At the beginning of the 1993 football season the Bombers looked like crash landing. The sleek aircraft of the mid-80s that sent tremors of fear through the opposition was in danger of becoming a rust-bucket. It had moaned and creaked for the past two seasons as it lurched one way and then the other, searching for a way out of the mediocrity. The sudden loss of altitude had passengers grabbing for anything in a bid to save their own skin. Captain Kevin Sheedy was in the cockpit.
It was decision time. Keep trying to fly and run the risk of ploughing into football oblivion or set the plane down, make some changes and take off again. Sheedy chose the latter. He rebuilt the Bombers from the ground up. It was the right decision and in September that year Essendon thumped Carlton in the Grand Final.
Kevin Sheedy will coach his 500th game this season – the milestone comes up against Brisbane at the Gabba in round three. There have been many significant times in the career of Sheedy but it is doubtful that he has had a finer moment than he did in the late afternoon sun at the MCG that day. It was a season that paid tribute to his foresight and fighting qualities. It was a match that stamped him as a coaching great.
Sheedy was minus 14 players who had been with the club in 1992 when he sat down to try and put the pieces back together. Among them were retiring champions Terry Daniher and Simon Madden. The opening three matches of the season didn’t bring the results the Essendon coach was looking for – two losses to West Coast and Collingwood and a draw with Carlton. Still Sheedy continued to tinker and finally the engine began to purr.
Come Grand Final day, only 12 players from the opening round match against West Coast had survived. Sheedy wanted new parts and he found them in the form of Dustin Fletcher and Ricky Olarenshaw who both made their debuts in 1993. James Hird, Mark Mercuri, Joe Misiti and David Calthorpe were all thrown into the mix – they had 11 games experience between them. And then there was the one recycled piece to complete the puzzle – former captain and club champion Tim Watson was lured out of retirement.
To throw all this together and produce a Premiership team was a truly magnificent feat. Those who suggested Sheedy never had to work with a team that was struggling, that he never had to build a side from the ground up might want to think again. He didn’t inherit this side - he built it himself.
“It was a marvelous effort from the coaching staff and the entire club when you think about the bunch of kids we started with. We resurrected a side that was old, that was flagging, that was non-competitive in 1992 and about 2000 games of experience had recently left the club,” Sheedy said “We basically turned it around in the space of one summer and 22 matches. It was a freakish year in my life. I don’t like to label something as the definitive moment but it is hard to go past.”
