Secret tape exposes rage over AFL ‘betrayal’
IT IS just after 11.30am on Thursday, August 8, 2013. Bombers chairman Paul Little calls an urgent meeting to reveal the AFL is preparing to lay charges over the club’s 2012 injections program. Here’s what happens next.
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JAMES Hird slumps into his seat and the fury pours out.
“They’re a pack of f---ing lying pr---s, and they have done from the start,” the Essendon coach mutters of the AFL’s top brass.
It is just after 11.30am on Thursday August 8, 2013.
Bombers chairman Paul Little has called an urgent meeting to reveal that the league is preparing to lay charges against the club and four senior officials over its 2012 injections program.
Little tells those gathered in the club’s dated Windy Hill boardroom that he has been in secret talks with AFL deputy CEO Gillon McLachlan but had no warning that the charges were coming.
The meeting that would escalate footy’s greatest crisis includes Hird, assistant coach Mark Thompson and football boss Danny Corcoran.
“One thing that Ray (Gunston, acting Essendon CEO) and I have learnt, probably more me than Ray in the last few days, is that they’ve absolutely said one thing and done the opposite,” a furious Little says.
“Bomber, I know you’re going to say ‘I told you so’, but we had to try. We had to try and bring some mediation, negotiation, settlement to this thing. And every single issue that I agreed on with Gil McLachlan, and I met with him the other night, has pretty much been reversed now in this note here.
“So I’m not sure there’s a lot of point of, Ray and I both agree we should have one more attempt — and it’s pointless doing it with McLachlan, but probably needs to be (Andrew) Demetriou — one more attempt of trying to understand what’s in their head, what they’re really trying to achieve. But I think in the meantime we just push as hard as we can legally now. As hard as we can.” says Little.
Hird now has no doubts on what the AFL is thinking. His angst and growing desperation are palpable.
“They want the club to cop the heaviest suspension ever to a club, they want me to cop the heaviest suspension ever as an individual, and Danny to cop a suspension,’’ he says.
Thompson is in a more combative mood. He’s up for the fight. The two-time premiership coach sees the AFL’s veiled threat of standing down club officials, detailed in the meeting by Little, as brinkmanship.
“Let’s crack ’em. Let’s crack the f---ers,” Thompson urges. “Don’t panic. Don’t jump to conclusions that they think they know everything. They actually know very little, because otherwise it would’ve been done a long time ago with players.
“You know what we have to do, mate? We have to find out what actually happened. Don’t f---ing believe what’s in the (ASADA interim) report.”
But Little shuts him down. “You know what, Bomber?” Little says. “There isn’t now time to do that.”
“We will fight it and I promise you that. But right at the moment, we need to know the best way to fight it and we need to understand what our legal rights are because as I said to Ray this morning, we have no f---ing leverage, we have nothing. If we have something you tell me. We have nothing.”
Defiant again, Hird suggests: “The law of Australia.”
Thompson agrees. “Yeah. The law, we’ve got ASADA, the ASADA Act.”
“Hirdy, mate, you can’t be idealistic with this,” Little fires back. “(But) I agree, I mean we’re being termed guilty before you know — and we’ve got to prove our innocence, which is completely around the wrong way.”
Corcoran says it’s vital that the club and four accused officials stick together. “What I see at this point is that our ways can’t diverge,” he says.
Little declares “the gloves are off” and vows to work with Hird’s legal team and others to block the AFL’s attack.
“We need a council of war now because if the AFL get the initiative here and start throwing these bloody charges around, it may be that we can’t stop anything. So we’ve got to get out there first,” he says.
“The football world are against us now, we know that. Look how they treated f---ing Jobe at the weekend, that’s just disgraceful. And the Essendon world have never been stronger than where they are. It’s us against the world.”
It is clear they knew their backs were against the wall.
Hird says: “I don’t see how this club can survive with players — things being held over their head for the next 18 months — and things being held over our heads for the next six months. And if they’re not going to come out and say the players are totally cleared on the evidence in front of us and they’re not just going to charge us and get on with it — I’d rather they just charge me straight away and get on with it, I really would. Let’s just get on with fighting this thing, because at the moment it’s this big fog over our head and we can’t fight.”
By the end of the month, Essendon, Hird, Thompson and Corcoran took deals which they hoped would end the saga. But their worst fears, so clearly detailed in the secret tape, were borne out.
More than two years later, after a marathon series of legal fights headed up by Hird and the club, 34 Essendon players were wiped out for doping.
McLachlan’s assertion the night before the meeting, according to Little, that there was a “99 per cent chance that the players won’t be charged” counted for nothing.
One percenters are everything in footy. Hird walked away as Essendon coach and in the months that followed he would tell close friends that the saga had destroyed him.
At the start of this year, he took a near-fatal overdose.
Corcoran, who sat across from him back in August 2013 crisis meeting, told the Herald Sun on January 13: “I walked out of that ICU and just felt the total despair of how systemic bullying and harassment of a person had caused him to fall into such a dire state.
“I can’t believe it.
“He’s in an ICU in a secure ward.
“A great man, a great champion, reduced to this ... it’s just horrendous to think that it’s got to this point.”
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