Dan Eddy is the author of King Richard: The Story of Dick Reynolds, as well as Skills of Australian Football. He is the co-author of Champions: Conversations with Great Players & Coaches of Australian Football, and The Will to Fly. Eddy is a current PhD scholarship recipient (Federation University), whose project will examine the career of AFL Legend Alex Jesaulenko, and this article is an extract from his upcoming book, 'Always Striving': The Moments That Have Made the Essendon Football Club.
As we revel in the cultural revival of our great club under John Worsfold in 2016, it is worth recalling a previous period when an “outsider” was brought in to change the culture of the Essendon Football Club. In 1971 under dual premiership player John Birt the Bombers won just four matches, plus a draw, to finish just six points above bottom-placed South Melbourne; the second consecutive season that the club had finished second last. After three decades of success (1940-1969), which included six premierships and a remarkable 21 finals appearances, the club had fallen away dramatically. They had forgotten what it took to win. The greats of the 1960s, namely Jack Clarke, Ken Fraser, Hugh Mitchell, Ian ‘Bluey’ Shelton, and Birt, among others, had retired, and a regeneration was required in order for the club to rise once again.
Recognising they needed somebody with a hard edge in order to instill a toughness on par with John Coleman’s men from the 1960s, the Essendon committee were leaning towards former player, Bob Syme. ‘Swampy’ Syme had been a ruckman during Essendon’s fine era immediately following the Second World War – when the club played in seven consecutive Grand Finals – and was a key member of the 1949 and 1950 premiership-winning sides. More recently he had spent 1971 coaching the Seconds, and was a popular man around Windy Hill. However, president Allan Hird had other ideas.
In 1971, Hird, along with David Shaw (177 games from 1959-68, including the 1962 and 1965 premierships), had been in attendance for a State game between Western Australia and Victoria, played in Perth, and were impressed by the address given to the Victorian players by Collingwood star Des Tuddenham. “I gave them a rousing address about commitment and not making excuses,” Tuddenham recalled in 2014. “Allan approached me after the game and said, ‘Dessy, would you ever be interested in coaching?’ I said ‘If you buy me a private jet I will!’ He laughed and said, ‘When we get home to Melbourne can we talk to you?’ Which I agreed to, and it went from there.”
Essendon prior to the 1970s, was a conservative club who looked after their own. Indeed, not since hiring Richmond’s Jack Baggott as its coach (1936-39) had the Bombers looked outside an “Essendon person” to coach the club. Dick Reynolds held the post for 22 seasons (1939-60), then Coleman for seven (1961-67), followed by Jack Clarke (1968-70) and Birt (1971) – all premiership players and fan favourites. It was a “monumental move,” according to Robert Shaw, particularly when ‘Tuddy’ was one of the Essendon faithful’s most despised foes from his yearly visits to Windy Hill as a Magpie player.
It could be said that Tuddenham was born to lead. A fitness fanatic, as well as a consistent and hard-nosed performer, and a man who was not afraid to speak his mind, he was the kind of leader that would say “follow me boys”. Said Tuddenham “I felt I was ready to coach Collingwood because we were the most unfit side in the history of the game. If I had have been training those Collingwood sides that lost close Grand Finals (1964, lost by four points; 1966 by one point; and 1970 by 10 points), we would have won them easily. I offered to train the blokes for Bobby Rose, and just leave him to coach, but he didn’t want to do it.”
In his first address to the Essendon players, Tuddenham was determined to make it memorable. “I walked into the rooms and said to the players, ‘Either you stay or you go. I don’t care who you are, but we’re doing it on my terms and if you want to stay you can, but if you want to go, then there’s the door; you’ve got an open clearance.” Fortunately, nobody walked out. “I knew straight away that I needed to improve the players’ fitness levels. I went there with an open mind, knowing full well that the number one priority would be to make them all work. I wasn’t going to allow anyone to make any excuses.”
Much like how Worsfold needed to record an early win in 2016 to give the Essendon supporters hope for the future, Tuddenham too knew that he needed to win over the Bomber faithful in order to improve club culture. “The first game was against the Bulldogs, at Footscray, and I had ‘Bluey’ Shelton, vice-president Jimmy Matthews, and David Shaw in the rooms before the game to hear my pre-match address,” Tuddenham explained. “‘Bluey’ always says to me that after that speech he wanted to run down the race and play, he was that fired up! When we ran out, all the Bombers supporters were on the outer side of the ground, and knowing full well that they never liked me when I played for Collingwood, because I used to hit a few of their players, I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to hit someone right in front of them to win them over.’ Dougie Hawkins was coming towards me on the outer side and I just gave it to him, hit him across the neck, and you should have seen the Essendon supporters: they went up in the air and I knew I’d gained their approval. They’d said ‘he’s for us’, and it was just super.” Essendon won by 61 points.
