Mark Duffield - The Editorial (28.07.2026)

**Mark Duffield** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the SENWA Radio Studio. We're out here at Optus Stadium. It is a Tuesday morning in Perth, and we're here thanks to Beaumont Homes, award-winning design built to be loved forever. 9.9 degrees outside at the moment, cloudy in our city today. Maybe a slight chance of a shower. A top temperature of 16 degrees later in the day. Made in WA for WA. This is Mornings with Mark Duffield on SENWA. So I'm going to find this fascinating. A study into the state and mindset of the Essendon Football Club may yet come about if the battle to win the club's senior coaching position boils down to a race between Fremantle senior assistant Jamie Graham and Bombers Club legend James Hurd. So in one corner, you would have a journeyman footballer with a near faultless AFL assistant coaching CV built over 15 years in the industry. Now, Graham has stint as either assistant or senior assistant at St Kilda, West Coast, and Fremantle. He is currently the forward line coach at Fremantle, the bloke who has sculpted an attack into a machine where the various components not only play well individually, but also function smoothly as a team. They get in the way of opponents to help teammates, and they stay out of each other's space and way. The way the docker's attack functions is a masterpiece of planning.
And in the other corner, you have an absolute playing champion, a Brownlow medalist, a Premiership hero, who was parachuted in the senior position at his former club without an apprenticeship, was one of the central figures in arguably the biggest scandal in AFL history, the quaintly named Supplement Saga, who since stepping out of the role amid the scandal that engulfed the club, may now be about to be parachuted back in, potentially with former Essendon teammates and mates making up several of his team of assistants. The whole herd push at Essendon reminds me of that stand-up comedy piece that Aussie comic Jim Jefferies did on American gun laws.
He was all for Americans to have the right to have guns. What he was not for was what he described as bulldust arguments and lies except he didn't say bulldust.
He said, there is one argument and one argument only for having a gun and it is this. F off. I like guns. It's not the best argument, but it's all you've got. Jefferies went on to say that the argument that Americans need assault rifles protection was rubbish. And then he explained why amid a fair few ocker expletives.
Yesterday, we read how yet another Essendon powerbroker, in this case, former player and board member Greg Brown, who was on the board when the drug scandal broke a decade and a half ago, was endorsing Herd's return. So to paraphrase Jefferies, Essendon, we're not against your right to hire James Herd if that's what you decide to do. But there is one argument and one argument only on why you would do it, and it is this one. If off, we like James Herd. It's not the best argument, but it is all you've got. And in the meantime, can you please spare us all the bulldust and retrospective rhetoric, desperately trying to reframe and rewrite the facts around the Essendon drug saga. Spare us also the claims that you can be absolutely confident that Herd's decade out of the game at the top level won't prevent him from re-entering the game as a cutting edge senior coach pointing to his football IQ, and his stint as an assistant at VFL Club Port Melbourne.
There are very few of us that believe Herd shouldn't be allowed a second chance, and several, me included, reckoned Essendon could have done a lot worse than installing him as their caretaker after Brad Scott was removed. It was kind of like a suck it and see approach that would have soothed the Pro Herd camp while taking a look at how Herd's coaching acumen had either evolved or waned over a decade.
But if you compare Herd's coaching CV over the past decade with Graham's, and then tell me who has earned this job, remember Graham finished a close second to Craig McCray in the race to secure Collingwood's job and McCray has proven to be one of the best coaches in the AFL. Remember also that Graham appears to be through to the last four at Carlton up against the contenders, several of whom pulled out of the Essendon's process, believing it was being tilted towards Herd. Give us your thoughts and questions on the Essendon coaching process. 487 736 736 is the text line. 13 12 55 is the Bower Endo Day open line. Bower Endo Day because the little things are everything.