And LO! after the peace of the Christmas ceasefire, the bloody saga of the Great ASADA/Essendon War will soon grind back into motion, dominating front pages and reaping yet more victims.
Even a dedicated student of the whole affair like myself, who finds the intersection of football, political power and personality utterly riveting in a simple beauty of its own existence, needed a break.
But it also gave me time to reflect. This column has pretensions to being knowledgeable about conflict and world affairs – so what war is this biggest and most public football fight of all time comparable to? Or is there none, and I’m just pissing in my own pocket here?
For a while I was going with the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It seemed to fit the bill – a brutal and long-running affair with fallout that has lasted decades, into today, both transforming the area but also throwing into light some of the eternal political realities like the Sunni/Shia split, as well as sipping off other fights, like Gulf War 1 against Bush 1.
The comparison is still apt – the bodycount at Essendon and elsewhere – and the machinations of the AFL and its power structure showing that ultimately, no club is big enough to take on the league and win (as Saddam Hussein learned to his cost.)
But there’s a better example now. Essendon are the Tamil Tigers. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of course no longer exist and Essendon doesn’t – though it isn’t out of the realms of possibility – face complete obliteration.
It isn’t that long ago, under a decade, that the LTTE under their magnificently named leader Vellupilai Prabhakaran were the richest and most powerful “non state actor” in the world. They controlled half of the island of Sri Lanka, maintained their own navy – the Sea Tigers – and even an air force that would make bombing raids on the government capital of Colombo.
What the Tigers had in reality was a state, just one that wasn’t recognised by the rest of the world. They had their own TV channel, a hugely effective international network of businesses and quasi-consulates and effective police and justice system for the areas they administered. If you’d looked at Sri Lanka in 2005 and said that ten years later the LTTE would be gone, utterly destroyed, as in no more, non existent, literally driven across the island until they were all herded into a few square kilometres against the sea and then machine gunned on the beaches, people would have thought you’d gone mad. But that is what happened.
And it happened because Prabhakaran dominated everything in the LTTE world and you were either with Prabhakaran or you were dead. The best compromise for opponents of his strategy was simply to shut up and go along with the rest.
So it is with Hird and Essendon. There was a time late last year when it appeared the club was looking to ditch Hird, actually ditched him according to veteran war correspondent Caroline Wilson, who insists her claim was accurate “at the time”. But the reality now is that Hird is still coach and if anything, the clash with the club and exit of Bomber Thompson has increased his power to the point of complete dominance.
Yet while Hird is now in effective absolute control, his domain is under desperate attack and shrinking. It was at the height of the LTTE’s reign, when it and Prabhakaran seemed impregnable, that the Sri Lankan government got its act together. When it did, the force it could deploy proved overwhelming.
Then chief of the armed forces and later President Mahinda Rajapaksa decided in the mid 2000s that the Buddhist Sinhalese government in Colombo wouldn’t be able to defeat the LTTE once and for all without international assistance.
(Its worth noting that Sri Lanka is having election soon which could see Rajapaksa defeated, but that doesn’t change the history.)
A deal was cut with the Chinese allowing them an Indian Ocean deepwater port on the island in return for massive cash investment and access to weaponry, especially mobile multiple rocket launchers and modern radar guided artillery.
The Israelis – some cynics have suggested they were interested in practising how you would exactly go about pushing a large group of people against a sea then massacring the armed elements among them until none were left – provided advisors, and crucially, drones that gave the Sri Lankan Army forces real time battlefield information, something the LTTE lacked.
The Americans, still in their “a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist” stage provided satellite imagery among “other intelligence” and gave the Sri Lankans vital diplomatic cover for what would be total warfare against the entirety of the population in the Tiger held areas.
The advance was slow and at first, during 2007 and 2008, few took notice of the gains made. There’d been government offensives before and territory had changed hands, but the Army had never come close to actually defeating the Tigers.
But as 2008 moved into 2009 it became clear that the Tigers were losing the fight. They simply couldn’t compete with an opponent backed by the two biggest powers on the planet. But Prabhakaran refused to accept reality and fought on, with thousands of young Tiger fighters massacred in suicide attacks and human wave charges. But their sacrifice was in vain, because the Sri Lankan machine moved relentlessly forward until the whole of the LTTE and tens of thousands of civilians were trapped in a tiny area to the east of the island.
There, after a few brief “humanitarian pauses” to let some civilians escape, what was left of the LTTE, which refused to surrender, was destroyed. Prabhakaran himself tried to flee through Sri Lankan Army lines in an ambulance. Sri Lankan troops were having none of it though and in an example of how brutal the fighting was, hit the ambulance with a rocket propelled grenade, not knowing who was inside. Then, in the aftermath, as commandoes were picking over the ruins of the battlefield, they came across Prabhakaran’s dazed 12 year old son Balachandran.
If you really want to, you can watch the chilling video of Balachandran being captured and given a chocolate bar by the soldiers. Within an hour the boy is executed at close range, his body riddled with bullets from the soldier’s rifles.
While ASADA won’t be asking for that kind of punishment – though I suspect Demetriou harbours some truly dark revenge fantasies – Hird’s Essendon are in a very similar position to the Prabhakaran and the LTTE in early 2009.
For all the confidence and bluster, they cannot win against the range of forces deployed against them. Hird, for so long revered by the masses, is now leading the club into a truly dark place and it seems nobody is able to stop him.
Players are going to be suspended for multiple games over the drug program of 2011/2012. The only question is how many and for how long. That nearly a full team’s worth of players from the 34 handed injunction notices are still on Essendon’s list shows how much damage will be inflicted.
For Hird himself, no matter how toe-curling and public the displays of fealty toward him by the true believers, there is nowhere to go. He simply cannot survive the suspension of his players on performance enhancing drug charges that occurred during his time as coach.
The decision to sack Hird doesn’t need to be taken by Essendon. The AFL itself can, and has before, and will again, deregister the biggest names in the game – think Ben Cousins – when it feels it has to.
The end is coming for Hird, whether he can even imagine what it will be like, or not. He simply cannot compete with the force arraigned against him.
That’s how the world works.
