Guy McKenna is nothing if not a realist, and as he mingled amongst Gold Coast officials at the 2014 Brownlow Medal, he sensed something wasn’t right.

The inaugural Gold Coast coach had earned a one-year contract extension a few months earlier with the club producing the best first half of a season in its short history.

But as the Suns’ fourth season collapsed spectacularly under the strain of injuries to key players, including Gary Ablett, McKenna knew the heat was back on him.

“All of a sudden the smoke started to come up … you could see it, you could start to smell it almost,” McKenna explained in Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast.

He had hoped for one night of respite from the strain for himself and his wife Madeline in Crown’s Palladium Room. But it wasn’t meant to be.

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE SACKED PODCAST

Standing with Suns chairman John Witheriff before the count, McKenna struck up a conversation with David Elia, chief executive of the club’s major sponsor Hostplus.

Elia had been finalising numbers for a lavish Grand Final eve dinner he hosted each year for the Suns, with invitations normally extended to Witheriff, McKenna, director of football Malcolm Blight, and other board members and their partners.

SACKED: HOW GOLD COAST DODGED AN BULLET

THE TACKLE: CAN PIES CARRY COX AGAINST TIGERS?

WHY US? MCKENNA ASKED AFL NOT TO SEND HUNT TO SUNS

McKenna recalled: “I was standing around talking to Johnny Witheriff … and Dave Elia comes over to the table and he says: ‘Johnny, Julianna (Elia’s wife) and I are confirmed for Friday night, ‘Bluey’ (McKenna) and ‘Chick’ (McKenna’s wife’s nickname) will be there. What about you?”

“John said ‘Look unfortunately I won’t be able to make it … we’ve got something already organised for Friday night’.

“We were all standing in a very tight little triangle and Dave turns to me and says: ‘It’s going to be a very nice intimate evening, Bluey’.

I said: ‘What do you mean?’ He said, “It is only going to be Julianna, myself, you and Madeline’.”

Sensing his fate, McKenna turned to Witheriff, made a sniffing sound and said: ‘Seems a bit like the Last Supper, doesn’t it!”

SLIDING DOORS

Seventy nine days earlier, McKenna’s stocks as coach could have hardly seemed more secure.

As a clearing kick shot towards the wing where Gary Ablett was opposed to Collingwood’s Brent Macaffer in the third term of the Round 16 clash at Metricon Stadium, the Suns looked to be steaming towards their first finals appearance.

Tucked inside the top eight by a game, and with Ablett playing as if he might add a third Brownlow Medal to his CV, Gold Coast was taking the game to Collingwood.

Then, in a heartbeat, and in one tackle, the Suns’ season crashed — just as Ablett did.

Macaffer wrapped the Gold Coast skipper in a tackle that buckled his shoulder and ended his season.

McKenna still jokes that although the Suns ended up winning that game, it “cost me my coaching career at that stage … the Collingwood game.”

The Suns suffered four injuries in that game — Ablett, Trent McKenzie, Charlie Dixon and Sean Lemmons — and had no rotations for much of the last quarter.

“Rotations were going through the roof at that time, and (Blight) said ‘why don’t you have no rotations one quarter?” McKenna said of a bizarre conversation he had previously with Blight, the man seen to be determining his fate.

“That was one of his pearls of wisdom. I was looking at him, knowing only Blighty could say it and get away with it.”

“(But) in that (Collingwood) game we had lost our fourth player on the bench … we had no one (left).”

In one of the grittiest performances of McKenna’s 88-game coaching career, his team held off Collingwood by five points.

It was originally cast as a watershed moment for the club; instead, it became the ultimate sliding doors moment.

GETTING THE BASEBALL BAT OUT

Without Ablett and a host of injured players, Gold Coast’s season collapsed after the Collingwood game.

They lost six of their last seven games — the most brutal against Brisbane in Round 18, after which the coach aired home truths at a feisty players’ meeting.

McKenna concedes he may have lost a few players — most notably an unnamed senior player believed to be still at the club — but knows he had to make a stand against some behavioural issues, centred around alcohol.

“There was one game in that period we lost against Brisbane … there were a couple of little things that happened off the field, not nasty, but just to the group,” he said.

“That was a catalyst for me to just get the baseball bat out.

“I only raised my voice once and fairly loudly to a particular individual and again he was a senior player at that stage. I would have thought he would have known better, and acted a lot better.

“We were going to cut him a bit of slack, and then he basically did the complete opposite. That’s what set me off.”

Emerging young leader Tom Lynch questioned if players had been “soft” which prompted McKenna to say: “Stand up everyone if you (thought you) were soft tonight’.

He recalled: “Given the result, if you look back on it, about 14 blokes stood up … (including) Dion Prestia, Jaeger O’Meara, David Swallow and I think even Tommy Lynch stood up.”

