Snipers and lines in the sand: How Lloyd’s bone-crunching bump got the wrong man

Essendon legend James Hird breathed in his club’s rivalry with Hawthorn as a 10-year-old when he attended the 1983 grand final to watch his beloved Bombers. He wanted to leave at three-quarter-time and cried for hours afterwards.

His grandfather Allan Hird snr had actually played 14 games with the Hawks before he became a premiership player in 102 games at Essendon, and later club president. He instilled in Hird what Hawthorn meant to the red and black faithful.

“He disliked Hawthorn intently. That’s where it all started, not because of what happened at Hawthorn but because of the Essendon-Hawthorn rivalry,” Hird said.

James Hird’s enmity towards Hawthorn deepened when he saw Robert DiPierdomenico knock out Kevin Walsh in the 1984 grand final before the drought-breaking victory was completed in the final quarter. He then savoured the 1985 flag.

When he arrived to play at Windy Hill in 1992, the rivalry was in his blood.

“I certainly disliked them as a child and that only motivated me to play well against them,” Hird said.

By the time he lined up alongside Matthew Lloyd at the MCG in round 11 2004, the club had dominated Hawthorn for a decade, beating them in their eight previous encounters, which included the 2001 preliminary final.

The Hawks had proved no match for Hird and Lloyd and their tough set of teammates. After another loss to the Bombers in 2003, club legend David Parkin was asked about the group of young Hawks.

“They should be home with their mothers in a real sense,” he said. The “mummy’s boys” headline screamed from the back of the paper.

The pressure was on midway through 2004. Essendon were fifth and the Hawks on the bottom. Their coach, Peter Schwab, who played in three Hawthorn premierships and each grand final against Essendon, was battling to keep his job.

The trend of embarrassing Hawthorn continued in the first half as Lloyd kicked four goals and a 32-point lead opened up for the Bombers.

As the lead built, Mark Johnson, one of Essendon’s many enforcers, slung Hawks ruckman Robert Campbell to the ground in a tackle and no one remonstrated. Just before half-time Johnson kicked a goal, charged at Lance Picioane and sat him on his bum. Again, no one in a Hawthorn jumper reacted.

From the stands, Hawks great Dermott Brereton, a board director, and Schwab, the coach, saw red.

The next time they saw that colour, they wanted it to be Essendon blood.

So Brereton headed to the rooms to get into the ear of a couple of senior players at half-time. They were like kindling being lit. Schwab’s half-time address added petrol.

Ben Dixon was not a fighter, but he was an experienced player who had played in each of the eight previous losses to Essendon. He had never seen Schwab so angry.

“[Schwab’s] eyes were rolling before he got through the door to let it rip,” Dixon said. “Dermie was down there breathing fire as well.”

Luke Hodge was in just his 45th match and his third against Essendon. He was well-versed in what the Hawks thought of the Bombers as Peter Knights annually emphasised the rivalry when he welcomed every new person – players and officials – to the club. Hodge heard the spiel at then president Ian Dicker’s place in Mount Eliza soon after he was drafted.

The dual Norm Smith medallist listened, but feeling what it meant made all the difference.

“It is not until you are out on the ground and both supporters are going hammer and tong [that you understand],” Hodge said.

Schwab says his message to the team about the lack of response to seeing Campbell slammed into the ground was simple. “If that happens again we have to stand up to them,” Schwab said. “It got a bit out of hand.”

Others in the room recall Campbell Brown’s eyes rolling in the back of his head. They also said Richie Vandenberg, who became Hawthorn skipper the next season, was a genuinely tough young man.

It was just two minutes into the second half when Hawthorn’s Chance Bateman crashed into Jason Winderlich and the game erupted into a brawl on virtually the same patch of grass a previous generation had fought on in the 1985 grand final.

Vandenberg threw punches into a pack as almost every player converged, with now Bombers president Andrew Welsh, who enjoyed mocking the Hawks as eastern suburb types compared to the roughhouse Bombers, the first on the scene to stand up to Vandenberg.

Brown then struck Winderlich as he left the ground.

Lloyd didn’t like what he’d seen from Brown and a feud between the two, who are now friends, began.

“He hit Winderlich and I said on Triple M radio it was one of the worst things I have ever seen in football. That triggered the start of our dislike towards each other through that period,” Lloyd said.

Five players were suspended for a combined 16 matches in that notorious “line in the sand” game.

“That [game] was at another level,” Knights said. “I was around the club in the immediate aftermath. It was a case of batten down the hatches and let’s stick together. [The rivalry] was definitely rekindled.”

