Fletch

by Dustin Fletcher

  One positive in the revenge mission was the fact that we would get a chance to do it earlier than normal. With the 2000 Sydney Olympics being held in September, the AFL had brought the first season of the new millennium forward so it would finish before the Games.

  It was good news all round. With an announcement that same month, Suzie had already given me the equivalent of a gold medal and a flag rolled in one: I was to become a father.

  JAMES HIRD

  Premiership captain, Brownlow Medallist, long-time teammate and coach

  Fletch didn’t train that hard early on in his career. I’d say the first 10 years I played with him, he and Scotty Lucas would be down the back, complaining the whole time. It’s not that Fletch lacks the dedication or discipline to train. I think he just loves playing, loves kicking the footy around and that is ultimately what it is. It’s also why he’s got a naturally durable body.

  Most footballers get injured, cop stress injuries. Not Fletch. He just doesn’t get those injuries and is able to constantly train. Most seasons we’d all be out training as hard as we could and we’d break down, whereas Fletch would train at a level he knew his body could cope with and so got through.

  Fletch’s greatest weapon – and I think the best thing about his personality – is that despite nervously pacing around the change rooms before a game, he never looked flustered.

  He’s always been a cool character. My first memory of him is of a skinny, shy character, a nice kid who didn’t say a lot but who had enormous talent as a footballer. What he did for us in 1993 was incredible. Every week that season he had a star to play on: Ablett, Modra, Kernahan, Carey, Hogg . . .

  What helped Fletch was that he had great speed, fantastic anticipation and natural football ability. He would move before anyone else would move.

  From a talent point of view only Michael Long, Gavin Wanganeen and maybe Mark Mercuri are as natural as Fletch when it comes to football. The rest of us have to work really hard at our skills and endurance but Fletch would have had a supernatural knack for any sport he’d taken up.

  Even after 22 seasons, I still think people don’t appreciate how good an attacking back-man Dustin Fletcher is. His big spoils, defensive marks and his kicking ability make him the archetypal attacking back-man. Fletch is an absolutely outstanding kick, one of the best you will ever see. He can put the ball 60 metres onto someone’s chest under pressure – that’s a pretty amazing skill to have.

  CHAPTER 7

  OUR SILENT BATTLE

  ‘We’re going to be faced with challenges in the course of the year to come, but other teams are never going to be able to break us mentally or physically.’

  James Hird was standing on a sand dune near Lorne addressing his teammates, who were in various stages of exhaustion. ‘We just proved to ourselves that nothing can stop us this season.’

  Rousing as the speech was, I could barely comprehend what my skipper was saying. For the past two and a half hours I’d pushed my body to the extreme and my pounding heart, thudding head and aching limbs were now paying the price.

  There aren’t too many things I hate more than training camps. Unluckily for me, John Quinn loved them and he’d taken Essendon’s pre-season fitness regime to new extremes for our tilt at the 2000 premiership. He also seemed to have a thing for sand dunes. Being from an athletics background, Quinny worshipped the famously eccentric coach Percy Cerutty, who had trained his athletes, including the great Herb Elliott, in the sand dunes near Portsea.

  We did a Saturday morning session down there with former Fitzroy player Brett Stephens, now a guru fitness coach on the tennis circuit who had worked with world No.1 Pete Sampras. It was a 5-kilometre run to get to these particular sand dunes, which were more than 20 metres high. For 40 minutes we slogged it out and by the time we reached the top I was throwing my guts up.

  While I was clearly not as fast as the other guys, I was determined to finish. Maybe it was pride, or the fact that I didn’t want to let my teammates down, but either way it hurt like hell. When we had to go down I ended up falling over and rolling all the way. I remember then sitting in water up to my knees, cramping and throwing up. I was a mess – so weak and worn out that I was thrown around in the water like a rag doll.

