Melbourne - September 3, 2006
Mark Thompson threw his hands in the air as the final siren rang out around the Telstra Dome, the low pitched blaring of the horn emanating throughout the ground signalling an end to Geelong's season. Taking to his feet from the coaching bench, he looked out into the stands around the Dome to see how many fans decided to stick around and watch the team finish off the season on a defeat, his eyes counting senselessly as more and more supporters of the blue-and-white stood up and began to pour out of the stadium as the Hawthorn club song echoed throughout the stadium.
"There must have been only five-thousand here that quarter".
Thompson guessed the number of his club’s fans in the seats as his eyes naturally drew away from the crowd and back towards his exhausted team, all of whom had just finished limping off to the sidelines after 22 rounds of football that for this year, ultimately amounted to nothing. As the players leered at their coach as they each faltered and fell back into the changing rooms, his assistant coaches and development instructors letting out sighs of lassitude at the end of another long season as they all grabbed their white boards and too, shuffled off into the backrooms. The coach himself was one of the last to properly leave the field, taking his time to pat his players on the back and shake the hands of the young Alastair Clarkson (the Hawthorn coach) before he finally decided to withdraw quietly back into the changing rooms.
The thought of the final score was sickening;
“A sixty-one point loss”
Looking back on it, he did realized it wasn’t even the worst margin of the entire round, but a loss was still a loss, and it was tough for him to swallow nevertheless, especially after he finally came to terms with the fact that he’d have to be staying home this September to watch the better teams play it out in the finals. Hell, he managed to lead the team to two consecutive finals series in ’04 and ’05, and surely a tiny dip in form for season 2006 wouldn’t be as big as a blight as he had considered it. However, despite mulling over the growth that the squad experienced in the few years of his tenure, he still held high expectations for this season, and whilst tenth on the ladder wasn’t underwhelming (especially after Sanderson left after last year’s semi-final), he couldn’t help but feel just tired and sick after his fourth year without a finals campaign in a career of seven seasons. Letting out a deep, breath, he looked around the change room where his men were busy wiping the sweat from their brows and backing their equipment away.
“I really don’t have much to say this afternoon, so I’ll try to keep it brief. Brent, that was much better work out there this time around, but you need to focus on getting your handballs down the corridor and not outside to the wings, remember, that’s where they can cut us off. For you Abletts; Gary, that was a pretty good effort out there, but like what I said to Brent, you must focus on getting the handballs down the corridor, and Nathan, you really need to try and beat your man to the ball, no matter how hard they’re trying to block you off.”
“I realize that….”
“…and I hope you take it to mind. Paul, Corey, Steve, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again; whilst you three were fine at gathering the ball at the twenty meter bend, you need to try harder to gather the ball in front of goal because we had five rush-behind today. Those could have all been goals if we all tried a bit harder. Alright, you midfielders, especially you Jimmy, do you all remember what I mentioned at three-quarter time?”
“Punch it in towards goal?”
“Exactly. Punch it in towards goal; punch it in, punch it in, punch it in. Don’t you all worry about setting sights at the big sticks from seventy, sixty, fifty meters out, just let the forwards handle it, because doing that consistently is what carried us so far during our last two seasons, and not doing it consistently is what cost us this year. Speaking of which, Matthew, remember what I told you before half-time; ‘don’t pretend to be a midfielder’. I realize the game plan in playing outside our positions, and it’s great that you managed to bag a goal today, but only do so if we’re free through the middle of the ground and don’t have a ton of Hawks bearing down on the back-fifty. For the rest of you, I’ll talk to you all later in private because I can see that you’re clearly tired, so I want to finish off by saying that whilst it’s been a pretty mediocre season, I am absolutely certain we can hit it through next season and break the top-four. Does anyone have any questions?”
