Hird is not Nathan Buckley thank goodness. he never whiteanted Knights. Like Worsfold and Scotts, Kniights whiteanted himself because he couldn’t coach
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Knights did only get 67 games though.
Either way.
where we are now. I think it’s reasonable if you haven’t coached for over a decade you would at least be doing something at the highest level.
I get the you don’t need too argument, but it just strikes me as a bit lazy or non committal.
I mean Malthouse was coaching when Hird last coached. Would anyone suggest we hire him?
Some lady named Jacki, hello if you are here, rang sen talking about some kind of rally at the hangar on Saturday morning in support for Hird, wtf is this real?
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But it is completely irrelevant that it strikes you as important.
Plenty of coaches have come from backgrounds that do not fit the anti-Hird mantras.
Further, very many of the coaches who were appointed with the so-called necessary experience have been dismal failures.
Whether you can coach or not depends on many factors and very often ‘recent experience of coaching at the top level’ in some capacity is by no means even a significant factor.
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No idea, sorry.
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I get the “cultist” angle on Hird - not gonna argue. But I’m a rational person, I lead a rational life, I pay my bills, support a family and trust in science. If there’s one area of my life where I don’t mind going a bit cultist then it’s footy.
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Langmuir is 55, older than Sir James, and has much less hair.
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I think @sausageroll is referring to Justin Longmuir (who is 45), not Longmire (aged 55).
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That is just not true at all.
Hird had to be dragged screaming and kicking to become Coach and it never have happened except for Matthew Knights publicly slagging him at an Essendon function. Immediately James Hird changed his mind and Knights was toast.
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From Chip….
James Hird coaching Essendon again sounds bonkers. Which is why it might just happen
Chip Le GrandState political editor
June 4, 2026 — 11:40am
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.
James Hird near the end of his time as Essendon coach in 2015.GETTY IMAGES
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.
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.
1:40
James Hird responds to calls to become Essendon’s next coach
James Hird reveals he’d “love” the coaching at Essendon, if he’s the right man for the job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then Bombers coach James Hird and president Paul Little in 2014.GETTY IMAGES
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.
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.
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.
The most powerful force in all this, however, is Hird’s 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 he can pull it back together.
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
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Never heard this before. Care to share more details
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Nick Rewioldt - How difficult to coach a senior footy club after a decade out of the game ?
Adam Kingsley - I think it will be fine, they will have staff. Head coach is around leading the staff and players in all facets of the game. The game evolves all the time and often wheels back to the past. For example we have gone back to a huddle this year on a kick out.
I don’t think being out of the game for any time restricts ability to coach a team.
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The industry I work in is full of senior management who started on the tools or as engineers.
If you know what needs to be done you can be better equipped at leading others to do it.
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I’m going to take you up on arrogance. Arrogance is not a good thing. It’s a very bad thing. Arrogance is assuming you can get what you want without working for it. Arrogance is failing to respect your opponent. Those things don’t win you games or make you a better club, they lose games and undermine the club. Just look up the definition of the word.
Arrogance is what lost us the 99 prelim. We’d beaten FC a few weeks earlier by 75 points, and we assumed that we’d do that again. FC had different ideas and they had a lot of good players back in the team, and we weren’t ready for them. We were arrogant.
Pride is different. Pride makes you work hard to achieve what you know you can achieve. When we say that someone takes pride in his work, we mean that he works hard to do his job properly, to the absolute best of his ability. That’s what we want. Pride. Not arrogance.
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Arrogance is what delivered 2000.
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Well Bluey that is where I perhaps disagree.
Players, coaches and The Board need pride in their work, pride in their performance and the self confidence that needs to come with it to improve every day. It is not arrogant to believe in yourself at all, and while in some arrogance can be their downfall, players like Matty Lloyd, Tony Lockett, Jake Stringer and others looked on top with an arrogant flair.
Supporters can be rightly proud of a successful Club, but we need to be arrogant about that, knowing we are the best and the rest are not. Otherwise we get stood on.
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Absolutely not. Pride is what delivered 2000. Pride is what made the team come together after 1999 and acknowledge that they’d let themselves down, and resolve not to let it happen again. Pride is what made us play so hard against the reigning premiers that we beat them by 125 points. Pride made us treat FC with the utmost respect and put absolutely everything into beating them.
Arrogant people are not admired. They are disliked and disrespected. As I said in the post, look up the definitions of the two words. They are not the same.
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Is the industry you work in, AFL football?
I’m surprised you name Stringer in the same sentence as Lloyd and Lockett.
You’re arguing about the meaning of words and you’re wrong. Look them up in the dictionary. Arrogance is not a quality any sensible person would wish for.
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Asking this on the forum that did the stand by hird campaign is a choice haha