Danny Frawley’s hilarious one-liner and the pressure on James Hird

DANNY Frawley knows exactly the kind of pressure Essendon coach James Hird is under. This is the best way to ease the tension.

D/I Coach Danny Frawley. AFL football - Hawthorn vs Richmond match 31 Aug 2003.

SEEING all the pressure James Hird is under at Essendon reminds me of one of the funniest moments of my footy career.

It happened at Richmond in 2004 when our coach Danny “Spud” Frawley was in a similar position to the one Hird is in now. After making a prelim in 2001 we had some pretty lean years under Spud, culminating in a 14-game losing streak to finish the 2004 season.

I couldn’t tell you what game it was after but some time towards the end of the year I remember driving to the club on a Monday after another loss and sitting in traffic on Punt Road and really dreading what I’d find there.

There’d been a lot of speculation in the paper that day about Spud’s job and as I got closer to the club I could see the big aerials that sit on top of the media vans sticking up from the car park and immediately thought, “This isn’t a good sign, something’s going on.”

I made my way past the reporters and got into the club and the first thing on the agenda was a team meeting upstairs in the Graeme Richmond room. The whole team was in there, it was pretty tense and sombre, no one was saying much, but there was one glaring absence — Spud wasn’t there.

Richmond coach Danny Frawley barks at his players.

We waited about 15 minutes and finally we heard him walking up the stairs. I was looking down at my feet as he entered the room because you know you’re every chance to cop a spray if you make eye contact. When I looked up, Spud was standing up the front of the group and he had a compressor we used to pump up the footballs on the ground next to him.

We’re all starting to think, “Maybe Spud has lost the plot here, what the hell is he doing?” He just stood there and he was looking at us and then he slowly bent down, picked up the compressor and held it up above his head.

He kept looking around and then said fairly quietly, “What am I boys?” No one said anything. He waited another 10 or 20 seconds and then said a little bit louder, “What am I boys?” No one knew what to say, so no one said anything. So a third time, with the compressor still above his head, Spud really yelled it, “WHAT AM I BOYS?”

One of the young players who made the rookie error of sitting in the front row finally broke the silence and said, “I don’t know Spud, what are you?” And Spud replied: “I’M UNDER THE BLOODY PUMP!”

Everyone roared with laughter and it really eased the tension in the room, which was obviously his intention. It summed up Spud as a character — he could always find a bit of humour in the most dire situation. It didn’t help him in the long run — later in the season he announced he was going to resign at the end of the year — but I’ll never forget that classic one-liner.

A back page story in the Herald Sun.

Mark Robinson calls for Frawley’s head.

Mark Stevens’ coverage of the Richmond crisis.

The pressure on Hird really cranked up this week and it’s hard not to point back to the WADA announcement as a turning point in the Bombers’ season.

After six rounds Essendon was 3-3. The Bombers had pushed Sydney at the SCG and beaten Hawthorn, Carlton and St Kilda. Then came WADA’s decision on May 12 to challenge the AFL anti-doping tribunal’s not guilty verdict.

While the Bombers remained competitive for the next few weeks they’ve really fallen away in the past month. They’ve lost to Geelong by 69 points, West Coast by 50 points, Hawthorn by 38 points and St Kilda by a record 110-point margin.

That St Kilda game on the weekend was one of the worst I’ve seen — they just weren’t in the contest at all. This WADA stuff must be affecting some of them, they must have just had enough.

It might not have changed anything but there was a bit of method in Spud’s madness that day at Richmond. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to get a bit of humour in the place.

Originally published as Danny Frawley’s hilarious one-liner and the pressure on James Hird