HAWTHORN coach Alastair Clarkson says the drama surrounding trade week will not sour his relationship with Campbell Brown.

In his first in-depth interview since a busy trade week that saw two players arrive and three depart the club, Clarkson said he would have no problem with Brown despite the Hawk being strongly linked to Port Adelaide as part of the deal that saw Shaun Burgoyne go to Hawthorn.

“I’ve spoken to Browny," Clarkson told afl.com.au. "He was an unfortunate by-product of the whole kerfuffle around trade week.

“We were never going to march a guy out of our footy club that wanted to stay. If they could have convinced him to go and he thought it was in his best interests and he came to us and requested to go then we would have given it consideration.

"When a player doesn’t want to go and the coaching staff doesn’t want him to go then I reckon you are running into disaster if you push players out of your footy club. Browny never wanted to leave and we never wanted him to leave.”

Clarkson, Brown and Hawks president Jeff Kennett were particularly outspoken after Brad Sewell fractured his cheekbone in a clash with Matthew Lloyd in round 22.

Reflecting back on the fallout from the incident, Clarkson admitted he and the club could have handled themselves better and admitted they had to work on restoring their reputation.

“The emotion is right at the forefront of the game and unfortunately in that particular instance neither myself nor Jeff, nor Campbell held the brand of the Hawthorn footy club in the same sort of manner in which we’ve held it in previous times,” he said.

“For that we’ve got some ground to make up in terms of the way we are viewed by the football community.”

Clarkson argued with Essendon players as he crossed the field following the game but apologised almost immediately.

He said he would be more conscious in future of protecting the Hawthorn brand.

“You continue to learn that you’ve got to keep your head down and bunker down a bit more than what we do in this emotional game from time to time,” he said.

“They are big stakes. The winner of that game was going to qualify in finals and we had such a disastrous year in terms of not being able to get our season up and going at the level we would have liked but we found ourselves in round 22 in a position where we could’ve got some credibility out of the season by at least qualifying to play finals."