Dreaming the dream

This piece was published in The Football Record on Sunday before the AFL game between Essendon and Carlton at the hallowed MCG in Melbourne. Close to 90,000 people came to the game. To be published in The Football Record was one of the great thrills of my writing life. From when I was a small boy going to the football, I would buy The Football Record outside the ground and before the game, I would read it carefully if anxiously, for signs of what may happen in the next couple of sacred hours. And now here is the Record and here I am inside it, writing of my life—my long life—in football.

And so I am publishing my Record article here on substack. It will not be for everyone, I know that. No matter. I like it very much.

There was a time when Collingwood and Carlton were the two clubs that were most intensely disliked—I do not want to use the word hated—by Essendon supporters. On the eve of this big game between the Bombers and the Blues, I want to say this: The Blues have left behind the Pies as the team we Bombers supporters can’t abide.

There are reasons for this, among them the 1999 preliminary final which Carlton won by a point with a vastly inferior team that went on to lose the Grand Final to North by 35 points. The pain of that loss comes back every time we play Carlton.

No loss has subsequently hurt more because the Bombers were so clearly a great side—they lost only one game in the 2000 season with virtually the same players—and a better side than North, the lucky premiers.

Looking back a quarter of a century to that game against the Blues, I feel like it marks the start of the unfulfilled dreams of us Bomber supporters, even though we were premiers in 2000.

This great side should have won multiple premierships. It didn’t. Premiership players left or were told to go. The Bombers became a middling team that played its last Grand Final in 2001 and since then has never threatened to be a premiership contender. And now it has been 20 years since it has managed to win any final.

But the main reason we Bomber supporters despise Carlton is that in 2013, that year of peptide hell that eventually saw Jobe Watson stripped of his Brownlow Medal and James Hird pushed to the brink of suicide, Carlton moved up into the eight when the Bombers were thrown out of the finals. Carlton, a team that did not deserve to play finals.

A generation of Essendon players had their repuations tarnished, their careers wrecked by the peptides durgs saga, and James Hird, perhaps the greatest Essendon player of the past half century was left wounded and suicidal and alienated from the club he had so brilliantly served. And Carlton, in 2013, in that year of pain, was the beneficiary.

Here we are, 11 years later, on this King’s Birthday eve game between Essendon and Carlton and for the first time in a long time, both teams are serious finals contenders, perhaps Carlton more so than the Bombers but who knows?

 I believe Carlton is a serious finals chance, perhaps even a chance to win the big one, but is Essendon a serious finals contender?  Who knows and it is hard to even dare to hope, but what I do know is that for the first time since 2013, it feels like perhaps, perhaps, that time of trauma and devastation, the years of unrelenting gloom, of crushed hopes and unfulfilled promises, may be ending. The scars of that time are still there—they will always be there until Hird and Bomber Thompson too come back to the club and are welcomed back like the legends of the club that they are —but maybe the scars are now healing and boys and girls, dressed in their Bomber gear are dreaming dreams of victories, even in finals that are not far-fetched, unrealisable fantasies. More than anything, I want this for my grandson who is eight years old. I want him to have these dreams unspoilt by memories of the club’s darkest past.         

Memories. Most memories dim with the passing of time but a supporter’s memories in my experience, grow more vivid with each passing year and for me, many years have passed since my mother bought me an Essendon jumper at the Victoria Market.

It was a couple of sizes too big, but it didn’t matter.  It was love at first sight, love for that black woollen jumper with that lovely and powerful red sash across it. Red and black, at that moment, I could not imagine two colours more suited to each other,

My mother was a refugee from Europe and knew nothing about football. She bought the jumper because it was black and black was a good colour for a kid who regularly played games that led to dirty clothes.

And so it was on that my fate was sealed. Over the years growing up, I outgrew that first jumper and many more. Year after year, I went to the football with a bunch of kids who are now grandfathers like me and still we go to the footy together. Our children come too and now our grandchildren are starting their Bomber journeys. Even at the worst of times, we went to the footy together—in the years of ordinariness during the 1970s for instance when Essendon was a conservative suburban club just muddling along before Kevin Sheedy came along in 1981and transformed it into a national football powerhouse.

