|
With two and a half decades of this man at the helm, you would have thought that the Bombers hierarchy would have been fairly savvy to some of the tricks he used to keep himself in power for so long. But no.
With a queue of highly rated candidates putting forward their presentations of exactly how much work would have to be done to get the Bombers back at the top end of the ladder, Knights, with his very impressive 36% win record at his two second tier football clubs waddled in, told them people were over reacting and that he could have them back in the winners circle in no time at all.
Six months later, he's clinging to a mathematical chance of making the eight using the same old strategy of hoping Lloyd and Lucas will kick a bag each and making use of the contract which saw the club own Dustin Fletcher until his 48th birthday.
It's the greatest sales job in history (with the possible exceptions of bottled water and Subi Burgers).
Of course, even the simpletons running Essendon wouldn't have fallen for the diabolical spin of Matthew Knights if Fremantle hadn't poached their 12th favourite son, Mark Harvey, from right under their noses.
Under attack from people too scared to venture outside the Melbourne CBD, this week, Harvey hasn't been afraid to take the hard decisions as he shapes Fremantle in his own image and sets them up for a likely premiership some time before the end of the decade.
Already he's injected much needed pace into the centre with a school of East Fremantle youngsters, he's turned Aaron Sandilands into a bone crushing, ruck behemoth. He's turned Matthew Pavlich from Australia's next Minister for Foreign Affairs into a bloke that will give a five minute spray to a teenage kid until he has him on the brink of tears, and he’ll enjoy it. He's even managed to get Luke McPharlin to dominate the Fremantle defence without pushing anyone in the back.
|
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
|
Sure, there are one or two things he still needs to work on, like kicking more points than the opposition, but he's a patient man and he's barely 6 months into the job full time.
But this week, long term plans are going on the shelf for a few days. There's a lot of bitterness between Fremantle and Essendon. Harvey begged them for years to have Sheedy committed and give him the much coveted head job but they refused until he trimmed his mullet.
Aside from the fact that he'd cut the mullet off 6 years earlier and no one there had actually bothered to look him in the eye, he knows he would have taken Essendon to a flag, Why the rest of the club is bitter at them is because that flag probably would have been 2006 and bloody John Worsfold would be hosting a children's game show on Channel 7 by now.
Of course, there's plenty more bitterness at the Dockers. Mark Johnson was turfed out on the street at the end of last year when Matthew Knights paid him back for a bit of rib work he gave him in the late nineties. Kepler Bradley had to spend December on the dole because Knights refused to do a trade with Fremantle unless it included Paul Hasleby, Matthew Pavlich or a $30 million dollar yacht parked off the coast of Port Melbourne. And worst of all is Dean Solomon, who left his The Best of Roxette cassette in his locker when he left and, to this day, the club have refused to give it back to him.
So it's not going to be a pleasant affair on Sunday...for Essendon. For starters, there are a lot of Fremantle players with carry over points just waiting to be recharged before the 2009 premiership tilt. Then there is Adam McPhee just walking around with a head that screams 'please hit me'.
But more important than seeing Essendon players injured beyond the capabilities of Perth's backwater medical fraternity, Mark Harvey will be more than happy just to see his side do to the Bombers what they did to Dean Laidley's mob last time they played on a consistent, AFL standard, surface.
A quarter of not getting the ball should see Matthew Lloyd's pants up around his chest by the end of the first term, as he nervously tugs them up watching goal after goal send the well rested Fremantle cheersquad into a frenzy. By half time he'll need some sort of respiratory device as the waistband heads well beyond his mouth and nose and by three quarter time, he'll be giving himself an atomic wedgy.
Fremantle might ease off in the last quarter out of respect for the aging champion but by then it will be too late. Fremantle will have wiped the floor with them, will take a week off and then come back to do some more steady rebuilding for the second half of the season.
|
.jpg)
Back in the day, Kevin Sheedy was widely considered the greatest salesman Aussie Rules had seen since Tom Wills convinced his rugby playing mates that sniffing each other’s bums was a bit gay. But the AFL pensioned Sheeds off at the end of the year when he started wandering onto the MCG at night to recreated various moments in Timmy Watson's career, in nothing but the number 32 Guernsey and a belt to hold his hip flask. But for all his achievements and his magnificent record, Sheedy has been outdone by a blokes who's playing career was even more mediocre than Sheedy's...Matthew Knights.
