Heeney’s Back and Honestly, Even I Feel Better About It
Isaac Heeney stood up on Thursday night, collected his third Bob Skilton medal, and told the Swans faithful he “can’t wait” to get back out there. As an Essendon man who has watched my own club get marched in and out of various tribunals, boardrooms and headline-writers’ dreams for the best part of two decades, I watched that video with the particular empathy of a bloke who knows exactly what it’s like to sit on the sidelines wondering what the footy gods have got against you.
Heeney missed his club’s finals campaign after a club-imposed suspension stemming from an incident at a hotel, and by all accounts it chewed him up something shocking. He called the absence “heartbreaking” and admitted to “extreme difficulty” during the whole saga. I believe him. I’ve watched enough Essendon press conferences over the years to know that when a player says things got hard away from the footy, they usually mean it got a lot harder than the cameras ever show you.
A Best and Fairest Like No Other
There’s something almost poetic about winning your club’s top honour in the same year you’re serving time on the sideline. It’s the ultimate good news, bad news sandwich. The good news: you were clearly best afield more often than not when you were out there. The bad news: half the competition probably forgot you existed for a month there while you were off doing laps of the inside track at Lakeside Oval instead of chasing a flag.
Three Skiltons now for Heeney, which tells you everything about how highly rated he is inside that Swans playing group. But I reckon this one carries a bit more weight than the other two. Winning a best and fairest when everything’s rosy is one thing. Winning it after a year where you’ve had to front your own club, cop a sanction, and then watch finals footy from the couch — that’s a different kind of validation. It says the players and the coaches still rate you as highly as ever, sanction or no sanction.
The Hotel Incident and Where Things Stand
For those who need the recap: Heeney was handed a club-imposed suspension relating to an incident at a hotel, and he served that suspension right through the pointy end of the season, missing Sydney’s finals campaign entirely. The exact rights and wrongs of what happened that night aren’t for me to adjudicate from behind a keyboard in Melbourne’s north — that’s a matter between Heeney, the Swans, and whatever processes they ran internally. What we do know is the player has fronted up, apologised publicly, and copped the sanction without a public blue about it. In my experience watching these things play out over the years, that’s usually the smart way to handle it. Dig in and fight every charge and you drag it out for months. Cop it, say sorry, do the time — the footy world moves on a lot quicker.
It’s worth remembering too that this was a club-imposed suspension rather than something that went through the AFL’s formal Tribunal or MRO system. Different animal entirely, though the broad principle is the same: footy clubs these days are not mucking around when it comes to off-field conduct, and players at every level are finding out that what happens on a Saturday night doesn’t stay there anymore.
Why Essendon Fans Know This Movie
I’ll be honest, nobody in the footy media landscape is better credentialled than an Essendon supporter to comment on a club working through a messy off-season saga. We’ve had ASADA, we’ve had the Tribunal, we’ve had appeals to appeals of appeals, we’ve had blokes suspended for entire seasons over things that took years to sort out. By the time our saga wrapped up I reckon half our members could’ve sat the bar exam.
So when I watch a bloke like Heeney cop a suspension, say his piece, and front the cameras determined to get back to footy, I feel for him in a very specific, battle-scarred way. The hardest part was never actually the missing games — it’s the missing the group. The missing out on being part of something when your mates are out there every week living the dream you’re not allowed to touch. Heeney describing it as heartbreaking doesn’t surprise me one bit. Been there, watched that, bought the commemorative scarf.
What It Means for Sydney Going Forward
The bigger football question here is what a fully fit, fully available, motivated-as-all-heck Heeney means for the Swans in 2025. This is a club that’s been knocking on the door without always getting through it, and getting back arguably their most important and dynamic player for a full pre-season and a full year is enormous. He’s shown time and again he can play forward, midfield, wherever Longmire needs him, and best and fairest form while serving a suspension suggests the quality hasn’t dropped off one bit.
If anything, players coming back from these sorts of sagas often return with something extra — a point to prove, a reminder that they want it, a hunger that the rest of the competition should probably be a little bit worried about. We saw it with our own blokes after the supplements saga wrapped up. The ones who stuck around came back desperate.
The Bigger Picture on Player Conduct
There’s a broader conversation happening in footy right now about how clubs handle these off-field incidents, and generally I think the trend toward clubs dealing with things internally, quickly, and with real consequences is the right one. It protects the game’s reputation, it holds players accountable without turning every incident into a three-month media circus, and — crucially — it gives blokes like Heeney a pathway back. Serve your time, say your piece, get back to work.
Could the proccess be more transparent in some cases? Probably. Fans always want more detail than clubs are willing to give, and that tension isn’t going away. But watching Heeney front up on Thursday night, genuinely emotional about his medal and genuinely fired up about getting back out there, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to want to see him succeed next year.
Riggsy’s Final Word
Three Skiltons, one almighty hard year, and a bloke who reckons he can’t wait to get going again. If there’s one thing twenty years of Essendon supporting has taught me, it’s that footy has a funny way of giving blokes a second crack if they front up and do the hard yards. Here’s hoping Heeney makes the most of his.
