Round #05 - The angels of truth
There is nothing quite like a young, exciting forward emerging to fill the hearts of a football club that has been running on empty.
For the Bombers, Nate Caddy is a massive part of the future.
And at the Adelaide Oval at Gather Round, the future showed up.
I am driving away from a game, our team beaten badly. Not our first loss — in fact, we no longer look like winning.
It is the home games I remember most. Driving out of the MCG with Richmond or Melbourne, or Subiaco Oval with Fremantle. The matches played in front of your people. Those who had aligned their identity to ours, often having no choice in the matter, anointed with a club before they'd met their grandparents.
It felt as though we had dishonoured them.
They came to watch even though we were unwatchable.
I turn off the radio to save myself from the public postmortem. In the silence of the car, an inner voice starts telling me stories. I refer to myself in the third person, not by asking questions but by making accusatory statements, and saying out loud:
"Cameron, I think you are fucking the whole thing up."
Blame finds friends easily, particularly in an environment where opinions are many. The most insidious form of this is self-blame, and here I was, joining the chorus.
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It was a podcast, when promoting his fantastic book ‘Greenlights’, that I heard actor Matthew McConaughey say in his wonderful Texan drawl:
"There are angels of truth everywhere, but we only tend to access them when we're fucked."
It's a beautiful provocation.
It got me thinking: how do we access those angels when we are going ok?
Why is our truth-seeking best when it's hard?
But the more I reflected, the more I realised there is a point at which it becomes too hard, and we go into a place of overwhelm, and the truth-seeking stops.
I have learned, as a leader, that the angels of truth need four things.
We need to be able to find it.
We need to be able to live it
We need to be able to tell it
We need to be able to take it
And remember, as the Stoic Epictetus wrote, "It is impossible to learn that which you think you already know."
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"Sometimes you have to let the tide go out to see where the rocks are."
Leadership will reveal who we are, and often, we do not like what we find.
It will pick you up somewhere and leave you someplace different.
In his book 'From the Heart', former Richmond skipper Trent Cotchin, after a profoundly disappointing 2016 season, speaks of learning the toughest lessons of leadership. Perfectionism, emotional weight, and the expectations of a big club that had been waiting almost four decades for success.
When you hear people speak of the loneliness of leadership, it is mostly in these moments, with self-doubt and self-blame bashing at your door, and waking you up in the middle of the night.
Leadership is lonely, but it is a question of degree, and you do have choices. The most important in my experience is to confront this truth. Lonely, yes, but it does not mean you need to be alone.
“Put yourself in conversation with wise people” should be the first response when you feel leadership loneliness. Seek the kind of wisdom that offers both integrity for you and insight that is helpful.
For Trent, that was the guidance of a mentor, Ben Crowe, who shared the idea of tides and rocks.
Trent embraced it. He allowed the tide to go out and studied the rocks, embracing his vulnerability and the courage it asked of him, never an issue on the football field, and filled the gap between the leader he was and the leader the role expected him to be.
It changed his life, and by extension, it changed the Richmond Football Club, who went on to win three of the next four premierships, with Trent playing a massive role, on and off the field.
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In the shadows of our success lie the seeds of failure.
For the Essendon Football Club, it has been a 0–4 start to 2026, which made it seventeen losses on the trot.
For this famous club, the losses are felt intensely and broadly.
Football clubs demand our love. It is generational and foundational, and love is the most vexing emotion and the very reason we are so drawn to it and keep coming back for more.
It is who we are.
For Bomber supporters, it has been a couple of decades of disappointment that no one saw coming, layered with intense controversy.
They are a famous club, one of the ‘Big 4’.
They were big, intimidating, and at one point, seemingly unbeatable.
They have learned the timeless lesson, one that I first heard from one of their favourite sons, Neale Daniher:
“The game does not give up its rewards easily”.
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I can relate deeply to the Essendon Football Club challenge.
A club under this kind of pressure faces noise from every direction.
Sometimes the noise is just noise, something we can learn to ignore, as difficult as that can be in our omnipresent media and its many forms.
Sometimes the noise is a signal; there could be some wisdom in what is being said, and mostly, in my experience, that depends on who is saying it, and their access to objective and factual context and content as it relates to our situation.