Thompson glanced around the room to see a few heads turn away from him to return to their packing, whilst others simply took deep breaths of exhaustion as they shook their heads. Despite his words of reassurance, the coach didn’t feel particularly confidant of the team’s top-eight chances next season (let alone top-four), and for his blustering of a premiership for the club in the ‘near future’ during his interview with the managers that got him this job back in 2000, several years on that promise was seeming more and more unlikely to come to fruition. After seven years with only three finals campaigns and ‘poor draft picks’, as well as forty-three years without a single premiership, the Geelong board were beginning to grow tired of promise-after-promise of ‘certain victory’ in the league, and very soon Mark Thompson would find himself at the losing end of that fatigue.
__________
Geelong - September 10, 2006
The coach of Geelong was sitting at his Belmont home in the early-spring heat, the heat of the afternoon condensing on his skin as he tried to watch the elimination final playing out in front of him; the Western Bulldogs verse Collingwood, the Magpies winning at quarter-time with a score of 36-to-26. ‘Tried’ was the key word, for Thompson at least, the game was an attempt to escape from the reality that was falling around him at that very moment; the man attempting to wear the outward veneer of composure all whilst a thousand different thoughts rocketed around in his skull, the game on the screen before him doing nothing to blow over his agitation.
For the past eight days, members of the Geelong board had begun to act on the realization of how strong the general disenchantment with head coach actually had become inside the club, the Cat’s President, Frank Costa (a long-time friend and supporter of Thompson), being forced to request his employee come in for a preliminary interview/meeting with the shareholders to discuss his willingness to soldier on into season 2007 after the losses of 2006 (particularly the final round trashing at the hands of the Hawks). It was a predicament that only begun the coach’s spiral into fear of losing his job as media speculation and rumour, all of which he couldn’t escape, only fuelled the growing certainty that he would be forced from his position, a fear that was almost confirmed like a punch to the stomach when Costa announced to the footballing world that the leadership group (a committee of shareholders, board members, assistant coaches, and select players) would perform a review of Geelong’s ‘footballing operations’.
Only two days after the loss, Thompson was called into the leadership groups offices in East Geelong for the first post-season meeting that would decide on the Cat’s plan for the 2007 pre-season drafts, trades, and general line-up of the squad, the groups refusal to bring up the review (saying instead that they were “busy interviewing members of the club” and that it “shouldn’t weigh on his mind”) doing nothing to alleviate any fear of an abrupt forced departure from his team of seven years. Hell, media speculation fuelled the most nerve-wrecking fears for the 43 year-old man, rumours such as ‘Daryn Cresswell was coming to sweep the position of head coach away’ and that ‘his delisting from the coaching roster was planned for the immediate future’ making it seem like there was more going on in the leadership group than what he was being told. Hell, with Cresswell (a former Sydney Swans player-turned-coach) even declaring that he was preparing to “come down to Victoria in pursuit of several coaching opportunities”, Thompson felt the end was just a brief stop around the corner.
Suddenly, the ringing of his mobile shook the coach out of his half-dazed, laid-back state on the couch as he scrambled for the phone on the lounge-room desk, answering the other end of the line with a startled an exhausted “Hello”.
“Yes, hello; is this Mark Thompson?”
The voice was instantly recognizable to the coach; it was the club’s Chief Executive Brian Cook, the chairman of the leadership committee and Geelong’s de facto head.
“Yes, this is Mark speaking. Am I talking to Brian Cook?”
“Yeah Mark, it’s me, how are you doing?”
Thompson forced himself into a false grin, the fast beating of his heart revealing his true anxiety.
“Um, I’m doing fine thanks. I’m just watching the Pies and Bulldogs game right now, let me turn it down…alright, yeah, I’ve been doing just fine overall. I took a look through the drafting notes you gave out a few weeks back and I’ve been spending most of my time skimming over those….”
“…yeah, yeah, thanks great Mark” the Chief Executive announced as he cut off his employee, “however I just want to cut straight through the bullshit and give you this news before you say anything else. Now, Frank wanted to give you this news himself, but since he was called away it came down on me to make this call; Mark, I’m sad to say this, because I’ve been a supporter of your tenure since the very beginning, however the leadership group has wanted you to know that your contract with the Geelong Cats has been terminated.”
