Richard Colless fires back at Kevin Sheedy over ‘we don’t want you’ comments
Former Sydney chairman Richard Colless wants Kevin Sheedy to name witnesses to a meeting where it’s alledged a Swans official told GWS “we don’t even want you in this city”.
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Fuming at allegedly having his integrity repeatedly questioned by Kevin Sheedy, former Sydney Swans chairman Richard Colless has returned fire with a blistering attack on the GWS godfather.
Colless is adamant he is the unnamed official Sheedy claimed in The Saturday Telegraph had stood up at a meeting with AFL heavies and told GWS, “we don’t even want you in this city”.
The Swans’ longest-serving patriarch said he was left “humiliated” by a “cowardly” Sheedy telling the same story a number of years ago at a Carbine Club lunch, where he claims the AFL icon ambushed him by personally naming him on stage.
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Colless has had enough and hit back, adamant the meeting never happened, and branding as “unmitigated bulls--t” Sheedy’s assertion that the Swans tried to rob Western Sydney kids of their dreams.
The forthright Swans leader, who famously gave Eddie McGuire a middle-fingered salute, did not hold back on Sheedy in a ferocious spray, not only demanding he name witnesses to the alleged meeting, but challenging him to concede who is the true pioneer of growing the AFL over the past 25 years.
The irony, Colless said, is that the super coach twice used Sydney to bolster his own pay packet while boss of Essendon.
“Kevin … give me some sort of evidence. Name one witness. It never happened. It simply never happened,” Colless told The Sunday Telegraph.
“It’s so misguided, so inaccurate. By and large I would have let it wash over me … But I’m not going to have people, I don’t care if it’s Kevin Sheedy, saying things that go to my integrity.
“I’ll challenge Kevin to come up with anyone who in a practical sense has done more to grow the game, not just the Swans, but the game, in the last 25 years.
“He’s clearly talking about me because at a Carbine Club function in front of 500 people he said something similar.
“Which I thought for a brave, fearless guy was pretty cowardly to be honest.
“I’ve got to say it was a bit humiliating. I can’t think of any other person who would do something like that. Kevin has never sought me out. Never rung me.
“This stuff p---es me off and the world’s moved on. For Kevin, this is fantastic. It keeps his name in the paper and he’s relevant and it just reminds people that he was a pioneer. But I don’t think he needs to do that.
“Kevin’s one of the great beneficiaries of the Swans. He used the Swans on at least two occasions to threaten Essendon that he’d been offered an arm and a leg to coach up here. Unless they were prepared to sharpen their pencil, he’d be coming up here.”
Colless said the fact he campaigned for Sheedy to be immediately elevated as a Legend in the AFL Hall of Fame is evidence he has no “vendetta” against a man he concedes has been a crucial pillar behind GWS’s success.
While he admits he and the Swans did originally argue against the concept of a second Sydney team due to concerns over its financial viability, Colless said this stance was yet to be disproved as GWS continue to cost the AFL between $20-30 million a year.
“We said, ‘we feel quite strongly there wasn’t the market for a second team’,” he said.
“The team hadn’t been created, so saying the Giants weren’t wanted is just absolute unmitigated bulls---.
“Once the AFL had made their decision, we accepted that’s their prerogative and we were the only club to say ‘well, if you’re going to do it you’ve got to do it correctly’.”
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Colless said the fact the Swans took up to 60 games over 14 years to ANZ Stadium at Sydney Olympic Park in front of 50,000-plus crowds did more to “whet the appetite” for Western Sydney kids than anything.
He said Sheedy’s rhetoric over “battle of the bridge” warfare was “pitiful”.
“What I found boring, counter-productive and absolutely stupid was Kevin tried to play all the tricks he did in Melbourne to get on the front or back page of the paper and they just didn’t work in Sydney,” said Colless.
“If you go back to the one person where all the bloody s--- comments were coming from, where all the goading and the taunting was coming from, it was Kevin.”
Originally published as Richard Colless fires back at Kevin Sheedy over ‘we don’t want you’ comments
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