The 2004 draft and the genius of Al Clarkson

Ashley Browne was in the room in 2004 as Clarko played the Tigers on the break

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The first sign that the 2004 national draft might be interesting for Hawthorn came on the final day of the trade period that preceded it, which back in those days was held underneath what was formerly the John Elliott Stand at Princes (now Ikon) Park.

Alastair Clarkson was in his first few weeks as coach of the Hawks and had already thrown a bomb through the creaky corridors at Glenferrie Oval, where the club was still based.

The coaching staff were more or less moved on immediately. Popular clubman Mark Graham was given his marching orders barely 30 minutes into what he thought would be his ‘get to know the new guy’ meeting with Clarkson.

Nathan Thompson agonised over his trade request to North Melbourne, thinking it would drag out for the entirety of the trade period. But the Hawks played ball immediately and received picks 10 and 26 from the Kangas.

The Hawks appeared done. Picks two (a priority selection), five and 10 looked a great hand for Clarkson to commence his rebuild of a heretofore old, overpaid and underachieving playing list.

But as the minutes counted down to the ringing of the final trade bell, perched in a corner of the deal room at Princes Park were a pair of veteran, old school footy administrators: Hawthorn’s John Hook and Collingwood’s Neil Balme. The pair looked like wholesale traders at the fish markets, pens in hand as they thrashed out a deal on a scrap of paper. The Hawks soon traded picks 10 and 37 to Collingwood and received pick seven and three-game player Bo Nixon in exchange.

Clearly the Hawks had a player in mind, hence the move three more places up the draft order. Had it happened in 2021, Trade Radio would have had a field day with it, with the usual, shrill voices leading the way. Bo Nixon was hardly a star, playing just three games for the Pies. He would play just one more in brown and gold.

Photographic evidence Bo Nixon played a game in the brown and gold.

But even back then, it was seen as another example of a laughing stock of a club, one that was seen to have sacked one favourite son (Peter Schwab) as coach, missed out on three others (Rodney Eade, Terry Wallace and Gary Ayres) as his replacement, while their purported No.1 choice (Mark Harvey) wasn’t returning phone calls. The truth was not even close to that, of course, but there wasn’t much that was compelling about the Hawks at the time and there was great mystery about Clarkson.

The AFL draft media industrial complex was just starting to grow back in 2004, but there wasn’t a mock draft out there that didn’t have Richard Tambling going to Hawthorn with the second selection overall.

The exciting Northern Territory midfielder would add razzle and dazzle to a part of the ground where the Hawks – Shane Crawford aside – were a bunch of plodders. And the Hawks did nothing to quell the speculation. Tambling stayed with Hawks recruiting manager Gary Buckenara before the draft and even told a pre-draft media event that he believed he was Glenferrie bound.

The draft was held on a Saturday morning in a function room at Melbourne Park. Fox Footy V1.0 didn’t televise it, but it was broadcast live on the fledgling SEN and streamed live on AFL.com.au. However, such was the interest that the stream buffered badly. Telstra had grossly miscalculated how much bandwidth would be needed to satisfy the desperate draft cravings of footy fans around Australia.

Exclusive footage of the 2004 draft night. Courtesy: Telstra.

Consensus was that Brett Deledio was signed, sealed and delivered to Richmond with the first pick, Tambling to the Hawks with the next selection and Ryan Griffen to the Western Bulldogs with the third overall selection. The draft would really begin after that, with premier talls Jarryd Roughead and Lance Franklin next to be selected with only mystery being who would be a Tiger and who a Hawk, although the Tigers were known to have concerns about Franklin’s temperament.

One of the tightly-held secrets heading into the draft was that Clarkson had upended Hawthorn’s draft plans at a meeting the day before. St Kilda had lost a thrilling preliminary final to Port Adelaide that year, but the one-two punch provided by emerging key forwards Nick Riewoldt and Justin Koschitzke (picks one and two in 2000) had everyone convinced that a Saints flag was in the offing.

And in footy, imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

At the pre-draft meeting, Clarkson hatched the plan to take the two best forwards in the draft. Roughead with pick two, and then wait for Franklin at pick 5, knowing that new Richmond coach Terry Wallace a) had doubts on Franklin; and b) would have relished tweaking the nose of his former club by taking Tambling.

It was left to Buckenara to call out the names at the draft. There was an audible gasp in the room when the Hawks called out Roughead’s name, snickers when the Tigers selected Tambling and fleeting terror when Buckenara called out the ID number and name of a Gippsland Power forward Luke Franklin, instead of Lance Franklin as planned. He immediately corrected himself.

Two selections afterwards, Buckenara (correctly!) selected tough Geelong Falcons midfielder Jordan Lewis, finally revealing why the Hawks had moved down from 10 to seven. Lewis was rising fast up the charts and might not have been there with the 10th selection, hence the deal with the Pies.

Thank you Buckenara!

Lewis was the afterthought. There was no social media in 2004 but there were message boards and Hawk fans came thick and fast for Buckenara who was widely painted as having bungled the draft. His mangling of the Franklin selection was cited as proof of that.

The Hawk Headquarters Message Board 2004 draft thread captured magnificently the mood of Hawthorn supporters that day as the draft unfolded and one entry, which simply read, “F*** you, Buckenara!” summed up the feelings of the fans as they watched Tambling slip from their grasp.

It was only several pages later that one brave poster posited that perhaps the club knew what it was doing, might be smarter than the supporters, and that snaring the two best key forwards in the draft might become the foundation of a premiership team. But he was an outlier.

The HHQ moderators bring back the thread before every national draft just for the sake of posterity and it never fails to amuse.

While Wallace was telling a compliant media that the Tigers had selected the “two best players in the draft”, Roughead - as has been well documented - had the directions to the Tigers slap-up post-draft lunch at club president Clinton Casey’s home folded in his pocket. He instead threw it in the nearest bin and headed to the old Hawthorn Social Club at Linda Crescent for a feed that was a doubtless bit more austere.

Terry Wallace with the “two best players in the draft”, according to Terry Wallace.

Clarkson sported a grin as wide as the nearby tennis courts through the rest of the draft, impervious to the talk that yet again, the Hawks had made another major mis-step.

It took Garry Lyon who was at the draft as a NAB ambassador, to remind his media colleagues that rather than stuff things up, the Hawks might have just selected the “next Riewoldt and Koschitzke”.

Lyon didn’t get it quite right. Roughead and Franklin would not go on to become the next Riewoldt and Koschitzke. Collectively, they would be much, much better.

And for the first of many times, Clarkson had shown himself to be the smartest person in the game.

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Ashley Browne is a Hawks Insiders contributor, the author of A Season Like No Other: AFL 2020, and a senior writer at the AFL Record and SEN. Follow him on Twitter @hashbrowne.

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