 We went to the footy together, my friends and I and our  children came too, even in the time of darkness in the seasons of nothingness after 2013 when we were a laughing stock and our kids, I feared, silently cursed us for inflicting on them a love and a commitment to a club that had so badly let our players down, those young men who had thought they were living their dreams but in the end, were trapped in nightmares. which was the worst thing, but that had also let us dreamers down.

You know commentators keep harping on about the fact that the Bombers have not won a final since 2004 and that is true. But I have come to think of Essendon not in those terms. Yes, it is a club with 20 years of little or no success, but I could live with that, and I have lived with that lack of success in the past and still had hope which is the real measure of a true supporter. 

But the last decade has been a decade of pain and a decade of no hope. During this time, my son and I grew closer, though we had always been a sort of father and son team in our love for the Bombers.  We grew closer still after 2013, bound together by our shared anger and sadness at what had happened to our football club.  Sometimes, my son and I talked about the possibility that it was over for us, this love for the Bombers, that perhaps it was time to give up, let our memberships go, stop going to games, bid farewell to our footy friends and ..I don’t know, live our lives as if Essendon did not exist. But we didn’t go down that path. We could not, because our love for the Bombers was precious, father and son precious.

And now, Is it finally over, those years when Essendon was a club that churned through coaches and staff, a club that players wanted to leave rather than join? Is it finally over, the peptide hangover that scarred so many people including legends of the club?

At the end of last season, when the Bombers had fallen in a heap in the run home, destroyed by GWS and Geelong and Collingwood, having earlier in the season offered us Bomber supporters the possibility that the hangover years were done, Brad Scott said that Essendon players had no real idea what it meant to live the life of a professional athlete.

It was a most striking and challenging thing to say, not so much about the players, but about the club and its culture, about the board and about its senior management and about its coaches and football managers. I think what he was saying was that the club was still recovering from the drug scandal. Players had been forgiven, were let off lapses in discipline because the club had failed in their care of many of them.

Standards were lowered, what was required of players was less than what was required of them at successful clubs, because players at Essendon had suffered so grievously. The fabric of the club, its culture had not yet been repaired. The scars had not yet fully healed.

When I think about all this, my heart goes out to Jobe Watson who I believe was robbed of a Brownlow Medal – the biggest individual award on football- he fairly won and to James Hird, that most graceful and powerful and charismatic of football greats who remains hidden away from us Essendon supporters who love him. 

And my heart aches for Dyson Heppell that most decent of young men who is the last player still playing who lived through and paid a terrible price for the peptide debacle and its aftermath and who in close to 250 games, must have wondered over the years—for he was a terrific footballer—whether he made a mistake sticking with the Bombers.

What I hope, what all Bomber fans hope is that the board and the senior management of the club are united, that they share a vision for the club’s future, that they are there to support the coach and his coaching team and that  everyone understands their duty of care to the players and at the same time, that they are setting standards and teaching values that these young men understand will make them not just better players but better human beings.

A while ago, Dyson Heppell was asked how he thought things were going this year, how was he feeling, was he happy.  Heppell smiled that open uncomplicated smile of his and said: `No doubt, no doubt, I am happier than I have ever been.’ When I heard this, I thought that perhaps the time had come to dream modestly, circumspectly, but dream nevertheless.

And it feels right that we are playing Carlton on this King’s Birthday eve when a crowd of over 90 000 is likely and both teams are a real chance to make the finals. The Bombers cannot redeem the past, cannot take back 2013 and its aftermath.

What we can hope for is a game in which the Bombers play with the sort of grit and determination and commitment to each other that they have shown so far this season. The past can’t be redeemed but neither do we need to live in it. 

All that said, a win would be most welcome. Go Bombers.

Michael Gawenda is an award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent and was the Editor of The Age from 1997 to 2004.  He wrote VFL match reports for the Sun News Pictorial in the 1970s.

Postscript: Essendon lost the game, but the team played with urgency and belief. I am heartbroken but not without hope.