Whispering_Jack

Redleg might well be acting dumb but we've been working hard in Hobart today to try to solve the conundrum of the tanking story. We are about to sail off into the wide blue yonder in the direction of Sydney but, below I set out my diary of today's events as they unfolded in Tasmania's capital city:-It was our last day here and we went on an excursion to the MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) which is about 20 minutes out of old Hobart town. Unlike Redleg who fortified himself for the ordeal the night before with a concoction made from bananas called a "banana foster", I had to be taken there at gunpoint by she who must be obeyed. I mean, the MFC is currently under siege and our wives are taking us on a tour of an art gallery? Let's get real, please! We took the ferry up the Derwent River and passed the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. There have been rumours that the company intends to come on board as a sponsor of the MFC and I have no problems with that proposition. In fact, I tried to arrange a meeting with executives of the plant to convince them that we Demons are a solid upstanding bunch of decent human beings and had nothing to do with the alleged match fixing they might have been reading about in those funny Victorian newspapers but the execs wanted nothing to do with us so the next stop was MONA. Now, both Redleg and I are anarcho-primitive philistines who have no place in a modern art gallery and we were soon bored witless by the wild mix of antiquities, modern and contemporary art and audio-visual displays which (as far as I was concerned anyway) were all a load of carp - literally. Anyone who has been within smelling distance of Cloaca Professional, a machine which turns food into excrement would attest to this. And after queuing up for half an hour to get into the death room, which wasn't nearly as confronting as we expected, Redleg and I were already working out an exit strategy. Then a strange thing happened. We passed by Sydney Nolan's Snake and found ourselves in an alcove where a green button on the wall invited me to press hard once, upon which I started hearing voices through the speakers. One of the voices was familiar - it was Dean Bailey. "OK. Nathan Brown's a bit of a worry. Who have we got left to put on him?" Then, I heard another voice coming out of the ether. "Try PJ on him. He's got the pace and the agility and if you move Ricky up forward, he might just get a goal to put you in front". At first, I froze when I realised to whose voice those words belonged but I quickly gathered my wits, pushed my way beyond a screen and grabbed the cassette from a console and placed it in my back pack. Then, I ran up two or three flights of stairs with my chest heaving pushing past crowds and shocked attendants. I hailed a cab and within a quarter of an hour was back on the ship where I played the tape through in its entirety. It was in fact the missing audio from the the Jordan McMahon game and I had my proof that there was no tanking. This was all the evidence that was needed to put an end to the sham of a farce that would surely now become the great AFL tanking fiasco of 2009. I had no doubt about the identity of the other voice - the one who was advising Bailey during that frenetic final quarter against Richmond and provided him with all of those brilliant moves that all but won the game against the Tigers. His voice was distinctive, his initials were A.D!

Syd Anderson

Pre-season update: Davis to Jones Is Jake Spencer finally going to break through as an AFL quality ruckman?

Thanks for that rjay. Wouldn't mind being there but I'm in Hobart ATM. Have a great day!

I'm led to believe that there's an open training session tomorrow but I have no idea as to the venue and for some reason am having trouble accessing that part of the melbournefc.com.au website that covers training sessions. I think the board and football department have done a good job so far in quarantining the playing group from the tanking controversy and all of the attendant nonsense (anyone who knows the slightest thing about playing football would be aware that the fumbling furphy could only come from the likes of Clothier and Haddad whose understanding of the game seems to be minimal) and should be congratulated on this. It's important that we keep the players focussed on the season ahead. Anyway, bring on the footy and the training reports and please tell me that nobody is really practicing fumbling at this stage of the pre-season.

Good to see that the Flash has got himself in good shape after appearing decidedly shaky at the start of the pre-season.

From Tuesday afternoon until early afternoon today I've been at sea and out of range of Demonland and the football media. After reading the hundreds of messages that have been posted on this and other threads, I'm staggered about two things:- 1. There is still total confusion as to the appropriate definition of "tanking". My understanding of the word is that it was defined on numerous occasions by the AFL's CEO and on his definition, neither Melbourne nor several other AFL clubs "tanked". However, if you want to apply the wider definition of "tanking", its clear that a number of AFL clubs "tanked" between the late 1990's right through to mid 2012 when Sheedy rang in the changes to ensure GWS won the Whitfield Cup. I believe the MFC submission will concentrate heavily on the fact that the MFC conducted itself in accordance with what Demetriou himself, laid out as being acceptable. Therefore, most of the speculation and brouhaha in the media and some of it here is utter bullsh1t. 2. There is on that basis, enough evidence available to charge large segments of the media with tanking.

