Inside the origins of the AFL’s most intense hatred

In a meeting room at the Kennedy Community Centre a painting hangs of the Hawthorn team of the century, named in 2001.

The tattered jumper of an opposition club is in the hands of Hawthorn legend Dermott Brereton.

That torn jumper is that of the club’s most hated rival: Essendon.

Paul Salmon is also in the painting, a Bombers great who made such an impression on the Hawks in five seasons, he was named on the bench in that team.

He quickly learnt what it meant to cross the border into enemy territory.

Just months into his first season at Hawthorn in 1996, after 13 seasons and two premierships at Essendon, Salmon was asked to phone a lapsed Hawks member as part of the club’s grassroots recruiting drive to fight off a merger with Melbourne.

He launched into a polite spiel explaining the reason for the call.

“Who is it?” the person on the other end of the line said.

“Paul Salmon.”

“You’re Essendon scum, f— off”.

The answer shocked Salmon. He soon realised the response should not have been a surprise.

“What I totally underestimated was the almost palpable dislike of Essendon from the Hawthorn fraternity and supporters. I totally underestimated it and it surprised me,” Salmon said.

“I think, playing at Essendon during the rivalry stuff, I never really tapped into how much Essendon supporters hated Hawthorn. I never really got a grasp on it, but I got a grasp on it when I joined Hawthorn.”

Salmon was playing just his fifth match when the seeds of the rivalry between Essendon and Hawthorn were first planted in 1983, months before the two clubs met in the first of three consecutive grand finals.

He kicked six goals against the Hawks at Princes Park in a match which turned fiery when the Hawks’ tough man Robert DiPierdomenico elbowed Bombers’ veteran Alan Stoneham in the face on the half-time siren.

DiPierdomenico received a four-match suspension as his beloved coach Allan Jeans told the tribunal, “he doesn’t think under pressure” in an effort to mitigate the act.

All Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy did under pressure was think. There was no way he would forget, or forgive. And Jeans was in no mood to be contrite.

Another senior coach had confided to the Hawks boss during pre-season that clubs needed to find a way to curb Essendon’s tactics, which he perceived as thuggish.

The plan wasn’t to do exactly what DiPierdomenico did, but there was no way the Hawks, who had returned to their dominant best under Jeans, were going to accept Sheedy’s team’s approach without a fight.

Sheedy respected Hawthorn, but his desire to win a flag was at its peak, so he met fire with fire.

“You don’t step around Hawthorn, you go at them and you attack them. Because they are a great club,” Sheedy said when asked about the rivalry.

The next time the two clubs met, Essendon evened the score with DiPierdomenico. Salmon recalled being a teenager sitting on the bench in Bombers colours watching as veteran hard man Cameron Clayton was preparing to come on at Windy Hill.

“[Clayton’s] nickname was ‘The Rattler’,” Salmon recalled. “He stood up covered in oil. He shrugged his gown off and shimmered in the winter sun. He was coolly stretching and warming up and Kevin Egan, the footy manager, took a call from the coach’s box, and he turned to say, ‘Rattler you are …’ He did not finish his sentence. They just nodded at each other, and before he went out he was doing a calf stretch in front of my face, and he said ‘watch this, Fish’, and then went out. Within minutes Dipper was asleep on the half-forward flank.”

Salmon, whose nickname was Fish, jokes that he did two double knots to tighten his dressing gown and kept his bottom on the bench.

Rather than cool the mood, Hawks great Don Scott wrote in a newspaper column: “There’s a hitman operating in the league’s final five and unless one of his pursuers captures him on Saturday, he will be sniping in September …Most players know who I’m talking about, but the football public cannot be told.”

Radio personality Derryn Hinch then named Roger Merrett as the player Scott was referring to in his “What the Papers Say” segment on 3AW. Merrett immediately issued a writ in the Supreme Court for defamation. Years later, in 1998, The Age’s Geoff McClure reported in his “Back Page” column that the matter had been resolved out of court.

Emotions were running high as Essendon won their way into the 1983 grand final against Hawthorn.

Even the forever fair-minded Peter Knights was up for whatever was required to silence the challengers.

“They were the sentimental favourites, and we were a bit more hardened. There was no way we were going to let those Bombers get a hold of us in 1983,” Knights said. “We hit them pretty hard.”

Hawthorn tagger Colin Robertson felled Bombers star Tim Watson early in the grand final as they humiliated Essendon in their first grand final for 15 years (and Sheedy’s first as coach) to beat them by 83 points.

A rivalry was born.

There have not been peace talks since, with frequent border skirmishes between the two clubs sometimes escalating into events that make no one proud.

