Whispering_Jack

If any players are found guilty of an anti-doping rule violation, any suspension begins as at the date of the hearing decision under the 2015 code ~ WADA Guidelines

All booked.

I really think that's enough of this - a thread based on what is in all likelihood a photoshopped picture, with a great deal of uninformed comment about one man's mental illness. We can discuss Mitch Clark further if something of substance occurs in the future. Thanks.

There's no doubt that news from the hearing will be leaked out and the way it's presented will depend on who the messenger might happen to be; that's the way the media works these days.I was hoping it would be open only because Dank said he would only voluntarily do so if was an open court. I would like to see the arrogant [censored] squirm under cross examination.

Funny, but when the IOC suspends drug cheats from competing at the Olympics or who are caught during the Olympics, they don't even entertain the idea of not sanctioning the cheats for fear of what it might do t the integrity of the Olympics. And I would have thought that if players were found to be cheats, then it would reflect poorly on the integrity of the competition if they were not punished.

I ask myself the question why, if the evidence existed to exonerate a club, its staff and its players, would anyone who had such evidence withhold it from the relevant authorities and the parties for so long? None of the answers that I can come up with would lead me to hold such person in a favourable light.

Essendon supplements saga: Hearings to be held behind closed doors This is shonky on so many levels that it's not funny. If only the AFL would open up the Tribunal to dare this creep and his "confidant" to have their day in court!

Paige Cardona's 30 players to watch in 2015. And she doesn't include Jake Lovett.

Bob. I agree with you to a large extent but, having watched a few of the replays of games from the latter part of the year including one involving both Blease and Tapscott (v Brisbane Lions), they together with a few others who remain on our list were/are coachkillers of the worst kind. I witnessed players in the first three quarters when the game was there to be won, miss targets, make bad choices, go long when they should have gone short and conduct themselves with a lack of discipline or poise for the main part. They were poor choices to start with but their development as players was equally abysmal. Even if some of those players would have had big tanks, their football skills were never up to scratch anyway.

Actually OD, this was at the request of the AFLPA to protect the 34 players who haven't been named (apart from 14 whose names were leaked by Robbo months ago). In a perfect world, cases such as these should be open to the public for a number of reasons but our game doesn't operate in a perfect world. It operates in a world where a football club runs a 12 month long doping programme and injects substances into the bodies of its players which it subsequently can't identify because the records have gone missing. It's a world of Stephen Dank and his confidante Martin Hardie, of Shane Charters and the Weapon, of club doctors who are devoid of courage, of shady chemists and scheming, manipulative coaches and their ambitious wives. Everybody wants to see and hear what's going on. We are all voyeurs. Best to keep it all under wraps. We don't want the kiddies to know of this.

Not to mention that Lynden's surname is spelt incorrectly.

The Tribunal hearings will take place behind closed doors. This means we can all look forward to selective leaks from Robbo, Rohan Connolly and Chip Le Grand.

It's not as if a player like him has escaped the notice of all 18 clubs and given that he played for Gippsland Power and even had a game for the Casey Scorpions, our own people would certainly have seen enough of him to make the decision as to whether he was on their short list. Despite the wraps in the above pen picture, there must be other things in his make up that caused him not to be taken. I recall a player in the mid to late 1990s who was a star forward for Vic Metro in the Under 18 Championships, a solid key forward named Quinn. He kicked a bag of four or five goals in one game and many (myself included) believed he would go top 10 in the national draft. He wasn't even rookied. He ended up at Sandringhsm but I don't think he lasted long at that level. You might have one or two clubs whose recruiting teams that get things wrong (and don't we know it?) but all 18?

Please say it isn't so ~ not to Essendon of all clubs.

Godders was a better kick.

Sergeant Peptides - By Jobe, I've just seen the light!I now understand the meaning of these words from "A Day in the Life" off the same album. I've Hird the words a thousand times before but they only make sense now:- The holes were made by needles!!!Danks a lot for the information.