The fumbling has me intrigued. How much fumbling went on in Rounds 1 to 13 when we won only one game and nobody suggested we were tanking? For the argument that fumbling was an integral part of tanking they would have to reveal our level of fumbling improved during the period when we transmogrified from a struggling team into one that suddenly was very capable of rolling the premiership favourites. The mind boggles at this proposition. Do they even keep statistics for fumbles?

If you saw the ladies who are giving RL the many "admiring glances" then you might see it in its proper context. They define the meaning of 85 year old cougars. Even more ridiculous is the stuff I'm reading from our local rags about the tanking inquisition. It's gone from the sublime to the absolute ridiculous. The stuff I'm writing from the ship is far closer to reality than some of the carp this Pierik guy is writing about although I'm almost certain that he reads Demonland posts before he puts pen to paper.

I can assure you that the going hasn't been all that easy since we left Adelaide. We were on the high seas and out of communication with the rest of the world for almost 48 hours as the ship headed first south and then in an easterly direction across the treacherous Bass Strait. Our own independent investigation into the tanking affair was seemingly over, so Redleg and I reconciled ourselves about the events of the past two days by visiting the upper deck where we sat by the swimming pool sipping on banana daiquiris admiring the young Brazilian guests in their skimpy swimsuits. It was a hard life ... until the seas became angry and we had to go below decks. Redleg noticed the envelope first. It had been slipped under his stateroom door and contained a not too subtle message, "Here is an invitation you've been waiting for - an opportunity to meet and listen to the one and the only Dean Bailey this evening at 7.00 pm. Starlight Room, 5th deck." I received a similar note under my door and we spent most of the afternoon discussing this new and intriguing development. It was clear that while we were back in the city of churches, Bailey had been avoiding us but here, on the high seas out of the world's gaze and with not a reporter or AFL official in sight, he was willing to talk. Would he spill the beans on the long running scandal or were the events of 2009 as stale as the snapper we had consumed in the Demetriou family fish and chip shop we visited before the start of our investigation? We wore the obligatory dinner suits (we thought they would act as an effective disguise) and made it to the Starlight Room at exactly 7.00pm but noticed that quite a crowd had gathered inside. They were listing to an American crooner playing songs on a grand piano. "I get my kicks from champagne ..." Bailey was nowhere to be seen and we became really worried when we realised that we were back on eastern standard daylight savings time and hadn't reset our watches. It was really 7.35pm and it suddenly dawned upon us that we had missed our assignation. "I get a kick ... yes I get a kick outa ... you ... " The entertainment director came out onto the stage and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for a wonderful performance for the velvet voice of grammy award winner, Dean Bailey, tonight's act direct from Chicago in the US of A." So he wasn't "the one and the only Dean Bailey" after all and we had reached yet another dead end. As we trudged out of the Starlight Room in disappointment we noticed a sign advertising tomorrow's main activity. Accompanying a photograph of an extremely obese man was the topic of his lecture: "Phil's fabulous fifty bananas a day diet".

Was it red?

Today was our last day in Adelaide and Redleg and I were determined to track down the man who held the key to the tanking conundrum, Dean Bailey. However, we weren't going to make the same mistake as yesterday so we looked up the telephone number for the Crows and dialled ... "Welcome to the Adelaide Football Club. Home of the Camry Crows. If you are enquiring about club membership packages, press one ... if you wish to make a purchase from our range of club merchandise, press two ... if you want to contribute to our special Kurt Tippett clawback fund to help us pay the AFL's disgraceful salary cap breach fine (all donations are tax deductible), press three." We finally reached a number that allowed us to speak with a human being and I asked the young lady at the other end to put me through to Stephen Trigg. There was hesitation before the voice responded, "Mr. Trigg isn't working here at the present time ... " "But it says here in the AFL Guide 2012 that he's the CEO; we need to speak with him urgently about one of your coaches ... " "Oh, that's OK sir, they should all be in their offices this morning. To which of our coaches do you wish to speak?" I gave her the name and thought I could hear her rifling through a long list of numbers before she finally got back to me. "Mr. Bailey. That would be extension one, eight, six ... I'll put you through now ... A familiar voice responded but it wasn't that of the former Demon coach. "Clarrie, is that you? We're the two blokes you met at Alberton yesterday. What are you doing at Crows HQ? "Ah, on Tuesdays, I'm working at the Adelaide Football Club. Mr. Bailey's not here but perhaps there's something I can do to help you?" "Clarrie, there is. You can empty the contents of every bin in his office and hold it for us. Don't throw anything away. We'll meet you at the club in 15 minutes ..." We spent the better part of another hot Adelaide day sifting through the contents of Dean Bailey's garbage but alas, we found nothing. Not a single scrap of evidence to suggest that Bailey was planning to impart any of the tactics and strategies he used with the Demons in 2009 on the Crows in 2013. We did find the remnants of two folders containing 800 pages of fol de rol over which someone had scribbled child-like cartoon characters resembling Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck but there was nothing of substance in either volume and given where their custodian had dumped them, he thought so as well. The closest we came to finding anything suspicious was a banana peel but we quickly dismissed that as a red herring. So for the second day running, we had come up against a dead end. Our investigation was going nowhere ...

