James Hird coaching Essendon again sounds bonkers. Which is why it might just happen

The strangest and most fascinating conversation I’ve had with James Hird was about persuading cocaine farmers to grow cacao beans.

It was nearly 10 years ago and Hird wasn’t long out of football, the protracted drug scandal having finally squeezed the last drop of resolve from the Essendon players and his capacity to coach them.

With the Court of Arbitration for Sport yet to deliver its final, crushing judgement on The Saga, as survivors refer to it, club and coach had agreed to part ways, leaving Hird both exhausted and possessed by a manic energy.

He needed a purpose to commit to – one far removed from football.

Hird’s big idea, developed with entrepreneurial friends he’d made while studying an MBA during his AFL-imposed year of exile, was to travel to Colombia and find villagers willing to stop growing coca plants for the cartel and switch to the increasingly scarce, key ingredient for chocolate.

A detailed explanation of Colombian soil types and labour politics ensued.

It evoked images of Hird, machete in hand, hacking his way through the Colombian jungle, like a young Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone, on a reckless and potentially deadly mission to find the only people in the world who didn’t have a view about Stephen Dank’s chemistry or Jobe Watson’s Brownlow.

I’m the same age as Hird. I remember thinking while listening to him on the phone what the reaction would be at my place if I came home one day and announced I’d taken a redundancy from the paper and was jetting off to Central America to be the next Willy Wonka.

The craziest thing about this story – and the reason I’m sharing it with you – is that Hird did exactly what he said he would. He travelled to Colombia. He met with villagers who’d toiled for Pablo Escobar. He came home with the chocolates.

It is worth holding that image of Hird in the jungle as you read over coming days and weeks about his chances of coaching Essendon again.

The idea of Hird being reappointed senior coach seems as bonkers as the business plan he sketched over the phone that day.

It is nearly 11 years since Hird’s previous stint at Essendon ended at what we then knew as Etihad Stadium, in an 112-point drubbing by Adelaide. It was the heaviest loss of Hird’s entire coaching career, a career which spanned fewer than 90 games, a full season’s suspension and the most destructive drugs scandal in the history of Australian sport.

Before his 2010 appointment as senior coach of Essendon, Hird had never coached. In effect, he was hired to learn on the job, with his old premiership captain and successful Geelo