Caroline Wilson's descent into gutter journalism

[Dee Fan 3,247]

Clearly someone kicked her out of bed one morning and said he wouldnt be calling.

I think they all did.

Actually this is the first one I've read about it and the venom has to be seen to be believed, she would want to be right or she is in for a World of pain and so is her paper.

[Brian Wilson 331]

I'm growing increasingly unhappy with the title of this thread.

[Guest José Mourinho]

The AFL introduced the priority pick to help improve struggling clubs. Like the four-man interchange, it was well-intended but created issues it did not foresee. Finally it removed it because football boss Adrian Anderson and a team of academics demonstrated to the commission the advantage was generally too great for those teams that earned one, with some obvious exceptions: when clubs were too hopeless to pick the right players or develop them professionally or create an environment that retained them.

"Pathetic and disgusting" thinly veiled swipe, Caro.

[Moonshadow 16,585]

i am actually shocked at how ridiculous and personal this article is.

Someone at the club really did something wrong to Caro somewhere along the way as I have never seen her write something with such vengeance before. It is written from the heart, with no facts to support it.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

She keeps going on, article after article, with no names, no clear quotes to prove guilt, no email trails, lots of assumptions, etc. Makes me wonder if she might actually have some damning evidence that she is saving up for a rainy day. Why else would she be harping on day after day about it, convinced her case is watertight. Really, she's actually prejudicing any hope of a fair hearing that the club might have. Without naming any names or showing any convincing proof, she's labelled us guilty. This latest piece of emotional writing is truly disgusting itself. Nothing new, no facts to prove guilt, lots of accusations, plenty of liable comment. She really has a bee in her bonnet about the club, CC, CS and DMcL. She and denham should get back to writing real stories. Show some balance and professionalism, caro.

[Hannibal 5,814]

Well done Don. She's so annoyed by your considered press release she's frothed at the mouth in this "opinion piece". For someone who's been around footy since she was a kid she has absolutely no feel for footy or footy clubs. To misread Connolly's humourous asides is compelling.

I particularly liked this sentence: "He seems to have been proven wrong."

[Dee Fan 3,247]

"Pathetic and disgusting" thinly veiled swipe, Caro.

How did Tambling and Fiora work out for Richmond? How's Martin going?

Superstar one year 10th in the B&F the next, great development, living with the President but still out of control, great choice.

[Hannibal 5,814]

Not necessarily, if we'd won the ladder after R19 would have been

13. Richmond (18)

14. North Melbourne (18)

15. Melbourne (16)

16. Fremantle (16)

With about 0.9% between the bottom two. Freo won the next week, but I suspect if they'd gone last they'd have ensured they didn't...

I hate to think what the Melbourne vs Freo game would have been like if we'd gone into R20 on four wins each and a sliver of percentage separating the two teams - but we would have still been very much in the mix to finish last of our own accord.

The point is that it's not farcical to consider Scully was the prize.

[biggestred 4,420]

She has no feel for team environments at all.

[Demon Disciple 11,194]

I think Caroline Wilson is auditioning for Before the Game... because she has got to be joking!

That is a disgraceful sham of an article containing fanciful leaps of reasoning to sustain an argument.

In her mind the MFC has already been convicted.

It has to be personal to her. Why? Because every other tanking article she has written has been titled with only the date, ergo, released at 12.00am. The MFC gave a response today, which so infuriated her, she had to have a say at 10.38pm. She couldn't wait until tomorrow's headlines to give her reply. Personal indeed.

Should we get off relatively easily, i'd love for nothing more than for CC and CS to give her a big smile when they next cross paths, to show no hard feelings!

[titan_uranus 23,143]

She's getting worse.

She says we're 'pathetic and disgusting'. 'Pathetic'? Really? Caring about our long term prosperity is pathetic? I would have thought taking a view to your future is nothing short of responsible, Caroline.

Then she says McLardy 'issued a plea for natural justice'. Like we're completely inundated with evidence and with nowhere to move. I didn't read the statement as a 'plea'. I saw it as a demand.

She's made up her mind that we'll be 'harshly punished' and that Schwab and Connolly will be sacked. She's certainly hitched her wagon to that one.

