AFL’s marriage made in heaven, the 27-year union between Kevin Sheedy and the Essendon Football Club that produced four smiling bouncy premierships, looks irredeemably fractured and headed for a very messy divorce.

That is the only conclusion to be drawn from the extraordinary statements made in today’s press by Essendon chairman Ray Horsburgh, who admitted that Sheedy had become bitter and sulky since the club decided three weeks ago not to renew his coaching contract beyond this year.

Horsburgh was quoted in The Age today as saying he felt the need to counsel Sheedy and tell him: “Don’t destroy your own brand out of personal bitterness. In the end it will bite you and not the club. The club always survives. The institution survives and the individuals suffer.”

Since Essendon’s sudden decision to sever ties with Sheedy, the sense of calm that normally pervades one of the AFL’s most politically stable clubs has been blown to bits.

Windy Hill has become Force-10 Gale Hill as even the Bombers’ respected chief executive Peter Jackson has copped a buffeting from Sheedy supporters and, in a veiled way, Sheedy himself.

The mastercoach is clearly unhappy at the way he’s been treated by the club, sniping away quietly at his soon-to-be former employer, and is said to even be reconsidering a massive testimonial send-off proposed by Horsburgh.

“I think he’s starting to get a little bit bitter and little bit hurt behind the scenes and he had a bit of anti-Peter Jackson feeling there for a while,” Horsburgh said.

It’s such an unnecessarily tacky end to one of football’s great partnerships. The club was right to dispense with Sheedy’s services but the manner in which they handled the decision — with undue haste, panic even — is unlikely to feature in the next Harvard MBA training manual. Unless it’s in the chapter headed: How Not to Manage Employee Terminations.

There now exits this ridiculous situation where Sheedy continues to coach a group of players while being courted by at least two other clubs, Melbourne and Fremantle. How can the Essendon players have confidence that the coach’s heart is completely in the job? How can they be sure he is completely and utterly dedicated to their cause?

Surely the interviews with these two clubs and the endless swirl of speculation about his future has got to be distracting Sheedy from the task of helping Essendon win games. Last weekend, for example, his Bombers traveled to Perth to play Fremantle, a club that wants to hire him as a sort of coaching supremo next season.

The divorce may be only marginally less ugly than the one Greg Norman is going through with his wife, Laura – the gruesome details of which are being publicly played out in the Florida courts – but only marginally.

Bomber fans who have enjoyed a fantastic run of success under Sheedy, and come to have great affection for his unique and maddeningly eccentric ways, must be shaking their heads and wondering how on earth it has come to this.