Essendon senior official Neil Craig is adamant James Hird will be senior coach next season while casting further doubt on the future of 2014 interim coach Mark Thompson.
In welcoming triple Essendon premiership player and former Fremantle coach Mark Harvey back as an assistant, he said: “Clearly James Hird is, and will be, the senior coach of Essendon for 2015.” He added: “I think we’ve got enough people there to cater for James’ needs.”
Thompson, recently returned from an overseas holiday, was senior coach in 2014 while Hird served a 12-month suspension for his role in the supplements scandal.
Craig, head of coaching development and strategy, denied it had been imperative to have an assistant with previous senior coaching experience to support Hird, but said Harvey’s capacity to “handle the intensity and pressure around the senior job would be valuable”. “No doubt at all in 2015 to have that experience around James and a calming effect, just to realign people … is going to be important,” he said on SEN on Wednesday.
Craig said Thompson had had discussions with chief executive Xavier Campbell and president Paul Little two days ago about his next step in football.
“It’s really important for Mark if he wants to stay in footy – and he wants to stay in footy at Essendon – that he has what I would call a meaningful job that gives him energy and passion to get out of bed in the morning.
“There are a lot of jobs in footy that look great on paper … but in the end the most important question is, ‘what does Mark Thompson want to do?’ If all that can be married up we continue. If it can’t, we don’t continue. Hopefully in the next few days a decision will be made on that.”
Thompson made it clear at Essendon’s best and fairest function that he did not want to return to a senior assistant role.
Essendon faces a potentially difficult start to the 2015 campaign, which could be exacerbated depending on the fallout from the anti-doping investigation.
The Bombers will travel to Sydney’s ANZ Stadium in round one to face the Swans, a team it has not beaten since round 20, 2011. It then tackles Hawthorn at the MCG and Collingwood in the Anzac Day clash.
Potentially compounding this start are any suspensions resulting from the show-cause notices issued by the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority to 34 past and present players, of which about 18 are still at the club.
If players are found to have been administered the banned peptide thymosin beta-4, it appears more than likely they will be suspended for at least the opening month of the season.
Essendon maintains the players were not given anything illegal. The players and their legal teams are still debating what their next move will be. If all 18 players were banned, that would leave the Bombers with about 27 players on their list.
This would require the likes of Brendon Goddard and Paul Chapman, who were not at the club during the 2012 supplements program, recruits Adam Cooney and James Gwilt, and David Zaharakis, who was not a part of the program, to lead the team.
The AFL has said it has a contingency plan should there be mass suspensions but has yet to publicly disclose what this would be.
Kyle Hardingham, Sean Gregory, Johnny Rayner and Leroy Jetta were delisted by the Bombers on Wednesday.