Lloyd angered Brown further when he knocked out young Hawk Josh Thurgood in their first clash the next season, when a brace Lloyd wore on his forearm smashed into Thurgood’s face as the pair attacked the ball.

Brown would wait until later that season to lay into Lloyd, prepared to cop four matches to let him know what he thought.

The tables were beginning to turn, too, as Essendon began to struggle on the field towards the end of Sheedy’s reign and the Hawks re-emerged under Alastair Clarkson’s coaching where being unsociable became a team trait.

Dixon suspects the “line in the sand” game would prove a critical reason why fortunes began to turn around for Hawthorn.

“We just lost our identity as a team. I think that straightened us up from there. It was a case of, ‘OK, we are back to being a team outfit now’,” Dixon said. “Hawthorn were never a club to back down, and we did lose our identity.”

Hodge didn’t condone the actions, but he saw the value. “The line-in-the-sand game was a part where [we realised] it’s OK to lose, but don’t be scared, don’t be intimidated,” Hodge said.

Lloyd is less convinced that the brawl was a turning point despite Hawthorn winning four flags in the next 11 seasons and the Bombers’ win in the finals at the end of that year being their most recent.

“They were a group who drafted so well. I, personally, don’t put it down [to that game],” Lloyd said.

The Essendon spearhead began to realise how unpopular he had become among Hawthorn’s players when he was in a photoshoot at the MCG promoting the Anzac Day clash against Collingwood a few years after the line-in-the-sand match, when the Hawks turned up for a training run. The attention soon turned to the Bomber.

“I was just hearing, ‘You are a sniper, Lloyd, your time is coming, Lloyd’. It was coming from these Hawthorn players and I thought, ‘This is interesting’,” he recalled.

Clarkson didn’t mind reminding the team how much they hated Essendon.

The late Michael Gordon, the former Age journalist and sports editor, revealed in his book Playing to Win that Clarkson would write on the whiteboard a quote he attributed to Hird: “I used to love tormenting them, rubbing their noses into the turf, calling them soft, pretty boys.” The message acted like berley thrown into shark-infested waters for the impressionable group.

Entering the final round of 2009, the stakes were again high as the two teams met. Hird had retired and Lloyd was now skipper.

Separated on the ladder by two points, the winner would make the finals. The losing team’s season was over.

There were 77,278 fans on hand as Hawthorn took control in the first half at the MCG and Lloyd watched on from full-forward. “I could not believe how flat we were,” he said.

Lloyd, who had decided after a tough year he did not want to play for Essendon in 2010, had one objective. “I wanted to lead my team into the finals,” he said.

“‘Knighta’ [Essendon coach Matthew Knights] went off at half-time and I went up the race pretty fired up. My aim was to wake the team up with a big bone-crunching tackle really, on [Sam] Mitchell probably as he was killing us in the first half. We won a clearance, and I was full steam ahead. I did try to lower, but I just executed it wrong and got [Hawthorn midfielder Brad Sewell] high and knew I was gone straight away.”

Sewell was unconscious before he hit the ground. In the ensuing pandemonium, Brown charged Lloyd before Nathan Lovett-Murray joined in to take on Brown, with Brown unsteady on his feet after the altercation. As the fiery Hawk left the ground for treatment, he pointed to the bench where Welsh was sitting and directed his hostility towards him. Welsh loved the back and forth.

Friends still send Hodge the footage of him throwing a few lefts at Lloyd whenever the incident is recalled.

“‘Sewelly’ turns a couple of centimetres the other way and Lloyd hits him straight down the middle. It’s one of the best bumps. That was just another thing where it sparked everything and the hatred then just came out,” Hodge said.

Soon after, Bateman struck Lloyd. Knees and fists were being driven into the instigator at every opportunity.

But from that point on the Bombers played inspired football, overcoming a 22-point half-time deficit to win by 17 points and book a finals spot. More importantly, they denied the reigning premiers a top-eight berth.

The drama did not end when the final siren went. In fact, it escalated.

“You could feel the tension and the venom towards me and all the Hawks fans were starting to work their way down to the front row,” Lloyd recalled.

Clarkson was ropeable at what had happened to Sewell. Hawks football manager Mark Evans had to restrain the angry coach as he attempted to make his way to Lloyd, an emotional response he made sure he apologised for when he and Lloyd were on the same TV show weeks later.

“I was thinking, this isn’t a great feeling in the stadium,” Lloyd recalled.

In the rooms, Brown showed no restraint in an interview with Triple M. “[Lloyd is] one of the biggest snipers in the game. His time is coming.”

Police arranged for security to accompany Lloyd to his car. Luckily, the only thing that came to Lloyd was a four-match suspension and retirement. Sewell had a fractured eye socket and jaw.