“I said ‘OK, stay standing up if you think you have been soft for the majority of the season’. There were about six or seven that stayed standing.”

The normally unflappable McKenna then raised the alcohol issue.

“That’s when I snapped,” he said. “Certainly the player I was talking about, I definitely would have lost him at that stage.”

SILENCE LEADS TO REVIEW BOMBSHELL

McKenna presented separately to the Suns football department and the Gold Coast board within days of each other in September 2014.

He was trying to stay positive.

The glass half-full theory suggested the Suns had finished with a club-best 10 wins, finishing in 12th spot. With the promise of Ablett and others returning in 2015, plus the further development of young players, he was excited about the road ahead.

“I presented and said ‘based on the scoring charts, our age profile, our games experience … the graph was going up, not south’,” he said.

“The last seven games we went one (win) and six (losses), where we couldn’t get over the line, and the numbers took a whack. I said ‘I don’t care who you are, they will take a whack (with) seven of our core players coming out, not just Gary’.”

To his surprise, the feedback was silence.

“I thought ‘I smell a rat here’,” he said. “There was no digging into the data or even challenging it.”

It was a similar situation when he presented to the board, other than the man famous for not keeping his mouth shut, then board member and now Suns chairman Tony Cochrane.

“There was deathly silence, it was like ‘any questions anyone?” McKenna said.

“Then Tony Cochrane couldn’t help himself.

“There were two questions — ‘Bluey, do you think we can make finals next season?’ My initial response was ‘mate, are you serious?’ What sort of question is that?’ That’s what I wanted to say. But I wasn’t going to say that at a board meeting.

“I said, ‘One thing I can say, Tony, is that the AFL doesn’t hand you 12 or 13 games to get into the finals. We have to redo this all over again. Now, are we better placed to do all that again? Yeah … if Gary is back, and this player and that player has their surgery and is back, and we are in the same sort of form going into next year.”

“The follow-up question was … ‘How deep do you think we will get into the finals?’

“I said, ‘mate, I’m not sure, if recent history tells me anything, I would hope these boys have been scarred in their first four years … they might want to get some redemption.”

But he stressed many sides, including Richmond at that stage, had been bundled out of the finals at their first step back in.

“It’s like another season is starting,” McKenna told Cochrane.

“It’s like the game goes up another notch … I would expect us to (take) flight, not fight. I don’t want that and I’m sure the blokes don’t want that, but I am sure that’s what will happen.”

Then Witheriff dropped a bombshell to close the meeting — “Guy, thanks very much, that was great, very incisive … just to let you know there is now going to be a review of the footy department.”

The clock was ticking on McKenna’s coaching career.

‘THEY ARE PUTTING YOUR NAME ON A BULLET’

The cynic in McKenna says the Suns held off sacking him until the week after Hawthorn won the 2014 flag because the AFL doesn’t like Grand Final week distractions.

So when he took a phone call from Witheriff on October 1, asking to see him at the chairman’s MinterEllison law offices, he knew what was coming.

“I sat down with him and he obviously said ‘how’s things going?’ I said: ‘How do you reckon things are going, Johnny? Everyone else in Australia knows that I am gone … apart from me, so I am assume that is why I am here’.”

“He said: ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much it mate”.

McKenna requested the reasons for his sacking, to which the chairman confessed the review hadn’t even been completed.

He could barely believe that response, but agreed to attend what the Herald Sun’s Mark Robinson called the worst press conference for a sacked coach in modern memory.

Witheriff embarrassingly lauded McKenna’s achievements and couldn’t explain to the bemused media why he had been culled a coach with a year to run on his contract.

Asked on the Sacked podcast if he considered Blight partly responsible for his sacking, McKenna said: “I’m sure he would have a finger (in it) at least, or some part of the knife that got me. I can’t hate (him) for it. He made the decision based on his experiences in football.”

The Suns have never won more than six games in any subsequent season and never been as close to the finals as they were in McKenna’s last year.

He’s no longer bitter, and now working in Cricket Victoria’s coaching and talent identification program, McKenna has long since moved on.

He doesn’t whinge about the AFL’s flawed set-up of the Suns, nor blame the club’s makeshift facilities that others insisted were an embarrassment and held the players back.

But two things still puzzle him.

If the Gold Coast was the basket case it was made out to be at the time, why did the AFL feel comfortable enough to poach Suns chief executive Travis Auld back to Docklands halfway through the 2014 season?

And why didn’t list manager Scott Clayton and other Suns football department listen to his pleas for more senior bodies to help ease the burden on the Suns young players? That’s a frustration he raised as late as his last football department meeting.

As stiff as he was, pragmatically, he knows the drill for AFL coaches past, present and future.

“When you sign that contract for that senior position, you know that somewhere across in the armoury, they are putting your name on a bullet and it is about how far, or how quick, or how long you can dodge that bullet for.”