Fired by a friend: The unsparing kitchen meeting that ended Clarkson’s reign

September 2, 2026 — 7:30pm

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Todd Viney and Sonja Hood sat opposite Alastair Clarkson in his Brighton home on Tuesday and delivered the news: He was sacked.

“He didn’t see it coming,” said Viney, Clarkson’s old friend and teammate whom he brought to North Melbourne as his football director and consigliere.

It was figured that was half the problem: Clarkson should have seen it coming. North were surprised Clarkson was surprised, but they were not surprised he was angry.

Viney and Hood were as blunt in the unsparing press conference as they had been in Clarkson’s kitchen. He had tried to change but the harder he pushed to fix things, the worse he made them. The messaging got muddier, the meetings longer and more rambling, but the game plan – as much as it swapped and changed – still had the same gaping holes in it.

They had players who had affection for the coach but were maddened by the coaching. The only consistency of the game plan was a failure to fix the same problems. They weren’t playing the modern game, and he was an over-worked coach who didn’t delegate enough and was still emotionally scarred from the Hawthorn racism scandal. And that was how they put it diplomatically. This was a mate.

Evidently, Clarkson knew what the........

© Brisbane Times