These are trying times for Hawthorn. So many good people have left the club in search of bigger or more challenging roles and left behind is a four-time premiership coach in need of a firm hand and some serious off-field leadership.
Alastair Clarkson is a champion of the game but he can test his workmates and part of the Hawks' success has been the strong and diplomatic leaders the club placed around the competition's great coaching mind.
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"Handling Clarko" has been one key topic of conversation in job interviews as the Hawks' executive recruiters filter through their relatively long list of candidates for the chief executive's role.
Mark Evans, whose firm hand with Clarkson worked wonders when the coach was still a work in progress, was not one of those candidates.
![Former Hawthorn football boss Mark Evans.](/web/20170404122634im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/b/8/a/d/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gvcu1k.png/1491286173913.jpg)
The club lost its chance to win back its preferred choice because the then AFL football operations boss could not submit himself to a process that threatened to last three months. Not while he was overseeing the on-field game at head office.
Now the club risks losing another preferred candidate in St Kilda's second-in-command Ameet Bains for a similar reason. Bains, viewed as a rising star in AFL circles, has reportedly told the Saints he is out of the Hawthorn process as he cannot rightly preach loyalty and commitment to players and staff at his own club while putting himself through the laborious campaign the Hawks have instituted.
That can change should Hawthorn president Richard Garvey and his board go direct to Bains as the Gold Coast's Tony Cochrane did – with strong support from the AFL – with Evans. Otherwise Bains will stick with the Saints as they move home to Moorabbin.
It is true Hawthorn's search for its next off-field leader promised to be diligent and uncompromising as the club moved towards an unknown future in the face of a new outer-suburban satellite home and the on-field rebuild that inevitably follows three straight flags.
But right now the determination of president Garvey to stick to that process looks painstakingly slow to the point of lumbering.
The Hawks did not expect to lose chief executive Stuart Fox to the coveted top job at the Melbourne Cricket Club, given that he was contracted and Hawthorn was at a crucial stage of its proposed and obviously risky upsizing to Dingley.
But the board knew in early December that move was on the cards and strangely did not seriously start looking for a replacement for two months, only engaging its executive search team in the middle of February.
Now it is April and still no candidate has been directly interviewed by the club, which has insisted it will not make a decision until the end of this month at the earliest. This is also tough on the acting chief executive and prospective candidate Tim Silvers and more so given the loss of football operations boss Chris Fagan, a significantly authoritative figure at the club.
There are people in football at Hawthorn who suggest the lack of leadership manifested itself in the incident surrounding Luke Hodge's suspension, and lack of discipline unthinkable last season.
And one made to look an embarrassing example of double standards as Clarkson tried to compare missing training to Hodge's drink-driving incident on the eve of the 2015 finals.
Since Hawthorn won the 2015 flag it has lost its president – another firm hand on football – to the AFL commission, its chief executive and its football boss.
Clarkson will probably be proved right in attempting to move heaven and earth for Jaeger O'Meara but he acted too quickly in his dealing with club heroes.
To think that both Sam Mitchell and Jordan Lewis were let go so clumsily was not something the old Hawthorn would have so mismanaged. Trade decisions such as those can flirt dangerously with a club's culture.
The AFL is a fast-moving juggernaut and the pecking order changes so quickly. And the competition off-field mirrors the game itself. The Hawks have been right to deliberate but now it seems the club cannot truly move forward until it puts a permanent chief executive at the helm.
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