Behind the meeting that ended the North Melbourne Kangaroos tenure of Alastair Clarkson as president Sonja Hood and Todd Viney met with him at his home
Todd Viney and Sonja Hood sat opposite Alastair Clarkson in his Brighton home on Tuesday and delivered the news: He was sacked.
“He didn’t see it coming,” said Viney, Clarkson’s old friend and teammate whom he brought to North Melbourne as his football director and consigliere.
It was figured that was half the problem: Clarkson should have seen it coming. North were surprised Clarkson was surprised, but they were not surprised he was angry.
Viney and Hood were as blunt in the unsparing press conference as they had been in Clarkson’s kitchen. He had tried to change but the harder he pushed to fix things, the worse he made them. The messaging got muddier, the meetings longer and more rambling, but the game plan – as much as it swapped and changed – still had the same gaping holes in it.
They had players who had affection for the coach but were maddened by the coaching. The only consistency of the game plan was a failure to fix the same problems. They weren’t playing the modern game, and he was an over-worked coach who didn’t delegate enough and was still emotionally scarred from the Hawthorn racism scandal. And that was how they put it diplomatically. This was a mate.
Evidently, Clarkson knew what the problems were but didn’t think his actual job was at stake.
It was not that he was deaf to the feedback, it was that he couldn’t fix it. The club’s leaders were not deaf to the feedback, and they certainly acted to fix it.
The club had spent weeks canvassing players, coaches and staff about the senior coach and the club’s leadership before coming to their decision to sack yet another coach, this time one who arrived at the club with the unimpeachable record of being an alumnus who had gone away and won four premierships.
Clarkson had been hailed as the messiah when he returned to lead the club. He stopped the revolving door of coaches from spinning, and his CV and reputation gave the club the comfort of a maturity and authority it had lacked. He provided ballast to a listing club.
Club president Hood commenced Wednesday’s press conference praising Clarkson for giving the club this stability and insisting the decision to hire him four years ago was as correct as the one to sack him was now. He was the right man for then, the wrong man for now. By the end of the press conference, it seemed stability was the only thing he gave them.
If Clarkson’s messaging to the players had become muddied, there was nothing muddy about the club’s opinion on where things went wrong with the coach and why he was sacked. The press conference was brutal.
“Unfortunately, there’s still some gaping holes in the game plan which we have been looking to try and fix,” Viney said.
North’s frustration is two-fold. It is with what they saw inside the four walls in how the game was being explained and then the results they were not getting. They frustratedly looked at how Hawthorn, the Brisbane Lions and Melbourne had bounced, yet North puddled along incrementally taking small steps but not big leaps forward.
“There’s some key metrics, which I’m not deep diving into now, that we haven’t been able to arrest, and therefore we haven’t been able to make the jump. I think if there was one thing that ‘Clarko’ did was he tried too hard in trying to fix that, and then what happens is we get into more meetings, more information, and the players at the end of the day become a little bit confused, and we don’t get the cohesion that we need to win more games,” Viney said.
“The main issue has been for us to take that next step in trying to fix some of the underlying problems in our game plan. In trying to educate that, messages have become a little bit muddier, and players feel like they haven’t been clear.
“There’s still parts of our game plan that we haven’t been able to improve in the four years, and that’s some stuff that we need to get right when we talk to the next coach to bring us in line with where the modern game is right at the moment. We need to get better.”
No one will doubt that.
The amount of detail at the press conference for their reasoning, the public nature of which will wound Clarkson as much as the decision itself, emanates from a desire to explain to fans why it is the club has sacked the coach who was brought in to break the pattern of the club sacking coaches.
The fact they will pay out only six months of his $1.2m contract for next year will ameliorate some of the angst that might be felt at another payout to a coach.
The position of Viney remains intriguing. A close, long-term friend, it was Viney who had to deliver the feedback on Clarkson to the board. He had enormous empathy for his friend for what he had been through and the toll the Hawthorn scandal had taken on him. And it was he who had to give Clarkson the news when the club sacked him.
He was initially vague about whether, as football director, he made a recommendation to the board on Clarkson’s future, noting he was aware of the feedback and the conversations being had, but tellingly added: “I just feel like we do need a new voice to help us to the next part of where we’re going”.
Viney came into the club with Clarkson but will not leave with him. He wants to stay, and the club wants him to stay.
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Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.