As a footballer, James Hird's greatest gift was a seemingly ethereal ability to control chaos as it unfolded about him. Who could ever forget his performance against West Coast the Saturday night after his receipt of an AFL-imposed sanction for some ill-considered comments on The Footy Show?

Hird's need to cleanse his reputation back then was so powerful that it was as though he scripted what was to follow: with himself as the wronged, and ultimately vindicated, hero. That night cemented a legend. It seemed that when pushed into a corner there was nothing Hird could not do. Perhaps it imbued the Essendon champion with the same belief.

James Hird at a training session on Australia Day. Credit:Paul Jeffers

Fast forward a decade and Hird is now like Sean Connery shackled to the bench in Goldfinger, a laser beam inexorably slicing through the metal, between his legs towards his groin. Yet, although we all winced in that trademark James Bond scene, we knew an escape route would somehow, miraculously, appear. Bond and his crown jewels would live to perform another day.

Hird, the golden-haired James Bond of the football field, though, is a real-life character in a real-life drama. And he is in a corner from which there may be no escape. Should the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority's case against past and present Essendon players be sustained at the AFL Tribunal, it will be the end.