Next she rambles on about how the AFL was incompetent. Nice. Glad to see you have the ability to focus your attention somewhere other than us, Caro.

Apparently it's not surprising a player has lifted the lid on the secret. Of course, she seems to think that that player knew it all. Maybe, Caro, that player's perception of things was slightly different to reality? Maybe, Caro, that player picked up on the same vibes that the rest of the football community picked up on. Maybe, Caro, that player is simply bitter.

Apparently we're all 'rabid'. I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt here and assume she used it in it's 'fanatical' sense, rather than trying to claim we all have rabies. Still, the word 'rabid' is not exactly nice. We're all as devoted and adoring of our club as any other supporters, but I doubt the supporters of Richmond would classify as 'rabid' in Caro's world.

She then admits that putting players in for surgery and losing heart in a game aren't bad. Which is nice, because she then claims we had a plan that lasted weeks! Wow! Weeks! And here I was thinking that the board at Melbourne made decisions to last for a few hours at a time.

She laments players being prevented from having more on-field success. Wrong, Caro. What we did was attempt to set our club up for the long run. Players don't want one or two wins here or there in 2009 when we're plummeting towards 16th anyway. They want a premiership, and that is what we were attempting to get them. You idiot.

She repeatedly calls it 'fixing' of games. Incorrect again, you sloppy hack. To 'fix' a game is to predetermine its result. Which we clearly didn't do, given that at the final siren we were winning the f*cking Richmond game. We didn't 'fix' anything. To not have winning each game as the first priority is not to 'fix' the game.

Finally, she tops it off by slamming us for not being able to retain Scully, a notion she hinted at earlier. Apparently, the AFL setting up GWS, giving them a massive budget, and allowing them to poach players was our fault.

This piece, like all the others in her saga so far, is poorly written, unfairly biased, prejudicial, rude, unjust, and potentially defamatory. She may well be proven right. But as it stands, she is balancing everything on one thing: a directive to tell the players to lose. If that's not proven, and the whole thing falls apart, I cannot wait to see her get run out of town. Which would be good, because I don't know if I'll ever want to read any of her drivel again.

Who's 'pathetic and disgusting' Caro?

You.

[Straight Sets Simon 23,113]

"What Melbourne did in manipulating results was disgusting."

I'm by no means a lawyer, but if Melbourne are proven innocent surely these kind of statements can get her in trouble?

[Hannibal 5,814]

then I'll be tempted to spit in her face.

Not rapt in that...

[biggestred 4,420]

I'm really surprised and blow away by the bile she spits in her latest article.

Shocked, in fact.

I knew she was gunning for the club, but it's now like she has gone out of her way to be offensive to the club and its supporters.

Someone must have said something that really hit a nerve with her.

It's safe to say, if I ever see her again outside the G, as I do from time to time (it's a timing thing), then I'll be tempted to spit in her face.

Dont lower yourself to the level of the collingwood ferals..... We are better than that.

[Blistering 493]

I was speaking with a retired journalist yesterday and he was commenting on the number of gaffes that Wilson had committed over the past week in her haste to publish disparaging articles about the Melbourne Football Club. Those errors were ultimately corrected in updates of her articles without the usual mea culpa. He reckoned it was a sign of the declining standards of his profession that people weren't owning up to their own mistakes and compounds the original sin of shoddy journalism.

Wilson's done enough already but this piece is both shocking and aweful. She's morphed into a self-absorbed person obsessed with her agenda of bringing down McLardy, Schwab and Connolly.

Her vendetta with Schwab is particularly interesting given that both have Richmond blood coursing through their veins. I'm wondering how personal her agenda is and whether that's what is making her come across so bitter and twisted.

[mauriesy 6,909]

"McLardy issued a plea on his club's website on Friday for ''natural justice'' as the mounting weight of damning evidence that the club fixed matches continued to emerge in all its shocking detail."

Detail? Where's the actual detail? I'd just like to see some. All we have at the moment is McLean's original utterance; Wilson's opinions; some anonymous interviews from disgruntled ex-players, staff or coaches; circumstantial evidence that seems overwhelming but when taken in isolation means little; and conclusions drawn from hearsay.