In all, the Dons would win 14 games in 1972 good enough for a fifth-placed finish and an elimination final against St Kilda. With Geoff Blethyn kicking 107 goals the club had the third most potent forward line in the league. “There was a real buzz around the place during my first year,” Tuddenham said. While the dream run came to an end against the Saints, who won the elimination final by 53 points, Tuddenham had achieved his first goal of improving the fitness of the playing group with a finals appearance an added bonus. One of the keys to the improvement in fitness can be attributed to Tuddenham’s decision to bring in Stan Nicholls as the fitness coach. “He was super in what he did for the players,” Tuddenham said. “No-one had even heard of a speedball before Stan and I introduced one at training.”
Despite losing Blethyn, who moved to Western Australia for business interests, there would be another elimination final loss in 1973 (67 points to St Kilda once again), as Tuddenham and Matthews set out on a recruiting drive that would bring in the next crop of champions to wear the red and black. “Collingwood knew nothing about recruiting, whereas at Essendon Jim Matthews and I used to spend countless hours recruiting players all over the State,” Tuddenham said. “The recruiting was just terrific at Essendon. We went and bought players. Our metropolitan recruiting zone was sensational and it allowed us to sign the Madden brothers, Simon (1974, 378 games) and Justin (who would later debut in 1980, 45 games), Garry Foulds (1974, 300 games), Bob Newton (1973, 59 games), the list goes on. We didn’t offer them the world, but they all came. Whilst in the Wimmera region we signed Greg Perry (1972, 63 games), Dean Hartigan (1974, 36 games), Robert Amos (1973, 54 games); I think in total we signed eight players in the Wimmera region alone. Hugh Delahunty (1971, 46 games) is another, and he later became the Victorian Minister for Sport.” They also introduced Tasmanian Robert Shaw (1974, 51 games), and West Australian ruckman, Graham Moss (1973, 84 games), a move which Tuddenham says “was huge for the club.” Moss would win the Brownlow Medal in 1976.
While building blocks were starting to take shape the side missed the finals in 1974 and, by 1975, Tuddenham’s relentless approach to training had started to wane on the players. The tipping point, according to some of the players, came after an 80-point loss to Carlton, in round 14, when, having conceded 14 goals in the second quarter alone, and 27 for the match, Tuddenham told the players at training they had to crawl around Windy Hill. “I said to them the following day, ‘You were on your hands and knees yesterday, so you can get on your hands and knees again today,’ and I made them crawl half-way around the ground,” Tuddenham explained. According to Ken Fletcher, “he lost every single player for the way he treated us that day. And if everyone had not got down and done it, then no-one would have played the next week. None of us liked doing it, but we all did it. It was really degrading. The most degrading thing I have ever done in my life, in fact.”
Said Tuddenham: “I’d crawled around the ground with them. It was one in, all in.” Moss says that, even though it “made headlines” at the time, “it wasn’t a big deal to me. We just did it, it wasn’t a big deal and I don’t recall anyone really getting offended.” And Foulds said, “When you’re young you just go along with it and so I figured this must be what happens when you get beaten badly. It took us a while to get around the ground, that’s for sure and I know that a few of the other players were not too happy about it.” Tuddenham adds “We won the two of our last four games, so it must have had some effect!”
While there are conflicting views of how Tuddenham’s directive to crawl around the ground was received, by season’s end a number of players threatened to leave the club and so the committee was forced to act. At the end of 1975 Tuddenham was sacked; the Dons having again missed the finals. Of his 90 matches in charge, Tuddenham had won 47 and lost 43 for a winning percentage of 52.22. “During 1975 I wanted to sack a lot of players, to have a clean-out so to speak, because I wanted to start again and refurbish what we started in 1972,” Tuddenham said. “But the players jumped up and down about it, and the committee accepted their view and not mine. Whether they were right or wrong, we’ll never know. But the club decided they wanted to sack me and that’s fine, it was their decision.”
With the passing of time, today ‘Tuddy’’ holds no grudges against the club which gave him his first opportunity to coach at VFL level. He would later coach one season at South Melbourne, in 1978. “It was a very special time of my career, the time I spent at Essendon,” he said. “We developed players and we turned the club around in regards to the supporters, the spirit and the way the club ran, on and off the field. The work of Jim Matthews, Bob Syme and David Shaw, among others, was what really helped to turn the club into the force it later became.” Robert Shaw wrote that Tuddenham “inspired Essendon and Essendon people loved the spirit of his teams ... He was inspirational and I loved him as a coach.”
Over the next few weeks essendonfc.com.au will be publishing more extracts from Dan Eddy's upcoming book, 'Always Striving': The Moments That Have Made the Essendon Football Club.
