Nothing is linear in life, but the expectation was Essendon wouldn’t have a second consecutive second-half-of-the-season fade out.
DB: I get it, but I can only do what I think is right. I can’t change the narrative of the past and why everyone feels so sad. All I can do, and have the ability to do, is change the future. It’s hard work. I thought one of the telling moments this year was when Brad said this club does not handle expectation. I thought that was a mature and smart thing for the coach to say, because if you go on pretending everything is OK, you don’t fix your problems. He came out and said this club, this group has a problem with handling expectations. Fantastic, it’s out in the open, let’s fix it.
MR: How do you fix it?
DB: You work your way through why that’s happening, and keep having the courage to put yourself out there and be under expectation until you get it right. Learn your lesson and figure it out. We might’ve suffered this year because we had such a good first half of the year. Expectation may have got ahead of ourselves.
MR: Is that a cop out?
DB: Why? If you want to talk about the history of the club, 10 years that’s been going on. I thought it was a really good thing to address publicly. The things that give me encouragement are we can now match it with teams in the midfield, we can win contested ball, we can get the ball into our forward line, we couldn’t do that for years and years. We’ve still got things to fix, but I don’t think they are as big as they were. My view is Brad Scott is a gun coach and he’s the best person possible to bring us success and Craig Vozzo will be an outstanding CEO for a long time.
MR: Describe “gun’’.
DB: He’s had 10 years’ experience, the way he communicates with his players, the way they listen to him, he’s solution-based, his teaching ability is fantastic, he’s a very clever man-manager, (he’s) a very clever tactician.
MR: He’s two years into a four-year deal, and I suspect you see in him as the long-term Essendon coach.
DB: My view is he is the long-term coach. I would like to think Vozz and Brad are there for a long time. I think this club needs to be solid, consistent and purposeful for a long time. The other thing is, this club doesn’t leak any more. It hasn’t leaked for two years. I’m proud of that.
MR: I read an article at the weekend which said people at Essendon (Sheedy and Dodoro) …
DB: It didn’t come from us. We are stable. We are committed. Committed people don’t leak.
MR: So, you’ve got the coach you wanted, the standards are in place, you’re paying all of the salary cap and …
DB: We made a real conscience decision to spend money on football. I think we had lost a bit of direction.
MR: In what regard?
DB: I’ll tell you what I think happened, and I’m part of this. After the supplements (scandal), after Covid, we got double hit, we had lost a lot of money. Paul Brasher did a brilliant job recovering our finances, but I think we got confused in the end with being good (and) being successful financially. My argument was the bloke in row four in the outer doesn’t care if we make $1.4 million, he wants to win 15 games. And Sheeds was a big part of that. We all wanted to go back towards footy. That’s not bagging anyone in the past, we just got lost.
MR: The pundits are wondering if this Essendon team is coming or going or stagnating.
DB: That’s got nothing to do with me. I haven’t got the skills or expertise to judge that. It’s Brad Scott, Craig Vozzo and the list management guys, that’s their job, not mine.
MR: This might be a silly question, but is this a business venture for you, the task being to fix the club for sustained long-term success, or are you still the little boy who barracked for Essendon who is full of emotion.
DB: No, it’s a really good question, I’m the second one. I’m only doing this because I want to watch my team be a great team again and win finals. This is easily the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. I’ve had hard jobs in my life, I took 150 people to Delhi for the Commonwealth Games and survived, got out of there, and this harder. It’s more emotional and it’s also very irrational. If you can’t handle the irrational you’ve got a real lot of problems.
MR: How are you handling it?
DB: It’s challenging. I get upset. I hate seeing fans leaving unhappy. I have people chip me occasionally and I get why, but what I hope the fans can see is I’m doing it because I love the footy club.
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