Bob, I believe the comment highlighted is wrong.Macca on a Demonland thread Debt, concerning the club's financial situation posted as follows earlier this year:- Annual Report (go to page 10 for the numbers and page 22 for the breakdown of revenue) The figures relate to YE31/10/13 and were also the subject of Peter Jackson's report at the AGM in February this year. I spoke briefly with him after that and he confirmed that notwithstanding the poor financial result for 2012/3 we weren't carrying the massive debt of more than $5m that the Stynes administration inherited and wiped out a couple of years before. You are correct in suggesting that an organisation can't sustain a business such as that conducted by our club by going to the members with hands out for donations or with collection tins. Stynes/McLardy/Schwab did so nevertheless in a very classy and dignified way and that did save us from extinction/relocation/merger as far as I'm concerned. I think it's equally fair to say that the business can't be sustained from getting AFL handouts either (which is in part what got us kick started again under PJ). The bottom line in improving our own bottom line is by being good, smart and innovative at running the business and given that this business revolves around football, we need good governance in every facet of the organisation and with a focus on producing a team that's ultimately going to be successful on the field. I believe we are heading in that direction (albeit slowly) under the administration currently in place but I would really like to see us asserting our independence from the AFL and being able to stand up in our own right and be the masters of our own destiny. We shouldn't forget that at the moment, we remain tied to the AFL and somewhat reliant on its largesse which doesn't entirely sit comfortably with me.

The point you make about the conditions and amenities at Casey Fields is well known and documented but these things apply in the case of many outer suburban venues and yet the clubs that use them (often at much lower levels) can still attract good crowds for local matches. I think the problems at Casey go much further. The Scorpions are a local club that was uprooted a decade ago from Springvale where they had a ground that had become unsuited to VFL competition and in addition was situated in an area that had undergone substantial demographic change and therefore had a declining supporter base for our footy. For some reason, the local community at Cranbourne hasn't totally embraced the club. I hope I'm not stepping on any toes or upsetting anybody's sensibilities because I'm not a local but my casual observation of the situation is that perhaps the identification with "Casey" rather than "Cranbourne" is one of the problems. The City of Casey was formed during the Kennett years and is an amalgam of the old Cranbourne and Berwick municipalities. The two areas are cheese and chalk in many respects and Casey is still more resonant of the northern part of the municipality which is where the name came from in the first place. I get the feeling therefore that the Cranbourne locals aren't fully enamoured with the Casey identity yet - the municipal offices are at Fountain Gate where the old Berwick Shire offices are situated while the old Cranbourne Shire offices were closed years ago and are now used for other purposes. So there's a possible disconnect between the folk at Cranbourne and the concept of Casey where the power base seems to be elsewhere. In addition, there's the Cranbourne Football Club which is a strong club with lots of depth and tradition and a base going all the way down to the junior ranks which therefore gives it an enormous foothold in the local community and from which the Casey Scorpions stand apart. I would like to hear from the locals but my theory is that for a football club to work in this area, it needs to have a heart and soul. A closer connection to the local name and the local football club might do the trick. Perhaps some sort of alignment between the two that sees the club become the Cranbourne Demons at VFL senior and development team level and to retain the Cranbourne Eagles identity at local and junior levels. I realise this is probably a highly sensitive area. On the one hand, it would be breaking tradition with the old Springvale but from what I see, much of that has been lost and the club isn't attracting supporters or dollars from that part of the world and without those things, it will never flourish. By ditching the Casey name, it might also get some noses out of joint from the northern part of the municipality while traditionalists from the local Cranbourne club and those associated with other clubs in the area might not be comfortable either. I've put it out there as an idea and as a possible alternative to abandoning the idea of an alignment and doing what a number of other clubs are doing and going alone - possibly to Prahran or to Punt Road to share with Richmond.

Smithy, I agree with you. The way it's turned out, he wasn't such a loss and we're not taking a rap for another failed early draft pick. Imagine if we could have found a way to keep him at the MFC on a 3 year contract? He would have cost us $700k a year plus $150k as our ambassador to protect the ozone layer. His old man would have woofed up the majority of the food available at club functions leaving nothing but scraps for the rest of us and we would have missed out on the Hogans, the Vineys, the Tysons and the Petraccas. He would have been delisted by Roosy in October/November along with his mates Bleasey, Straussy and Tappy leaving us an extra draft pick to select another shmuck like him but much cheaper with pick 83. Yeah ... I'm over it, contented and at peace with the world.

