When you’re a big, polarising club and nothing’s going right, it can feel like the footy world’s closing in on you
A few years ago, the Sunday Age columnist Tim Boyle recalled a conversation with Kevin Sheedy at a draft camp. The teenager was spooning some mashed potatoes when Sheedy sidled up to him. “Ever hit anyone, Boyley?” he asked. That was the era. And that was Sheedy. He was always wary of cerebral types. He preferred tradies and farmers. His teams, particularly in the early days, lunched on the meek. “Half the time you were playing for self-preservation,” Dermott Brereton once said of Essendon games. “You didn’t know if you would be whacked, split open, broken nose, have your ear ripped off, broken jaw.” To which Sheedy chimed in. “You went to war – absolutely. Do you want to fill stadiums, or do you want to go and play with plasticine, or get on a skateboard, or catch a wave, or listen to music?”
Perhaps Sheedy covered similar territory in his recent speech to the Victorian state opposition. But modern footballers generally don’t respond to that sort of talk. They talk about connection, about vulnerability, about walking into the club on a Monday with a smile, irrespective of the weekend’s result. Ask any teacher, coach or parent of a teenager whether that stuff resonates anymore, and they’ll laugh, just like Boyle laughed at Sheedy. It’s a very different society, and a very different generation of footballers.
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