Why safe choices won’t stop his AFL return

Advertisement

Opinion

James Hird coaching Essendon again sounds bonkers. Which is why it might just happen

Chip Le GrandState political editor

June 4, 2026 — 11:40am

June 4, 2026 — 11:40am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

The strangest and most fascinating conversation I’ve had with James Hird was about persuading cocaine farmers to grow cacao beans.

It was nearly 10 years ago and Hird wasn’t long out of football, the protracted drug scandal having finally squeezed the last drop of resolve from the Essendon players and his capacity to coach them.

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.

He needed a purpose to commit to – one far removed from football.

Advertisement

Hird’s big idea, developed with entrepreneurial friends he’d 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.

A detailed explanation of Colombian soil types and labour politics ensued.

Loading

The plan at once sounded barking mad.

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’t have a view about Stephen Dank’s chemistry or Jobe Watson’s Brownlow.

Advertisement

I’m 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’d taken a redundancy from the paper and was jetting off to Central America to be the next Willy Wonka.

The craziest thing about this story – and the reason I’m sharing it with you – is that Hird did exactly what he said he would. He travelled to Colombia. He met with villagers who’d toiled for Pablo Escobar. He came home with the chocolates.

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.

The idea of Hird being reappointed senior coach seems as bonkers as the business plan he sketched over the phone that day.

It is nearly 11 years since Hird’s 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’s entire coaching career, a career which spanned fewer than 90 games, a full season’s suspension and the most destructive drugs scandal in the history of Australian sport.

Advertisement

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.

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.

The last I heard of Dank he’d 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’t have aged a day.

The holes in Hird’s coaching CV have been well documented by commentators better connected to the game than me. That doesn’t mean he can’t coach.

Advertisement

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 – 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.

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.

Which takes us back to the jungle.

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’s offer to resign.

Advertisement

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.

“He is complex, he is driven, he is stubborn and he is talented,” Little told me at the time. “He can be selfish. I have accused him of that. But he is ethical.

“You can’t help but get the feeling that if you got in the way of the Hirds you wouldn’t be sidestepped around. It wouldn’t matter who you were. They are fiercely focused on what they believe in.”

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

Advertisement

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

More:

AFL 2026

Opinion

For subscribers

James Hird

Essendon Bombers

Supplements saga

Chip Le Grand leads our state politics reporting team. He previously served as the paper’s chief reporter and is a journalist of 30 years’ experience.Connect via email.

Click here to read article