The announcement came down on Thompson like a massive brick. He felt this was coming, he felt it in all the fibre of his being, and yet no amount of mental preparation could prepare him for the words that boss and occasional acquaintance laid on him. Taking a deep breath from the other side of the line, Cook continued;
“Now, I know this is coming out of left field, and I want to say that I’m sorry that you have to hear the news this way, but I wanted to give you this news straight to you today before you headed into the next meeting, and with neither me nor Frank being in there this Tuesday, I wanted you to here this from a friend.”
The Chief Executive paused for a moment, wanting the now former head coach to respond, Thompson remaining silent as he simply rubbed his brow in his instinctive manner of frustration, his silence urging this employer to continue;
“Again Mark, I’m sorry you have to hear the news this way, and personally I would have liked to see you stay for one more year at the head of the squad, however it wasn’t my final decision, because that came down to the leadership group. We’ve spent the last few days discussing and debating over here, and they’ve decided that since you were brought on to help grow and support the new generation of players, however it’s time to let you go because they’ve seen this season as a sign of things to come in future years if we retain you at your current position, and that all we need now is a coach that’ll help the team get to the premiership. I want to personally commemorate you for what you’ve done these past ten years here in growing this current batch of kids, but your promises haven’t won over the majority in the leadership group and they feel that without a swift change, the club, and its brand, will stagnate. Again, I’m very, very sorry if I’m giving you such little information, but that will be gone over on Tuesday when we issue the press announcement, and frankly I felt that the club was going in the right direction.”
Cook paused again to allow the head coach to get a word in. Thompson himself was sitting at the edge of his couch with his phone resting on the lounge room table, the mobile turned to loudspeaker as he simply rubbed his forehead in a display of frustration.
“I knew this was coming.”
The words read themselves over and over in his head, the now ex-coach letting out deep, exasperated breaths as he wiped the sweat from his face. With a mixture of exhaustion, distress, fatigue, and irritation, he picked up his phone and after letting out a long and audible breath that penned his bitterness, he finally replied to the man on the other end of the line;
“So what happens now?”
Mark Thompson threw his hands in the air as the final siren rang out around the Telstra Dome, the low pitched blaring of the horn emanating throughout the ground signalling an end to Geelong's season. Taking to his feet from the coaching bench, he looked out into the stands around the Dome to see how many fans decided to stick around and watch the team finish off the season on a defeat, his eyes counting senselessly as more and more supporters of the blue-and-white stood up and began to pour out of the stadium as the Hawthorn club song echoed throughout the stadium.
"There must have been only five-thousand here that quarter".
Thompson guessed the number of his club’s fans in the seats as his eyes naturally drew away from the crowd and back towards his exhausted team, all of whom had just finished limping off to the sidelines after 22 rounds of football that for this year, ultimately amounted to nothing. As the players leered at their coach as they each faltered and fell back into the changing rooms, his assistant coaches and development instructors letting out sighs of lassitude at the end of another long season as they all grabbed their white boards and too, shuffled off into the backrooms. The coach himself was one of the last to properly leave the field, taking his time to pat his players on the back and shake the hands of the young Alastair Clarkson (the Hawthorn coach) before he finally decided to withdraw quietly back into the changing rooms.
The thought of the final score was sickening;
“A sixty-one point loss”
Looking back on it, he did realized it wasn’t even the worst margin of the entire round, but a loss was still a loss, and it was tough for him to swallow nevertheless, especially after he finally came to terms with the fact that he’d have to be staying home this September to watch the better teams play it out in the finals. Hell, he managed to lead the team to two consecutive finals series in ’04 and ’05, and surely a tiny dip in form for season 2006 wouldn’t be as big as a blight as he had considered it. However, despite mulling over the growth that the squad experienced in the few years of his tenure, he still held high expectations for this season, and whilst tenth on the ladder wasn’t underwhelming (especially after Sanderson left after last year’s semi-final), he couldn’t help but feel just tired and sick after his fourth year without a finals campaign in a career of seven seasons. Letting out a deep, breath, he looked around the change room where his men were busy wiping the sweat from their brows and backing their equipment away.