Thanks ... and fixed. As you can see, I'm working on turning the club around from the house divided scenario to one big happy family theme. It must be working!

Fair go ... he's a young kid. I can remember one of the first television interviews I saw when I was young. It was of a Melbourne recruit called "Hassa" Mann who was just down from the country and he was barely intelligible. He turned out to be a captain of the club and worked his way into top positions in business and was CEO of the club and a well spoken man. People can learn.

You could hardly call anything I've stated here as exonerating anyone but if, as you say, this thread is limited only to the 2014 financial reports, then why do you and others immediately point to the previous administration's failure in part of one year and fail to acknowledge its role in bringing the club out of a $5m black hole and into the black? When I mention a "house divided", I refer not to that board internally but to the Melbourne community in general and the divisions over the years going back all the way to the time when we were a power in the 60s. There are plenty of examples of this that have been discussed and debated ad infinitum and don't need to be canvassed again. As for your parallel with what's happening over at Essendon, apart from the fact that we're talking about an entirely different situation where much of the story is out in the open, you need to check your facts. I have on many occasions commented favorably about how, despite the controversy raging about the supplements issue, Essendon has been allowed to perform to the best of its ability on the field without the distractions of bickering factions, quite the opposite of what happened at Melbourne in the latter part of the Bailey era and throughout Mark Neeld's time as coach. And to add to that final point ... despite the raging storm over banned supplements, Essendon won enough games in each of the past two years to make the top eight ... and they recently announced a profit.

Hird was obviously pivotal in this scenario in that, as coach, he bore a substantial amount of responsibility in the adoption and implementation of the supplements programme introduced at Essendon in late 2011 and then well into the 2012 season. He initially accepted responsibility for what happened during that time but when it came to the Federal Court hearing, he made it clear in his evidence that this was not the case. At the point in time when he backtracked on the issue of his responsibility as a coach, it was clear that his position was untenable. I tend to agree with the view put forward by Caroline Wilson that he was on the brink of being sacked and Mark Thompson was going to replace him but something went awry for the Bombers' plans - possibly legal advice precluded them from sacking Hird while his appeal to the Federal Court Full Bench was being determined. There is another theory that Hird knows things about the club's activities that the board doesn't want to get out in the public domain, but that's speculative at best. In any event, Hird's status as coach at present remains a sideshow to the AFL Tribunal hearing due to start on Monday week and the Federal Court outcome, whenever that may be. If both turn against Hird, then contract or not, he will lose his job and ultimately, he may also lose the right to coach at AFL level for any time into the future.

Thanks to those who have been contributing reports. It's terrific for those of us at work and very much locked into the pre-Xmas silly season to be able to follow closely how the team is traveling ATM. In case anyone's wondering, the AIS lads training with Melbourne on work experience are Harley Balic (Sandringham Dragons, 186cm medium forward) and Liam Jeffs (192cm, Eastern Ranges, forward) who should be comfortable at a club that drafted former teammates Angus Brayshaw and Christian Petracca respectively. The fact that an AIS academy member does work experience with a particular AFL club normally doesn't mean he will end up there as a result of a future draft but the last intake saw Brayshaw and Billy Stretch training with us earlier this year. Neither looked out of place and I notice that in an interview this week Brayshaw cited his training experience at the club as being valuable in teaching him what to expect in terms of increased training intensity when coming to an AFL club.

That wasn't my point. I said that our financial problems weren't confined to the one administration but to successive administrations and that relates to the one from which Schwab took over which left a $5m black hole and the one before that when a previous CEO was said to have left a substantial unpaid tax bill in the drawer of his desk. The other point was that throughout these periods we were a house divided which is a condition that leads you to debacles like the tanking investigation, the collapse of our playing list from 2006/7 onwards, on field failures, poor recruiting, player development and coaching. Much of this is being neutralised at the moment and that's good but we're by no means out of the woods and remain reliant on the largesse of the AFL and, after a decade of disaster, our future is now dependent to a large extent on the improvement of our on field performances.