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AWTHORN won plenty of respect for its pluck during its defeat by Essendon on Saturday.

But it lost even more in a few minutes of complete petulance after the game was over.

You would hope the cooler heads in the Hawthorn camp are feeling a little embarrassed at the moment about what happened after the match. Because the intemperance of a leading player and its coach certainly did the club no credit.

First, to Campbell Brown. A decent bloke and a very courageous and valuable player whose passion is usually an asset. But his comments on radio about Matthew Lloyd, while obviously delivered with emotions still running high, were ordinary stuff, hypocritical, and, frankly, smacking of sour grapes.

Calling any peer a sniper and threatening retribution in a public forum, let alone a peer of Lloyd's stature and record of achievement, is serious stuff indeed, which needs to be supported with both hard evidence, and context. It wasn't.

Whatever the wrongs of Lloyd's bump on Brad Sewell, no one could seriously call it sniping. It was certainly high and reckless, and in the current environment, will probably earn Lloyd about a three-game suspension.

But it was also in a contest, with the ball in dispute, a maze of bodies going full-tilt.

That's football, not the calculated and opportunistic cowardly act conveyed by the label of ''sniper''.

Essendon's public response to that claim yesterday was, if angry, still deliberately measured. But there's absolutely no doubt privately the Bombers would have cast their minds back to the infamous "line in the sand" game against Hawthorn in 2004, and Brown's four-game suspension for striking Jason Winderlich.

A concussed Winderlich was being helped from the ground by trainers when Brown, who was also leaving the field, set upon him.

That's far closer to sniping than anything Lloyd did to Sewell, and Brown knew it, apologising to Winderlich and telling the tribunal he was embarrassed. He should be now as well.

Perhaps Brown was beginning to see the weakness of his claim even while his controversial post-game interview was still in progress. First, he said Lloyd's bump was "pretty similar" to that of Lance Franklin on Ben Cousins his club had just spent the week defending. Then, after his tirade on Lloyd, he was asked whether, by implication, his Hawk teammate was also a sniper. "Absolutely not." So what was the difference? "I'm not going to go there." That's because there was nowhere to go with his flawed thinking.

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