{"id":713908,"date":"2026-06-04T03:19:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T03:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/713908\/"},"modified":"2026-06-04T03:19:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T03:19:32","slug":"james-hird-essendon-coach-why-safe-choices-wont-stop-his-afl-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/713908\/","title":{"rendered":"James Hird Essendon Coach: Why safe choices won\u2019t stop his AFL return"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 4, 2026 \u2014 11:40am<\/p>\n

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The strangest and most fascinating conversation I\u2019ve had with James Hird was about persuading cocaine farmers to grow cacao beans.<\/p>\n

It was nearly 10 years ago and Hird wasn\u2019t long out of football, the protracted drug scandal<\/a> having finally squeezed the last drop of resolve from the Essendon players and his capacity to coach them.<\/p>\n

\"JamesJames Hird near the end of his time as Essendon coach in 2015.Getty Images<\/p>\n

With the Court of Arbitration for Sport yet to deliver its final, crushing judgement on The Saga, as survivors refer to it, club and coach had agreed to part ways, leaving Hird both exhausted and possessed by a manic energy.<\/p>\n

He needed a purpose to commit to \u2013 one far removed from football.<\/p>\n

Hird\u2019s big idea, developed with entrepreneurial friends he\u2019d made while studying an MBA during his AFL-imposed year of exile, was to travel to Colombia and find villagers willing to stop growing coca plants for the cartel and switch to the increasingly scarce, key ingredient for chocolate.<\/p>\n

A detailed explanation of Colombian soil types and labour politics ensued.<\/p>\n

The plan at once sounded barking mad.<\/p>\n

It evoked images of Hird, machete in hand, hacking his way through the Colombian jungle, like a young Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone, on a reckless and potentially deadly mission to find the only people in the world who didn\u2019t have a view about Stephen Dank\u2019s chemistry<\/a> or Jobe Watson\u2019s Brownlow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m the same age as Hird. I remember thinking while listening to him on the phone what the reaction would be at my place if I came home one day and announced I\u2019d taken a redundancy from the paper and was jetting off to Central America to be the next Willy Wonka.<\/p>\n

The craziest thing about this story \u2013 and the reason I\u2019m sharing it with you \u2013 is that Hird did exactly what he said he would. He travelled to Colombia. He met with villagers who\u2019d toiled for Pablo Escobar<\/a>. He came home with the chocolates.<\/p>\n

It is worth holding that image of Hird in the jungle as you read over coming days and weeks about his chances of coaching Essendon again.<\/p>\n

The idea of Hird being reappointed senior coach seems as bonkers as the business plan he sketched over the phone that day.<\/p>\n

It is nearly 11 years since Hird\u2019s previous stint at Essendon ended at what we then knew as Etihad Stadium, in an 112-point drubbing by Adelaide. It was the heaviest loss of Hird\u2019s entire coaching career, a career which spanned fewer than 90 games, a full season\u2019s suspension and the most destructive drugs scandal in the history of Australian sport.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"Nate<\/a><\/p>\n

Before his 2010 appointment as senior coach of Essendon, Hird had never coached. In effect, he was hired to learn on the job, with his old premiership captain and successful Geelong coach Mark Thompson returning to the club as an on-site mentor.<\/p>\n

He was still learning in 2012 when Dank moved into a basement office at Windy Hill and started injecting players with stuff which might have included banned substances, although no one can say for sure.<\/p>\n

The last I heard of Dank he\u2019d left an anti-ageing clinic in Darwin with a warrant out for his arrest and was back in Melbourne providing his wares to gym junkies in South Yarra. That was a few years ago but if he believes his own bullshit, he won\u2019t have aged a day.<\/p>\n

The holes in Hird\u2019s coaching CV have been well documented by commentators better connected to the game than me. That doesn\u2019t mean he can\u2019t coach.<\/p>\n

He showed enough during his time at Essendon, particularly in the 2013 season shadowed by the Blackest Day in Sport and emerging drug scandal, to suggest he has an intangible quality that all good coaches possess \u2013 the ability to extract more from a team than the sum of its parts. Michael Malthouse reflected this week that Hird, like nearly every coach, would be better second time round than he was in his first senior job.<\/p>\n

It would be another thing, for all the reasons stated above, for Hird to convince the Essendon board that he is the best candidate of all coaches potentially available, to entrust with the most difficult job in football. It would follow no discernible logic for the club to come to this view.<\/p>\n

\"ThenThen Bombers coach James Hird and president Paul Little in 2014.Getty Images<\/p>\n

Which takes us back to the jungle.<\/p>\n

Near the end of the drug scandal, I interviewed Paul Little, the former Essendon chairman who led the club through its battles against the AFL and Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority and who in 2015 tearfully accepted Hird\u2019s offer to resign.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"James<\/a><\/p>\n

Little is a flint-hard businessman who made his pile in trucking, logistics and property development. He admired Hird and was driven to distraction by Hird, whose singular focus was not always aligned with that of his club.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is complex, he is driven, he is stubborn and he is talented,\u201d Little told me at the time. \u201cHe can be selfish. I have accused him of that. But he is ethical.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t help but get the feeling that if you got in the way of the Hirds you wouldn\u2019t be sidestepped around. It wouldn\u2019t matter who you were. They are fiercely focused on what they believe in.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Hird believes he is the best person to coach Essendon and he is not alone. If Caroline Wilson, these pages\u2019 answer to Maggie Haberman, is on the money, then Little is using what influence<\/a> he still has at Essendon, along with Kevin Sheedy and others, to put Hird back in the job.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"Former<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a strong, emotional push among some Essendon supporters to see the return of Hird. That might sound silly to people with no connection to the Bombers but the will of the mob can be a powerful thing.<\/p>\n

The most powerful force in all this, however, is Hird\u2019s will. It was strong enough during his playing days to bend the arc of a tumbling ball in flight. It was strong enough during his time as coach to cleave a football club in two. It is strong enough now, after all these years, to convince him that <\/a>he can pull it back together.<\/p>\n

Chip Le Grand is the author of The Straight Dope, a Walkley-winning account of the Essendon and Cronulla drug scandals published by Melbourne University Publishing. <\/p>\n

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\"ChipChip Le Grand<\/a> leads our state politics reporting team. He previously served as the paper\u2019s chief reporter and is a journalist of 30 years\u2019 experience.Connect via email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"June 4, 2026 \u2014 11:40am Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":713909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-713908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}