  There are plenty of horror camp stories. This was just one of them. Another Quinny killer had us going to Cann River in East Gippsland, about five hours from Melbourne. The organisers explained that the course we were about to embark on took normal adventure groups about 10 days to complete; we were going to do it in three. Not a great start. And it got worse when we were given our food rations: spam and Kraft cheese.

  The first day was a 60-kilometre ride on average mountain bikes. We set off at 7 am and some didn’t finish until almost 12 hours later. There wasn’t much water, so blokes were blowing up about that, and we also had all sorts of trouble with the bikes, including flat tyres and chains coming off. Frustration in the group was building and I’d fallen back in the pack. Physio Bruce Connor was in a van following us to make sure nobody fell too far behind and he stopped to check how I was going. As he drove up the hill I grabbed the mirror on the side of his van and he towed me the whole way.

  I was pumped but a couple of hours later again found myself at the back of the pack and struggling. I went to do my towing trick again but this time my dead weight ripped the mirror clean off! I got my just deserts on the way back down the hill when I hit a crack and went flying over the handlebars into the scrub.

  It was torture, but it was only the start. The next day we did sand dunes in the morning followed by a 20-kilometre hike along the beach. By this stage the boys were starting to really lose it about the lack of water and the poor quality of the food. Some guys were chafing so badly that they started to bleed and had to go into the ocean to stem the flow and ease the pain.

  Someone must have tipped Sheeds off about the hostility in the group; he arrived that night with a few slabs of beer, some bottles of red wine and some good food. I’m not sure Quinny was too happy with the coach, but it was a smart play because the Essendon Bombers were on the brink of mutiny.

  The final day was paddling down the river on li-los. We figured we’d just drift down, but it was full on and we were at it for eight hours, paddling our hearts out just to stay on course. And if your li-lo got punctured, as plenty did, you had to sit on the bank and wait for someone to come and fix it.

  Once again the boys’ patience was wearing thin and as a group we didn’t handle the whole experience well. Quinny had wanted to take us out of our comfort zone, which he successfully achieved, but he made it clear afterwards that he wasn’t happy with what he’d got from us.

  Given how we’d struggled badly on that trip, there were low expectations and high levels of fear for our expedition to Mount Rufus in Tasmania and a training camp run by army commandos. It wasn’t pretty. One of the exercises required us, as a group, to carry a big rope above our shoulders all the way up the mountain. By day two I’d lost it with the rope so I became the designated water boy. This meant I had to carry a full jerry can of water – the only water my group would have for the day. The can was heavy and I had to keep swapping arms going up the hill. I again fell off the back of the pack and the army guy gave it to me. ‘We’ve got one, we’ve got one,’ he was saying into his walkie-talkie. ‘He’s as weak as piss.’ I glared at him and then gave him one of my own verbal sprays.

  There were regular breaks on the hike where an army man would give us tasks to perform before we could continue, and generally these involved a ridiculous number of push-ups. After about the 500th push-up I cracked: I opened the valve of the jerry can and let some of the water run out. I probably let about 4 litres go without anyone noticing. It obviously made the can a lot easier to carry and got me to the top of the mountain. There was enough water for the boys to drink at the next break but only about a litre and a half left after that – and we still had four hours to go. The boys weren’t happy but I quickly made up a stor
y about how the can must have been leaking without my knowledge. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’d dumped some water because I couldn’t carry it.

  I wasn’t on my own in my dislike for camps. I simply didn’t buy the whole team-bonding argument. For mine, you could do that just as well, if not better, over a couple of pots at the pub.

  I will concede I understood Hirdy’s point on the top of that sand dune. We’d been rattled by the preliminary final loss and were going to need all the mental and physical strength we could muster to atone for that disappointment.

  A good omen was our convincing victory over the Kangaroos in the Grand Final of the pre-season competition. The last time Essendon had won it was in 1993.

  *

  ‘Do you want to cut the cord?’ Dr Peter Ashton was motioning me over to the bed where Suzie had just given birth to our beautiful baby boy.