Sometimes the noise is a racket; agendas are being set, people and groups are seeking to position themselves, and influence decision-making. A racket is about power, and never about power to you; it is about power over you.
As much as we think about leadership and its importance in driving collective good, we cannot have a conversation about leadership without talking about power.
Bill Parcells, the legendary NFL coach who won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants, called it the three-fight daily battle. Every day as a head coach, he was managing three fronts simultaneously.
Division from within — team chemistry fracturing, players unhappy with roles, small groups assembling to complain about coaches and teammates and why nothing is going well.
Competition from your opponents — the actual games, the part that should matter most but gets crowded out by the rest.
Outside influences — the media, the agents, the families, the noise that never stops and only gets louder the longer you lose.
He understood that a losing streak doesn't just test your game plan. It tests the bonds that hold everything together. The longer the streak, the wider the cracks, and the more people reach for quick fixes. But Parcells was clear: don't sell quick fixes. People who want to avoid responsibility and discipline look for a quick fix. There are no shortcuts or tricks to play. Fundamentals and basics are always the solution.
His advice was to stay out in the open. Don't close the door to your office. Don't isolate yourself from the team. Put more effort into teaching the game plan than ever before. And above all, don't personalise the losses. When you show players you care — by coaching them to play well — they will care enough to win.
During a losing streak, making progress in a winning direction is more critical than winning.
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The challenge is the work.
When leaders speak about the challenges they are facing, my response is:
“The challenge is the work.”
For the leaders at Essendon, with a new President in Andrew Welsh and his Board, a new CEO in Tim Roberts and his leadership team, and their experienced coach, Brad Scott and his coaches, this is the work.
In these times, it is best to remind yourself that leadership isn't a 'got to' thing; it is a 'get to' thing.
Leadership asks a lot of you in these moments, including the need to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas simultaneously and be ok with that.
The role demands we hold steady while navigating uncertainty, even when that uncertainty demands personal reflection to self-assess what we are bringing as leader, which mostly sits hidden inside you and will require you to build an internal game strong enough to hold these contradictions, knowing we're only ever experienced, and therefore measured, by how we show up, amplified in times like these.
Rational and informed questioning of self isn't weakness, but a natural and essential response to leadership's inherent ambiguity, the reason we need leadership in the first place.
However, it is also important to recognise that leadership isn't indecision dressed up as wisdom. Some may mistake your openness to possibility as a lack of conviction. There will be pressure to simplify, to reduce complexity to soundbites and certainties.
The difference lives in understanding that this role, these challenges, even moments of doubt — they're not burdens to bear but opportunities to grow both yourself and your team, by meeting them where they are, and not expecting them to meet you where you are.
To access those angels of truth.
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There is nothing quite like a young, exciting forward emerging to fill the hearts of a football club that has been running on empty.
For the Bombers, Nate Caddy is a massive part of the future.
And at the Adelaide Oval at Gather Round, the future showed up.
My drawing celebrates his reaction to his last quarter goal, when he effectively iced the game for the Bombers.
Essendon beat Melbourne by 45 points. Eleven goals to two in the second half. After 323 days without a win, the dam broke.
And he wasn't alone. Archie Roberts, twenty years old, is a wonderful player with a cool appreciation of the game that reeks of leadership. Jacob Farrow and Isaac Kako are finding their feet at the level, and yet another debutant, Sullivan Robey, pulling on the jumper of the team he grew up loving. No one had to tell him the words to the song in a very joyous winners' circle post-game.
Then there was Zach Merrett, and the layers of judgement that ‘tag’ him wherever he is on the football field. But he beat the ‘tag’ as he has so often in his career, 31 possessions and a last-quarter contender for the Goal of the Year. A mighty performance by a great Essendon player.
And finally, the club is getting close to a full squad, and with that comes selection pressure. Hopefully, soon, players will be competing for spots, not just filling them.
Define reality, give hope. That's the challenge, and that is the work. But all of a sudden, hope has something tangible to build on.
Everyone understands that one win doesn't fix everything, but on Saturday arvo, with young players filling hearts, a few veterans reminding us, and perhaps themselves, what they bring to their team, it felt like the angels showed up.
Play on!
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