“I really don’t have much to say this afternoon, so I’ll try to keep it brief. Brent, that was much better work out there this time around, but you need to focus on getting your handballs down the corridor and not outside to the wings, remember, that’s where they can cut us off. For you Abletts; Gary, that was a pretty good effort out there, but like what I said to Brent, you must focus on getting the handballs down the corridor, and Nathan, you really need to try and beat your man to the ball, no matter how hard they’re trying to block you off.”
“I realize that….”
“…and I hope you take it to mind. Paul, Corey, Steve, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again; whilst you three were fine at gathering the ball at the twenty meter bend, you need to try harder to gather the ball in front of goal because we had five rush-behind today. Those could have all been goals if we all tried a bit harder. Alright, you midfielders, especially you Jimmy, do you all remember what I mentioned at three-quarter time?”
“Punch it in towards goal?”
“Exactly. Punch it in towards goal; punch it in, punch it in, punch it in. Don’t you all worry about setting sights at the big sticks from seventy, sixty, fifty meters out, just let the forwards handle it, because doing that consistently is what carried us so far during our last two seasons, and not doing it consistently is what cost us this year. Speaking of which, Matthew, remember what I told you before half-time; ‘don’t pretend to be a midfielder’. I realize the game plan in playing outside our positions, and it’s great that you managed to bag a goal today, but only do so if we’re free through the middle of the ground and don’t have a ton of Hawks bearing down on the back-fifty. For the rest of you, I’ll talk to you all later in private because I can see that you’re clearly tired, so I want to finish off by saying that whilst it’s been a pretty mediocre season, I am absolutely certain we can hit it through next season and break the top-four. Does anyone have any questions?”
Thompson glanced around the room to see a few heads turn away from him to return to their packing, whilst others simply took deep breaths of exhaustion as they shook their heads. Despite his words of reassurance, the coach didn’t feel particularly confidant of the team’s top-eight chances next season (let alone top-four), and for his blustering of a premiership for the club in the ‘near future’ during his interview with the managers that got him this job back in 2000, several years on that promise was seeming more and more unlikely to come to fruition. After seven years with only three finals campaigns and ‘poor draft picks’, as well as forty-three years without a single premiership, the Geelong board were beginning to grow tired of promise-after-promise of ‘certain victory’ in the league, and very soon Mark Thompson would find himself at the losing end of that fatigue.
__________
Geelong - September 10, 2006
The coach of Geelong was sitting at his Belmont home in the early-spring heat, the heat of the afternoon condensing on his skin as he tried to watch the elimination final playing out in front of him; the Western Bulldogs verse Collingwood, the Magpies winning at quarter-time with a score of 36-to-26. ‘Tried’ was the key word, for Thompson at least, the game was an attempt to escape from the reality that was falling around him at that very moment; the man attempting to wear the outward veneer of composure all whilst a thousand different thoughts rocketed around in his skull, the game on the screen before him doing nothing to blow over his agitation.
For the past eight days, members of the Geelong board had begun to act on the realization of how strong the general disenchantment with head coach actually had become inside the club, the Cat’s President, Frank Costa (a long-time friend and supporter of Thompson), being forced to request his employee come in for a preliminary interview/meeting with the shareholders to discuss his willingness to soldier on into season 2007 after the losses of 2006 (particularly the final round trashing at the hands of the Hawks). It was a predicament that only begun the coach’s spiral into fear of losing his job as media speculation and rumour, all of which he couldn’t escape, only fuelled the growing certainty that he would be forced from his position, a fear that was almost confirmed like a punch to the stomach when Costa announced to the footballing world that the leadership group (a committee of shareholders, board members, assistant coaches, and select players) would perform a review of Geelong’s ‘footballing operations’.
