Tape reveals Essendon anguish over AFL ’gun to our head’

A SECRET tape has emerged of a crisis meeting held at the height of Essendon’s drugs war with the AFL.

The extraordinary 2013 recording of Bombers chairman Paul Little, coach James Hird, senior assistant Mark Thompson and football manager Danny Corcoran lays bare their fury as they came to the view they had been betrayed by the AFL and then-deputy chief Gillon McLachlan.

In the recording, Little tells the meeting at Essendon’s Windy Hill headquarters that McLachlan had declared to him the previous night “there is a 99 per cent chance that the players won’t be charged”.

An angry Little adds: “I rang him last night and I said, ‘You know, you’ve really upset me here because you’ve gone back on your word Gil’.

“He said, ‘No no, I haven’t, I haven’t’. I said, ‘You have. You told me one thing and now you’re doing something else’.”

A clearly desperate Hird says: “They’re a pack of f---ing lying pricks — and they have done from the start … ”

The tape, which until now has been secret, exposes how the Bombers felt the AFL was threatening them to either accept sanctions or be “stood down” as a club, with Little saying “that’s the gun at our head”.

The August 8 meeting was called just hours after lawyers for the AFL informed Essendon that charges would be laid against the club and key officials over the 2012 drug injections program.

Labor MP Kimberley Kitching has joined a push for a Senate inquiry into the conduct of the AFL and ASADA, after reading excerpts of the recording.

“It is clear mistakes were made by regulators and others, and those mistakes must never again be repeated,’’ Senator Kitching said last night.

The league has always maintained that the AFL Commission “hearing” to decide the fate of Essendon and its officials — held two weeks after the recorded crisis meeting — was not compromised by backroom deals and negotiations.

The leaked tape throws serious doubt on those claims.

Campaigners for an inquiry have questioned whether it was appropriate for the AFL to attempt to strike a deal with Essendon and to provide assurances over whether the players would be charged.

At the start of the recording, a clearly stunned Little tells the group: “So, I think what they’re saying is . . . if we don’t co-operate they have the power to stand down.” He continues: “And we don’t know if that refers to individuals or the club. But they have used that as a veiled threat.”