I think you might be reading to much into the word "board" used in the article. What I find to be of significance is the bringing in of potential draft tampering charges because these lay the AFL open to the question of why it hasn't already acted against Richmond and Terry Wallace, Carlton and Brett Ratten and half a dozen others. There might have been some difficulty with bringing tanking allegations against the other clubs but now, when we have an AFL coach admitting he did nothing to win a game lest it deprived his club of a draft pick, that's a direct admission. One that hasn't been investigated. The pizzing will end up splashing all over the two most senior people at the AFL. I can't believe they really want that?

Steve O'Brien

I'm in and out of range ATM but I've now managed to lock. Please feel free to post on the AFL investigation thread and kindly do so within the guidelines in the C of C.

At this point, it's been decided to temporarily close this thread because there's a fair amount of duplication with the AFL investigation thread. We'll reopen it when we feel it's appropriate - perhaps when Ms. Wilson next rears her head. Could posters also please familiarise themselves with the Demonland code of conduct. There's no need for abuse of other posters. Critical responses are fine but outright abuse and bullying are not accepted. Please try avoiding the derailing of threads and try not to post too often or go on tangents in threads. There's too much of that going on and warnings will be issued and if that doesn't work, we'll reluctantly adopt AFL tactics and apply bans. Thank you.

How inaccurate is the last paragraph of the article? McLean was never asked if Melbourne tanked? In fact he specifically denied it was called tanking but rather he used the word "experimentation" which was the same word Andrew Demetriou used in a Wilson article in 2009 about the Jordan McMahon game and which was considered by the AFL to be an acceptable practice. Pierik is a Wilson lackey doing her job whilst she's away.

Of course we then realised that Bailey's at the Crows so we might venture out there tomorrow.

Thanks for the reports. You learned a lot more than Redleg and I learned at http://demonland.com/forums/index.php?/topic/27162-the-no-t-no-b-thread/page-150#entry682289'>Port Adelaide from today's training there. * warning - the thread is not intended for serious readers.

Redleg and I are carryimg out our own independent investigation of the phenomenon that has come to be known as tanking. Our first stop was Adelaide where we sought to interview former Demon coach Dean Bailey. We arrived at Alberton Oval this morning with the temperature nudging 40 Celsius even though it was still early in the day. The first unusual thing we noticed was that there was not a soul around. No Hinkley, no players and no Dean Bailey which was unfortunate because we'd spent a day navigating the rough waters of Bass Strait with the aim of securing an interview. We'd endured the sickening nausea that comes even when a big ship encounters waves of ten feet up to thirty at times so it was a major disappointment to miss the great man but he was nowhere to be found. Never mind, we eventually found this bloke named Clarrie who agreed to speak with us: DL: Clarrie, can you tell us about Dean Bailey's position on the tanking enquiry? Clarrie: Sorry sir but I can't tell you a thing. DL: Why is there a cover up going on here? Clarrie: No, no. It's only that I've just arrived here from the Phillipines ... DL: But you work here. You must know something? Clarrie: I'm on the cleaning staff. I know nothing about the football. DL: That's OK. If you hang around this place for a few months more you'll be qualified for a job on the coaching staff. Good day sir and good luck. Well that's it. A wasted morning in Adelaide trying to get to the bottom of the tanking enquiry. Still, I think that as usual, we got a fair bit more than they put in the newspapers. Next stop, Hobart where we hope to catch up with a prominent MFC sponsor.

The AFL is conducting its annual induction of new players today so don't expect any of the newbies to be in attendance.

It's on again this morning. Hope some posters can make it out for the benefit of those of us who are overseas, interstate or just can't make it.

BH is correct. There are a lot more issues at play in this and from the AFL's point of view they clearly override concerns about them discriminating against one club. I view this as a definite plus in the long run for us because ultimately a heavy sanction against us would make the next big story not merely one of discrimination (which it clearly has been from the get go) to one of corruption and the AFL certainly don't want that.

Pre-season update: Grimes to Tapscott Jack Grimes has also had a few niggles during a pre season that hasn't been kind to the skippers.

Redleg and I are on the banana boat. Good omen - one of the flags they were flying over the deck was red and blue. Next stop Adelaide where we hope to interview Dean Bailey about his views on the tanking controversy. In the meantime, rough seas expected and we'll be out of range till Monday morning.