Mark Harvey admits he’s to blame for Kevin Sheedy’s infamous on-field demonstration towards West Coast’s Mitchell White in round 15, 2000, at Marvel Stadium, in a game the Bombers eventually won by 32 points as part of their dominant premiership-winning season.

Speaking from Windy Hill for the seventh episode of historical podcast Fabric of the Essendon Football Club, Harvey revealed how, in the coach’s box that day, he subtly suggested to Sheedy that action needed to be taken after Mark Johnson was felled in a second-quarter incident that resulted in tempers boiling over.

“That was my fault,” Harvey said.

“Mark Johnson had come on the ground just before half-time and he must have run straight into Mitchell White. Mark’s gone down and, all of a sudden, this kerfuffle’s happened. Kevin’s gone, ‘What the hell happened here?’ I said, ‘Sheeds, you wouldn’t believe it - Mitchell White’s just whacked Mark Johnson!’

"Now, I actually don’t even know if he did; I half made it up, just trying to find a player within the vicinity of where Mark was. I said, ‘It would be good if you went down and really got behind Mark and really had a verbal crack at Mitchell White.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right.’ So, he storms out the back of the box and goes straight down the stairs - I don’t know what he’s going to do. He walks out and he’s looking at Mitchell White and the next minute he goes [and demonstrates a throat-slitting action].

“The media’s picked up on it straight away, obviously, they’re just giving it to him and Sheeds has been reported for bringing the game into disrepute. So, he’s had to go to the tribunal on the Monday night and he got fined about $8000 ($7500). He reckons he got people donating money to try and pay for that fine, and he actually finished up making money out of it.”

This was just one of many memorable and controversial moments that encompassed Harvey’s outstanding career in red and black, which began as a peroxide-haired forward in the mid-1980s and continues today in an administrative and promotional role for the club.

In between, Harvey was recognised as one of the most courageous players in the AFL, during a fine career that included the 1984-85 premierships, the 1992 Crichton Medal, a club-leading goalkicker award (1985), twice named All Australian (1985, 1993) and, in 1993, as a senior statesman who helped guide the ‘Baby Bombers’ to a famous Grand Final triumph over Carlton.

After 206 games (1984-97), ‘Harvs’ served under Sheedy as an assistant coach before taking the senior reins at Fremantle (2007-11). He was then assistant at the Brisbane Lions under Michael Voss (2011-13), acting as caretaker coach for three matches when Voss was sacked late in the 2013 season. In 2014, Harvey, one of Essendon’s most popular and loved figures, returned to his former club, intent on leading the organisation into its next successful era.    

Harvey learnt plenty under the legendary and, at times, unpredictable Sheedy, who often created headlines as a means of heightening a rivalry against an opposition club, player or coach. With Sheedy having loaded the bullets, it was then left to Harvey and his Bomber teammates to go and fight the war. Two of those rivalries that Sheedy helped to build up were against Hawthorn and Collingwood.

“This is how football was [then]. Sheeds used to turn us on the Hawthorn team. Kevin clearly didn’t like [Hawthorn coach] Allan Jeans. He didn’t like Leigh Matthews, because Kevin had played on Leigh and Leigh had either beaten him as a footballer or perhaps even physically. Sheeds gets angry with all that sort of stuff; he doesn’t like to see anyone beating him. This was part of the waging war that was evolving.

"We could go into meetings where he’d personally start going, ‘Listen, if you see him, Dipper (Robert DiPierdomenico), you know Dipper may come across as he’s tough, but he’s not. If you really want to find out…’, he’d do things like this. He’d say, ‘Chris Langford. Chris comes from a private school. Dermott [Brereton], the Irishman. Those green boots, that dyed hair. Billy (Duckworth), Steve Carey, you understand? Do you understand? Roger [Merrett]?’ That’s how it was. And as you know, he was a great manipulator of the media and he’d doctor comments in there that would agitate them.”

The brawl at quarter-time of the 1990 Grand Final against Collingwood has gone down in football folklore. Harvey was in the thick of the action and was shocked to see his fired-up coach also get involved.

“I was on the bench when the fight happened with Terry Daniher [who] hit Gavin Brown. There was a big blue and we were starting to lose control of the game and quarter-time had come. Gavin Brown’s not feeling well and he’s walking off the ground. The coaches’ boxes were right behind the interchange benches, so we walk on the ground [when], the next minute, [Graeme] ‘Gubby’ Allan, who’s the [Collingwood] football team manager, sees Gavin and he’s turned around and he’s whacked our runner, Peter Power. Gubby’s in a suit and I’ve seen that, so I’ve started getting involved with Gubby. I’ll never forget Bernie Quinlan, who was the boundary rider [for Channel 7], said to Lou Richards and Peter Landy upstairs, ‘You wouldn’t believe what’s happened! There’s a blue here and there’s also another blue on the bench.’ As I’m fighting with Gubby, Sheeds has walked in and he’s come over the top, trying to hit Gubby with a big haymaker. He’s missed him, but that’s how Kevin was. That’s his reaction to it.”

For all the theatrics and drama that encompassed Kevin Sheedy as a coach and spruiker of the game, Harvey, like so many of his teammates, remains indebted to the influence that the Australian Football Hall of Fame Legend has had on his life.

“From firstly starting as a full-time coach, and then to see how he’s marketed the club, recruited [for] the club, and then brought the club to the situation where it’s one of the most powerful clubs and along the way had success and had this phenomenal way of dealing with the media. Dealing with who should be recruited to the club, what we stand for, the fabric of people that in and around support the club, the whole chemistry of how this all works, to this day where Essendon’s playing in four or five of the biggest games in the competition. He’s just a great person who should be acknowledged, which he is, for what he’s done. He’s just the all-round person who [you can] say, ‘Gee, thank Christ I met him in my life.’”  

Fabric of the Essendon Football Club is a weekly 20-episode series powered by Liberty, featuring in-depth chats between club historian Dan Eddy and 20 of the club’s most adored names across multiple decades. You can listen via Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.