  He’d called me over earlier to have a look before the baby was born via caesarean section, but I’d nearly fainted. This time the little fella was screaming and hanging upside down as they were clearing his throat. I got halfway when it became obvious to the doctor that I was in trouble again.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

  ‘Ahhhhhh . . .’

  ‘You’d better go back to your chair, sit down and put your head between your legs.’

  I meekly retreated again and let the doctor do the honours with the cord. I’m not usually a fainter, but seeing what was happening to Suzie and then to my new son was overwhelming.

  We were at the Mercy Hospital and it was 9.15 am on 8 April. In five hours Essendon were playing Carlton across the road at the MCG. I’d left the door open for someone else to take up my spot in the team, but at 11 am I rang football manager Matthew Drain to tell him I would be playing. Suzie and our new son, Mason, were both doing well and resting, so I left the car at the hospital and wandered down to the ground, floating on air.

  We’d comfortably won our first four games of the season, starting on a high in Round 1 at our new home of Docklands Stadium. I’d never thought I’d be playing football indoors, but this state-of-the-art stadium had a retractable roof and we played Port Adelaide in the first AFL game there. It was an incredible experience and we celebrated accordingly, with a thumping 94-point victory.

  It was early days in the 2000 season but something big was building. Our average winning margin over the next three weeks against Richmond, Fremantle and Hawthorn was 42 points. We were brimming with confidence and keen to inflict some pain on our old rivals, Carlton. I was on cloud nine for obvious reasons and cruised through the warm-up without my boots touching the turf. Five goals to one in the first quarter made my day even more enjoyable, and by half-time our lead was 44 points. Once again Sheeds had a feel for the occasion and released me from fullback in the second half. My journey forward resulted in two goals in a 24-point victory.

  It had been a great day, and I belted out the song with a bit more gusto than normal before I quickly made my way back to the hospital to resume my new role as a father.

  As the season progressed something happened to me that I’d never experienced before. For the first time in my career I drove to games and wasn’t worried about a thing. Normally the quality of the opposition, their game plan and a counterattack for whichever star forward I was playing on would be occupying my mind, particularly in the 48 hours leading up to the game.

  Not in 2000. There wasn’t much thought about the opposition because I was so confident in what this Essendon team was doing. From Round 5 on, we kicked some heavy scores and starved oppositions with our defence. We were belting sides. In a three-week period between rounds 17–19 we won by a combined total of 271 points.

  Ruthless was one word to describe this team’s mindset. After 20 rounds we were undefeated.

  There were a couple of new faces making an impact and some older ones enjoying career-best seasons. Ruckman John Barnes had returned to the club after eight years at Geelong, while young speedster Adam Ramanauskas had become a permanent fixture on the wing. Hird had recovered from his foot problem and come back at the peak of his powers, highlighted by him winning the inaugural Anzac Day medal against Collingwood. Meanwhile, Matthew Lloyd was on his way to kicking 100 goals in a season for the first time, while at centre-half forward Scott Lucas was closing in on 50 goals.

  There was a great vibe about the group and, most importantly, we enjoyed each other’s company. For example, if we played on a Saturday night or Sunday then after our recovery session on Monday we’d sneak down to the local pub for a few quiet beers. The older guys would have one or two and then head home to their families, while the younger ones might stick around for a couple more. It was a great way to break up the intensity of the season. Sheeds understood this, and in the mid-season break took us to the snow for a few days. It certainly wasn’t for the skiing – more an escape from the AFL bubble for an old-fashioned bonding session.

  Football had become my great escape. I was facing more challenges at home than on the field. Mason had been in and out of hospital since he was born, diagnosed with an immature stomach and chronic reflux. It meant that after a week or so at home he’d started to lose weight. He simply wasn’t feeding, and every time we tried he generally threw it up. It was impossible to get a routine started and it was a hard time, particularly for Suzie. We had to feed Mason a formula that looked like Clag glue to try to line his stomach with something – anything. It was disgusting stuff and most of the time he couldn’t keep it down. It was a pointless, heartbreaking exercise.