“I reckon it is the real rivalry for Essendon. Hawthorn and Essendon [rivalry] has been building since 1984-85 and it’s got more intense every year since,” recent Essendon president David Barham said.

The incidents involving the two clubs over the next 43 years make an impressive list, if fights can be described as impressive.

Hawks and Australian football legend Jason Dunstall made his debut in 1985 and hardly touched the ball in that year’s grand final as the Bombers tore Hawthorn apart, Brereton’s eight goals a heroic but forlorn resistance in the 78-point loss.

Not known for his emotion, even Dunstall recognised what was building.

“I came to the club at a time when they were the two best teams in the competition and the rivalry was intense, as was the personality clash between Kevin Sheedy and Allan Jeans, so it was ingrained into us that this is a team you hate,” Dunstall said.

The seed of the rivalry planted in 1983 developed deeper roots the following year when Essendon failed to shut down talk the Hawks were giving their players an illegal substance at breaks in play. An Essendon fan mentioned it to Sheedy, who asked the question of someone else, and all of a sudden, Victoria Police had launched an investigation, which more than riled “Yabby” Jeans, whose day job was as a senior sergeant with the force.

The Age’s crime writer John Silvester, who broke the story, remembers the emotion it generated among both clubs, particularly Jeans, who could barely contain his anger when Silvester contacted him.

The police had vision of the huddle and asked legendary trainer Bob Yeoman to supply the substance for testing. They also followed him home from the social club, with the police unwilling to be seen as sweeping the issue under the carpet.

The innocuous substance was found to contain eucalyptus and smelling salts.

“Yabby, whose scruples were so high, [was offended by the allegation] he would instigate something illegal or unbecoming to the great game of Aussie rules. He was just a stickler for the game, and when ‘Sheeds’ had a go at him for doing something illegal, he took great umbrage,” Knights said.

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“That [insult] filtered down from ‘Yab’ because we loved him so much, to the players. It was like a flame that was ignited.”

Silvester was more sympathetic to Sheedy, saying a few passionate Essendon fans in the police force got a little excited and by the time it was in the public domain, they had to act, particularly as the chief of police, Mick Miller, was a Hawthorn supporter.

“My own view was that Sheedy was a bit hijacked. I don’t think he was the driving force behind it but was unable, or unwilling, to shut it down,” Silvester said.

Such is the depth of feeling still on the issue, a former Hawthorn premiership player speaking off the record laughed when told Silvester’s view on Sheedy’s role. “I can’t believe Sly said that.”

Sheedy, who has previously said he feared he would lose his job because of the drama if the Bombers had not staged an amazing last-quarter comeback to beat the Hawks in the 1984 grand final, is adamant the police approach resulted in the furore. He is relaxed when asked about his role in the saga.

“All I said was, ‘what are they sniffing?’ I’m allowed to ask the question. It’s a free country,” he said.

“It was good theatre in the end. In finals it was full on and it was nothing personal.”

Jeans, a different character but equally competitive, thought a simple phone call between presidents could have resolved the matter.

He led the Hawks to a flag in 1986 as they won four of the next six premierships before Sheedy rebuilt on the run to reach the 1990 grand final and win the flag in 1993.

During that time Brereton became the villain, a provocative on-field force to match Sheedy’s off-field stirring.

He kissed Essendon tough man Billy Duckworth on the lips in 1988 only to see a Dunstall free kick reversed. He became so angry he charged through the Bombers’ three-quarter-time huddle. The next season in the 1989 second semi-final, Brereton knocked out high-flying Bomber Paul Vander Haar with a shirtfront.

“There was begrudging respect there, and players in a Hawthorn guernsey Sheedy would have loved and so would ‘Jeansy’ have liked a few Bombers,” Salmon said.

“But you put two hungry footballers in a cage, they just might try to eat one another.”

When Matthew Lloyd began his illustrious career at Essendon, the club’s main rivals were Carlton. Then as the team evolved in the late ’90s, the longstanding enmity the club had with North Melbourne took centre stage. Essendon merely mocked Hawthorn.

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“We did not have a great respect for Hawthorn in my early years because they were a struggling team and there were a lot of guys running around with peroxide hair and not really performing on the field,” Lloyd said.

Essendon had become a perennial superpower while the Hawks’ halcyon days appeared behind them as they staved off a merger and battled to dominate in the early days of the national draft.

Little did “the Velvet Sledgehammer”, as Lloyd became known, imagine he would become a central figure in the next iteration of the rivalry as Brereton’s animosity towards the Bombers spilled over to embed the hatred into this century and a new generation of fans.

Tomorrow: Snipers and lines in the sand.

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