[Straight Sets Simon 23,113]

What really annoys me is this is exactly the kind of reaction she is after, she is pushing all our buttons. The Age (which I used to like, especially compared to the Herald Sun) will be selling more papers and getting many more hits on the website.

[Grapeviney 9,059]

the problem is that all her pieces would have been heavily legalled at the age before going to print, so she's obviously got enough to cover her backside in terms of defamation (presuming the age's lawyers have done their jobs properly)

Edited November 2, 2012 by Grapeviney

[Curry & Beer 5,444]

we have to sue, this is outrageous

[RickyJ45 392]

This reminds me of the misfud/davey saga.

She kept going on and on on this issue and nothing ever happened.

Here she keeps going on and on with greater vitriole, she really is [censored] with someone at the MFC

Talk about meglomaniac trying to write the course of history... yeah write,,, just another footnote on nothingness and the current state of journalism in australia

[John Crow Batty 8,352]

Phew! I need another rum or two. Quite a slap from CW. Virulent response from Demonlander's. Most important question is; How are the 40 players that want to win for us going to respond?

[titan_uranus 23,143]

the problem is that all her pieces would have been heavily legalled at the age before going to print, so she's obviously got enough to cover her backside in terms of defamation

My gut feeling is that she will be OK as she will be able to rely on what could be called a defence of 'contextual truth'. In other words, if she makes one claim which is true, then the ones around it which aren't can be 'justified' by the truth of that other one. I don't think this is a certainty, though.

[Redleg 38,472]

Well let me understand what these journos want. They want a club that sits on the bottom of the ladder, bar two new teams, who will pass them soon with their lists of star players/top draft picks and also struggling financially, to be harshly dealt with, for a crime also perpetrated by many other clubs and seemingly condoned by the AFL, in a system it instigated.

So lets get em then. Take away our draft picks for the next five years from 2013. Fine them a $1million dollars. Watch any energy or inclination to try disappear from the Board and Staff. Make them a pariah. Ensure no player will want to join them. Condemn their innocent Coach to a short career in the AFL. Comdemn their team to failure and by big margins. Take away the last morsel of hope from their supporters who are now at their wit's end.

Don't affect the premierships of the Pies and Hawks obtained with players gained using the same system as us. Don't investigate other clubs even though their players and coaches admit to the crime. Watch as the player we got for the crime is now the highest paid young player in the game at the newest club, lured during his first contracted year and on the back of lying to his dying president and the football world.

Yes rejoice as even more misery is brought to the MFC and enjoy the thrashings weekly on TV that come as a result of the punishment.

Yes that is what you vultures want, blood.

We might be found to have done the wrong thing in the end, but for what purpose, to give a club a chance to compete in a rigged competition, where it is banned from the best timeslot on fridays and given low crowd drawing games at the worst times. Where it is forced to compete against clubs that have received many priority picks, by losing large amounts of games and surprisingly playing finals the next year, while it twice won games that cost it some of those picks. Where it is forced to compete against new clubs that are just given lists of players that it cannot ever hope to compete with. Where even the latest star player leaving his club will be directed to the newest club for free.

Yes lets feast on the carcass of the MFC. Yes lets sh-t on the last hopes of its supporters.

In the words of Sheahan and Wilson, then we will know the meaning of "pathetic and disgusting behaviour".

Edited November 2, 2012 by Redleg

[Grapeviney 9,059]

My gut feeling is that she will be OK as she will be able to rely on what could be called a defence of 'contextual truth'. In other words, if she makes one claim which is true, then the ones around it which aren't can be 'justified' by the truth of that other one. I don't think this is a certainty, though.

im guessing she's seen the statements of one or two players / coaches who have clearly fingered connolly and quite possibly schwab .. even if there is conflicting testimony, or it's outweighed in the end, she'll still be able to point to what she had as justification for the claims / accusations

[P-man 13,309]

That article reads like a post on bigfooty from an opposition supporter. Absolutely appalling.

[Hannibal 5,814]

What really annoys me is this is exactly the kind of reaction she is after, she is pushing all our buttons. The Age (which I used to like, especially compared to the Herald Sun) will be selling more papers and getting many more hits on the website.

It's a left wing rag.

But whatever floats your boat.