“As a leader you’ve got to make a stand at times. I’ve done it. I’ve done it throughout my career, where sometimes you don’t cross the line, and sometimes you do and crossing the line [happens] in a split second,” Hodge said.

Sewell accepted the apology, but the veteran Bomber was sheepish when he crossed paths with Hodge weeks later at a charity function. Hodge was understanding.

“I said to him, ‘What happens on the footy field stays on the footy field. It’s another part of the big history’,” Hodge said.

Lloyd and Brown remained frosty for a time, avoiding each other whenever they were at a function together. That changed, not long after the incident, when Sewell’s buck’s night was being organised and Sewell was convinced to dress up as Lloyd.

Brown went to Lloyd’s house.

“He got me to write on the jumper, ‘Dear Brad, I hope you last longer on your buck’s day then you did at the MCG that day’. We hugged it out that day and have been good ever since,” Lloyd said.

Essendon hit the deck as hard as Sewell for the next six seasons as the drug scandal overtook all thinking from 2013 onwards. Hawthorn reeled off four grand finals to win three flags in the same period and dominated the Bombers again, revitalised under Clarkson.

Mitchell, Lloyd’s intended target that fateful day in 2009, did not miss the chance to rub in their ascendancy. In 2015, at the height of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority investigation into Essendon, Mitchell mocked the Bombers’ Cale Hooker by pretending to inject himself after a goal had been scored in a match at the MCG.

To rub further salt into the wound a year later, Mitchell (and Richmond’s Trent Cotchin) received Essendon captain Jobe Watson’s 2012 Brownlow Medal when the Bombers skipper and son of ’80s legend Tim was deemed ineligible following the suspension of 34 players for breaches of the anti-doping code.

It became another reason the rivalry has passed down the generations.

“Sam Mitchell has been a fantastic player for Hawthorn [but] when he did that [simulated injection] it looked ugly and what was uglier, he took [Jobe Watson’s] Brownlow,” Sheedy said. “It just keeps evolving, doesn’t it?”

Clarkson had also angered Essendon supporters and the club when he weighed into the controversy on the eve of the 2014 season by challenging a perception that most coaches felt Hird had been treated harshly during the drug investigation.

The Bombers were on their knees when Zach Merrett made his debut in 2014.

He welcomed back his suspended teammates alongside No.1 draft pick Andrew McGrath as the club beat Hawthorn in front of a huge MCG crowd in round one, 2017.

McGrath had already been inducted into the rivalry, having seen the iconic games in the build-up and felt the heat from former greats.

“Mark Harvey [1984-85, ’93 premiership player] is still walking around, and he reminds us with a bump and a kick to the leg that he doesn’t like Hawthorn,” says McGrath, who has now replaced Merrett as captain.

Hopes were high that 2017 night that the Bombers’ resurgence would gather steam. But Essendon did not get off the ground.

The Hawks,meanwhile, battled to make an impression until 2024 when Mitchell, who had become the coach, led them to a win in September.

Still, it was not difficult to find a reason to keep the rivalry between the two clubs simmering.

“The Hawks were down the bottom … and Essendon were not going that well all the time so they became bigger games, winnable games, there were a couple of spiteful clashes,” Hawks legend Jason Dunstall said.

Strange things began to happen. The Bombers chased Clarkson to be their coach after board upheaval, only to end up with Brad Scott (who played at Hawthorn before becoming a Brisbane Lions great) as coach in 2023. Then Archer May, the son of Brereton’s partner, was added to Essendon’s list.

It took Brereton to keep it real when he responded to a cheeky text from Barham welcoming him to Essendon.

“I feel dirty,” Brereton wrote, half joking.

Sheedy put Brereton on the spot when he pulled him on stage at an Essendon function and offered the Hawthorn great a Bombers scarf.

The respect between the combatants is huge, but the edge these games carry will never disappear, embedded in the psyche of both clubs.

“Nothing that happened between Essendon and Hawthorn was manufactured. You can’t contrive these things,” former Essendon and Hawthorn ruckman Paul Salmon said.

“There is always going to be underlying aggravation between the two clubs.”

As 2025 drew to a conclusion, Merrett, now a six-time best-and-fairest winner at the Bombers, dropped a bombshell to bring what was under the surface into the open.

The Essendon captain wanted a trade to Hawthorn.

The Bombers took the gloves off again and resumed the rumble.

“The rivalry is real, and it has been real for 40 or 50 years. This is just the next instalment of it,” Brad Scott told Fox Footy on Monday night.

Part one: ‘You’re Essendon scum’: Inside the origins of footy’s most intense hatred

Part three on Friday: Behind the failed Zach Merrett trade

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