  I’d often rock up to training with my eyes hanging out, which prompted my teammates to question whether I’d been out clubbing all night. ‘What have you been up to?’ was the standard question. I could only manage a shrug in response rather than explain how I’d been up all night dealing with dirty nappies, vomit and a partner who was struggling to cope.

  While footy was going so well, my personal life was at rock bottom. Suzie and I both got to the stage where you start to think there is no way out. I would go to the footy club and put on a bit of a face but my mind was ticking over at a million miles an hour. All I wanted was to get home because I knew Suzie was struggling. I would try to ring home to see if the baby was sleeping and if she didn’t answer the phone I would start to worry and that would increase my need to get home to help.

  Footy was getting more and more professional and we were training all day but all I was thinking about was getting out the door. My mind was on what groceries we needed at the supermarket and what I was going to make for dinner rather than game plans and how we were going to move the ball forward on the weekend.

  There were days when we just wanted to hide at home. People would knock on the door and Suzie and I wouldn’t answer. Often my family – given it was the first grandchild – would try two or three times a day to see us but we had put a barrier up. I know they wanted to help but Mason was not an ordinary baby.

  You don’t go into having a baby thinking it’s going to be easy and you know you’re not going to get much sleep but no-one could have predicted how much our beautiful baby boy’s struggles impacted on our lives.

  It got to the point where we didn’t want to talk to people because we thought we were failing as parents. And I think it is worse for the mother in those circumstances because their maternal instincts are supposed to be able to handle anything; when that didn’t happen Suzie was questioning herself, asking why she couldn’t be a good mum. As the months went on, the more reclusive we became; we knew we were losing a few people because of it but our attitude was to bunker down and try to deal with the situation as best we could. The one person I did confide in was our club doctor, Bruce Reid, and he was brilliant in the way he helped Suzie and me deal with the greatest challenge of our lives.

  For the first time all season my football team didn’t cope with a challenge in Round 21 against the Western Bulldogs. All the talk in the lead-up had been about our perfect season. Winning every home and away g
ame had only been achieved once before, by Collingwood’s 1929 team.

  But Dogs coach Terry Wallace came with a plan. He employed a massive flood, stacking his defence with extra players and completely shutting us down. It was bold and risky but, unfortunately for us, it worked.

  After scores were tied at half-time we managed to sneak ahead by 15 points at three-quarter time and I’d been able to make a contribution as a forward, kicking three of our 11 goals. But the Dogs refused to go away. They persisted, and thanks to an error from me they hit the front with 90 seconds remaining. We’d been under siege and I got a quick kick out of the pack that had a bit too much on it and went out on the full in the forward pocket. The Bulldogs’ best player, Chris Grant, took the free kick, ran around on his non-preferred left foot and snapped an incredible goal from the boundary line.

  They deserved the victory, and as we trudged off I thought it was probably a good result for us. So many times you hear about teams in local competitions, particularly at junior level, that go through the season undefeated and then lose the Grand Final. Maybe we were getting the loss out of our system. Better now than in September, I figured.

  We finished one of the best home and away seasons in history with a fantastic 21–1 win–loss record, five victories clear of second-placed Carlton.

  We went up yet another notch coming into September footy, and North Melbourne were on the receiving end in our first qualifying final. A nine-goal opening quarter set the tone and at three-quarter time we led by 101 after a 10-goal third stanza. In the end we kicked the highest finals score in history: 31.12 (198) to 11.7 (73). Lloydy kicked seven, including his 100th for the season, while Hirdy got five.

  Afterwards we continued our ritual of not singing the club’s theme song. We’d agreed not to do that until we won on Grand Final Day. Earlier in the season Richmond great Kevin Bartlett had spoken to us and relayed a story from his playing days when legendary athletics coach and sandhill svengali Percy Cerutty had been in the rooms when they were singing the song after a regulation victory. ‘Why are you singing the song?’ Cerutty had asked. ‘You haven’t actually achieved anything.’