Very good editorial by none other than Patrick Smith
Reckon he's nailed it
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A million bucks for Hird to twiddle his thumbs - quite a punishmentPATRICK SMITH
THE AUSTRALIAN
DECEMBER 14, 2013 12:00AM
BACK in February when the horror of Essendon's 2012 season was made public, coach James Hird prescribed his own penalty when he said he took full responsibility for what had happened at the club. He was pulling our leg.
If Hird were true to his word, true to the principles that made him make that promise, then he would not be accepting any money for season 2014. But instead, even after agreeing his actions -- or lack of -- contributed to Essendon bringing the game of AFL football into disrepute, Hird will receive $1 million to twiddle his coaching thumbs next season. A million in advance to do nothing. If only every one of us could have such punishment meted out to us for our indiscretions.
Hird is holding his club to a heavy, most selfish ransom. Forcing the Bombers to honour a contract that somehow he had had increased by two years in the final hours of the settlement reached in August. Hird is playing the club, its officials and fans for fools. It is obvious now that Hird had no intention of ever taking responsibility for his part in a coaching regime that saw Essendon players arbitrarily given some drugs that were in breach of ASADA rules, not recommended for human consumption and others that the club still has no idea of their legality or quality.
To underline how outrageous the outcome is for Essendon, consider this: the club is aggressively seeking donations for its new training centre while paying Hird a million to work on his tan.
How Essendon president Paul Little will explain this to his members -- even to his staff -- will be interesting to observe. Little has blown a million dollars at the very time the club is on its begging knees. He should tender his resignation immediately.
That is just one side of the story. Within the last handful of days AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said he knew and was assured that Essendon would not pay Hird during his one-year suspension. It turns out that Demetriou had no idea what was happening. For Hird, the money continued to roll in, only to avalanche in yesterday.
Just how Demetriou could have been so blindsided to what actually was happening with Hird, with Essendon or even with other AFL officials is unclear. But we can say categorically that it is humiliating personally for Demetriou and utterly embarrassing for the AFL executive and the commission.
Hird has been able to manipulate his club, its supporters and members and the competition. He might claim this as a victory but the callous way he has treated the club, the reckless way he has honoured the responsibilities as coach, paints him as a man with an ego that blurs him from what is fair and appropriate. He will prove the biggest moral loser from this saga even if he has been allowed to pocket a million for mucking up his coaching obligations so flippantly.
Nonetheless, the damage Hird has done to the AFL is brutal. Demetriou is now seen as a man who cannot deliver what he trumpets. AFL Commission chairman Mike Fitzpatrick is seen as so arrogant he sought to find a settlement independent of the executive team he and his fellow commissioners had charged to facilitate.
Fitzpatrick worked with the chairman of the Australian Sports Commission John Wylie in the shadows to find common ground with Little. This triumvirate of big boys not only made a great a mess of what was already a rabble but their actions made the league and its machinations look less transparent than ever.
It was the secretive doodlings of these three men that saw everybody bar Hird strangled by a list of inducements offered to the coach. One was that he would receive his pay while suspended. The ineptness of these dealings was matched only by the hubris that drips from the men who took part.
At least it brought a nice symmetry to the biggest scandal to rot away at the AFL's standing in the sporting community. It became a scandal when Hird and nearly everybody at Essendon had no idea what some members of staff were doing. And it has ended with Demetriou and others at AFL headquarters appearing to have no idea what their own representatives were up to.
Essendon has lost much. When the club went public with the knowledge that no one at the club could tell the parents of the club's footballers what drugs had been administered to their children, David Evans, as president, Ian Robson as chief executive and Hird, as coach, fronted the media.
Evans is gone after being undermined by insiders at the club. Robson stepped down - was pushed - because he was the club's senior executive and thus had to take responsibility for what had taken place at the club.
And Hird will not coach Essendon next year, too busy counting his dollars, one to a million. Add to this a suspension to football manager Danny Corcoran, a heavy fine to assistant coach Mark Thompson, the sacking of sport science wild card Stephen Dank and the squeezing out of high-performance manager Dean Robinson and the size of the catastrophe that is Essendon is chilling.
But no less is the damage to the AFL. Especially to Fitzpatrick and Demetriou.
As chairman, Fitzpatrick has been negligent in not taking a more public role. This is the biggest moral crisis to ravage Australian football and he has barely uttered a sentence in public. Instead he whispered clandestinely to Wylie, a man whose judgment must also come under heavy scrutiny.
Demetriou might be mortally wounded. His declaration that he would happily pop into his grave knowing that Hird was not being paid for season 2014 was not his first blunder. He has been badly bruised by this controversy and this column's call on September 19 that he consider his position is only strengthened.
In the end Demetriou's biggest mistake was that he had not considered it possible a man of Hird's (previous) standing in football would not acknowledge the damage he had done and would continue to do to his club and to his sport.
Yesterday Hird made a million bucks at the same time he lost the last drop of his dignity, last dollop of respect.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/opinion/a-million-bucks-for-hird-to-twiddle-his-thumbs-quite-a-punishment/story-e6frg7uo-1226782818883#
