KEVIN Sheedy and James Hird arrived separately for their joint news conference in the Hall of Fame at Windy Hill yesterday, and left separately afterwards.

This characterised their 16 mostly successful years together as super coach and superstar. "They're very different people," said former Essendon football manager Danny Corcoran a few years ago. "They look through the same window and see a very different picture."

Football clubs mostly are not the mystical places of legend, but co-operatives of talented, strong-minded and driven individuals. The best — and there have been few better than Essendon in the Sheedy-Hird era — manage this dynamic better than the rest.

Sheedy said yesterday he realised early that Hird did not need coaching, just a free rein. Hird affirmed it. "Sheeds worked out pretty quickly that he would give me a bit of direction, then leave me alone," he said.

All that the pair has achieved grew from that tacit understanding. "We've had a reasonably good relationship," Sheedy said. "But I don't sit in his back pocket, and he doesn't sit in mine."

Publicly, this odd couple likes to turn their differences into a pantomime. "We're two different sorts of characters," Sheedy said yesterday. "I live out in the bush. He lives in the city." Interjected Hird: "He owns half the city!"

Later, when asked how they would spend Sunday morning while waiting for twilight and the game, each did a set piece about how he was long overdue to mow his lawns. "With all the marble around your place, you won't have to," jibed Sheedy. Hird, the fall guy again, laughed.

That is not to say that they have affection for each other, only that they have had as many ups and downs as might be expected of two strong-willed people, a quarter of a century apart in age, thrown together in a stimulating, stressful and abnormally intense environment, pursuing obsessively a common goal, with the eyes of hundreds of thousands intent upon them.

It's for better or worse, and it has nearly all been better. When Hird was first inclined to retire a year ago, it was Sheedy who talked him out of it over a coffee in Napier Street. Hird said yesterday he was glad of it.

Now, though, there is no going back. "There's a little part of me that wants to keep going," Hird said. "But then it's five degrees outside, he's yelling at me and I'm pretty happy with my decision." Sheedy is less happy to be getting out, but then it wasn't his decision.

Sheedy and Hird would have us believe that neither had dwelled on the occasion of what might be his last appearance in Melbourne, and perhaps his last anywhere, next week in Perth. Until it was finished, it would be just another game, there to be won. Hird said he still would be trying to get a kick until the last minute of his last game.

Sheedy said he would not cry when it was done. Hird said he could imagine how he would feel, and was sick of being asked about it, even by his wife.

Perhaps this is so. The premium on winning in football is so draining of all other sensibilities as to leave no room for sentimentality in the moment. But, curiously, when asked what they would remember about one another, neither Sheedy nor Hird thought immediately of famous victories on the field, but rather of triumphs of the spirit.

For Sheedy, it was Hird's instinctive hugging of a spectator after kicking a matchwinning goal against West Coast at Telstra Dome in 2004, and of his courage in his first game back from a gruesome head injury in 2002. "The first ball he went for, there was no reserve, he was straight at it," Sheedy said. "It was the spirit and the feeling."

For Hird, it was Sheedy's rousing half-time address that inspired the Bombers' comeback against Adelaide in the 1993 preliminary final, and a moving, private moment in grand final week in 2000, when Hird's daughter Stephanie was desperately ill in hospital.

Sheedy sat with Hird by her hospital bedside one night, and said he would understand if Hird chose not to play. "It showed a different side of Kevin Sheedy," Hird said. "One that I'd never seen before, the human side."

Rejoined Sheedy: "You won't find that in the psychology report." It was classic Sheedy: anxious not to reveal too much of himself publicly, never able to resist a jibe — this at the tortuous process of interviewing coaches — and certain always to have the last word.

Hird did play in 2000, was best-on-ground and the Bombers won the flag, Sheedy's fourth. All four cups were on display yesterday, their bulk momentarily obscuring Hird and casting a shadow over Sheedy. It was a surprising effect, but apt: henceforth, they will live in the shadow of their sterling achievements.