Only two days after the loss, Thompson was called into the leadership groups offices in East Geelong for the first post-season meeting that would decide on the Cat’s plan for the 2007 pre-season drafts, trades, and general line-up of the squad, the groups refusal to bring up the review (saying instead that they were “busy interviewing members of the club” and that it “shouldn’t weigh on his mind”) doing nothing to alleviate any fear of an abrupt forced departure from his team of seven years. Hell, media speculation fuelled the most nerve-wrecking fears for the 43 year-old man, rumours such as ‘Daryn Cresswell was coming to sweep the position of head coach away’ and that ‘his delisting from the coaching roster was planned for the immediate future’ making it seem like there was more going on in the leadership group than what he was being told. Hell, with Cresswell (a former Sydney Swans player-turned-coach) even declaring that he was preparing to “come down to Victoria in pursuit of several coaching opportunities”, Thompson felt the end was just a brief stop around the corner.
Suddenly, the ringing of his mobile shook the coach out of his half-dazed, laid-back state on the couch as he scrambled for the phone on the lounge-room desk, answering the other end of the line with a startled an exhausted “Hello”.
“Yes, hello; is this Mark Thompson?”
The voice was instantly recognizable to the coach; it was the club’s Chief Executive Brian Cook, the chairman of the leadership committee and Geelong’s de facto head.
“Yes, this is Mark speaking. Am I talking to Brian Cook?”
“Yeah Mark, it’s me, how are you doing?”
Thompson forced himself into a false grin, the fast beating of his heart revealing his true anxiety.
“Um, I’m doing fine thanks. I’m just watching the Pies and Bulldogs game right now, let me turn it down…alright, yeah, I’ve been doing just fine overall. I took a look through the drafting notes you gave out a few weeks back and I’ve been spending most of my time skimming over those….”
“…yeah, yeah, thanks great Mark” the Chief Executive announced as he cut off his employee, “however I just want to cut straight through the bullshit and give you this news before you say anything else. Now, Frank wanted to give you this news himself, but since he was called away it came down on me to make this call; Mark, I’m sad to say this, because I’ve been a supporter of your tenure since the very beginning, however the leadership group has wanted you to know that your contract with the Geelong Cats has been terminated.”
The announcement came down on Thompson like a massive brick. He felt this was coming, he felt it in all the fibre of his being, and yet no amount of mental preparation could prepare him for the words that boss and occasional acquaintance laid on him. Taking a deep breath from the other side of the line, Cook continued;
“Now, I know this is coming out of left field, and I want to say that I’m sorry that you have to hear the news this way, but I wanted to give you this news straight to you today before you headed into the next meeting, and with neither me nor Frank being in there this Tuesday, I wanted you to here this from a friend.”
The Chief Executive paused for a moment, wanting the now former head coach to respond, Thompson remaining silent as he simply rubbed his brow in his instinctive manner of frustration, his silence urging this employer to continue;
“Again Mark, I’m sorry you have to hear the news this way, and personally I would have liked to see you stay for one more year at the head of the squad, however it wasn’t my final decision, because that came down to the leadership group. We’ve spent the last few days discussing and debating over here, and they’ve decided that since you were brought on to help grow and support the new generation of players, however it’s time to let you go because they’ve seen this season as a sign of things to come in future years if we retain you at your current position, and that all we need now is a coach that’ll help the team get to the premiership. I want to personally commemorate you for what you’ve done these past ten years here in growing this current batch of kids, but your promises haven’t won over the majority in the leadership group and they feel that without a swift change, the club, and its brand, will stagnate. Again, I’m very, very sorry if I’m giving you such little information, but that will be gone over on Tuesday when we issue the press announcement, and frankly I felt that the club was going in the right direction.”
Cook paused again to allow the head coach to get a word in. Thompson himself was sitting at the edge of his couch with his phone resting on the lounge room table, the mobile turned to loudspeaker as he simply rubbed his forehead in a display of frustration.
“I knew this was coming.”
The words read themselves over and over in his head, the now ex-coach letting out deep, exasperated breaths as he wiped the sweat from his face. With a mixture of exhaustion, distress, fatigue, and irritation, he picked up his phone and after letting out a long and audible breath that penned his bitterness, he finally replied to the man on the other end of the line;
“So what happens now?”