Mazer Rackham

Of course he has. At the pub Robbo frequents, there's a bloke who's there even more than Robbo. If you're short of scratch he's good for a tip for the dogs or trots, he can get you a GPS unit for $25 or an iphone for $60, if you're having a party it's rumoured he can get "party supplies" at good prices, and if you ask his name, he says either "Who wants to know?" or "William Shakespeare".

I chose Falstaff coz he spends all his time in the pub, and sucks up to the crown prince ..... only to be discarded by him in the end.

Roughly he was trying to justify the Hun's screaming headline implying Geelong were in bed with Dank the same way Essendon were. And that exhuming two-year-old stories to reanimate them is fair game because the stuff in those stories (kind of) happened. My previous opinion of Slobbo as a buffoon who can barely hold one thought in his head at a time, who can't even finish one sentence before abandoning it to move on to another stream of consciousness thought-let, was confirmed. Now I think that, in addition to the above, he is a slippery son of a witch who talks over anyone whom he thinks is about to counter him and shifts the goalposts to try to nullify any point made by anyone fortunate to jemmy in a few words between his bluster. As they say on bigfooty, he's a campaigner.

Caroline Wilson is Regan Warner is Dogberry Slobbo is Falstaff Look 'em up.

The tragedy of MacBeth. Nobleman and warrior meets three sports scientists who prophesy that he will one day be coach of Essendon, and then premiership coach! MacBeth knifes the extant coach, but in his quest for power, his fear and paranoia causes him to turn on his own confidantes and supporters. Urged on by his wife, his catalogue of crimes grows until finally, when Windy Hill comes to Tullamarine airport, he meets his downfall. Beware of McDevitt!

Robbo is the fine upstanding man who last year wrote a scoop article revealing the names of 14 of the Essendon players, and in the very same issue of the paper wrote an opinion piece lamenting that players' names had been leaked.

True. Thanks, Vlad.

ON SEN right now KB and Brian Waldron are in full attack mode on Essendon and Hird. Interesting turning of the tide.

Knowing a little about IT, when a document -- any document -- is accidentally deleted, there is very rarely a circumstance where nothing at all can be recovered. (And let's assume that Essendon, with their myriad laptops that you can see on TV on any game day, were not so primitive and backwards that they dealt exclusively with pen-on-paper documentation.) Usually there's a hard copy somewhere. An older version on someone's desktop. A memory stick with some version of it. On the backup devices! At last resort, a forensic data recovery will extract at least a partial version from one of the above, even if garbled. For a document to go missing from all of those sources is a very very unusual occurrence. A bit like how winning Tattslotto is a very very unusal occurrence. What are the chances?

There is certainly a logical disconnect in the naming of other clubs Dank has been to. Geelong: Dank won them a flag on the back of drugs. GC: drugs everywhere but the AFL won't investigate because they know what they'll find! Cronulla: cocktails of bad drugs and they went down in the end. Essendon: administered only vitamins and "good" versions of substances. Melbourne: 12 players drugged up! Spot the odd one out.

That's a good one. Reminds me "Apocalypse now" when the WADA investigator finally gets up river to the camp of Colonel Hirdz and meets a mentally unbalanced journalist who proceeds to say ... "Hey, man, you don't talk to the Coach. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you, and he won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say do you know that if is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you -- I mean I'm no, I can't -- I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's, he's a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas -- I mean --" (It works very well if you have a "Robbo" voice in your head saying that.)

Point is, who is exhuming these corpses and flinging them around like weapons ... what do they think they are gaining from it?

It's like the end of the movie "The Thing". When they work out which one is "The Thing" it goes berserk and tries to destroy everyone and everything. Someone somewhere in the Essendon ecosystem has sensed that the end is nigh and has gone berserk. London to a brick another club will be revealed as being dirty nasty drug cheats in the next 48 hours.

Someone somewhere is lashing out and spreading grapeshot. Who and for what purpose one can only guess. http://www.news.com.au/national/stephen-dank-claims-he-had-a-hand-in-melbournes-supplements-program/story-e6frfkp9-1227479399698 Gawd, I hope these claims live up to the usual standards of Dank truthiness.

Or you're Sir James, it's The Trial by Kafka.

Bonfire of the Vanities. A high flying but shallow man is caught in circumstances essentially of his own choosing. He flies a little too close to the sun but some bad luck gives him a major problem. His initial response, to cover it up, comes back to bite him on the bum, hard. His attempts to escape come to naught, circumstances worsen, and in time it all closes in and leads to his downfall. A secret witness supplies the coup de grace.

But Dees, how sure are you that CAS will have to the power to subpoena? I thought that was still up in the air.

"Robbus, go forth and spreadus disinformationus everywhere ye go. I command it." "Yes Master." (pause) "Master ..." "What now, o drunken old fool?" "Can I wait until after happy hour?"

That's the ACTUAL view! Here's what Tird sees:

Yes I know the charade, but really ... what were they given? But more, why aren't the players demanding to know??? (Unless ....)

Forgetting all the agendas and all the vindictiveness, real and imaged, aside ... I think EVERYONE just wants to know: what the hell were those players given?

I would like to think that the Doctorbator had himself gone rogue and that any suggestion of a job to Dank would have been knocked on the head by our club officials about 2 seconds after it was suggested.

God I hope they give him another contract extension.

My mistake. I thought the stuff they sent to Melbourne Uni for testing was acquired at the club.

That, I get. I would expect rigourous handling of eg urine samples from players. That's what I'm trying to say. If they can show that a substance is TB4, then how it got there doesn't matter. The chain from China to Alavi, etc, doesn't really matter. If it's there, it's there.