robbiefrom13

Watts hung around near full back whenever we were kicking out (unless he did the kicking) - he must have been under instructions to occupy this pointless position, or else the runner would certainly have been out to tell him to make himself useful - "get out there, and present!" Not having an effective centre half back left Watts in no-man's-land most of the game. Plus, didn't he miss the final training session? Maybe he was not 100%, too. In any case, if he can be usefully deployed next week, he's definitely a first 18 for mine. (But, for all his faults, I shake my head at how MFC have used him, ever since he arrived, and certainly again today.) We played negative, not defensive, once we were losing. It's different - negative is to go slow, look for the boundary, go backwards, act like you are scared of being told off for transgressing a team rule about "defence" [read negativity], rather than trying to achieve something good that might turn things around. Viney, Toumpas, Blease the exceptions. Too young or new to have gotten on the programme, I suppose. Defence of course has always begun with manning up and denying them easy possessions. I can't get away from thinking the coach is at least part of this.... It is the uncontested/unhurried possessions we give the opposition that plays them, one team after another, into confidence, and arrogance - and with no Melbourne runner going out to demand accountability, I can only conclude the coach is not upset by this absurd tactic of "guarding empty space" (Wake up Mark, it's not soccer: they just kick it over our heads...). Watts wasted his day guarding empty space - is that his choice, I wonder? There will always be somebody lacking confidence, but when about 18 out of 22 play without confidence, why wouldn't questions be asked about the way they are being coached?

interesting point. is fitness really the essential base it seems it must be? (Or can other - perhaps mental - qualities be as effective, as alternative bases?) we'll find out how much fitness changes things I suppose, as our fitness levels reach elite standard over the next year and a bit. but I well remember seeing the unfit Jurrah turn it on for 5 goals in a short period against Brisbane a couple of years ago...

yes. The difference between when finals are realistically impossible, and technically impossible, would probably be a small window in which there would be scope for the rort I tried to describe. But I agree with the clear intent of your suggestion. I flew to Melbourne one week late in that year, with my wife, just for the Melbourne game. At the gate, we looked at each other and turned around, and went and watched half of the misery in a pub and then wandered around until we flew home again. We knew what was going to happen, at least thought we did; and we hated it. It was a very dispiriting experience, the "tanking that wasn't", and no football supporter should ever go through it again. A rule that promotes busting your guts while there's hope, and then going flat out after that - this is the right rule, in my opinion.

A club may not have set out to rort the system in the way Choke describes, but what if they are a loss or two off being out of contention (whatever the formula is for working that out), and they have an easy run home: wouldn't this be a huge incentive for throwing a couple of games in a "mid-season collapse"? Bottom line - someone will surely try to beat the system at some stage, if they have a mind to, no matter what the rules. Actually, in that sense, a half mill fine for a technical acquittal may be a genuinely good result - a "no correspondence entered into" just outcome in terms of the heart-in-the-wrong-place system-rorting attitude. Pick it to bits, sure - but it sent the message.

Disagree. If the players' actual performance is unaffected by an illicit drug, then I think we can argue that it is police matter, not aAFL matter. The AFL has limited responsibilities - wider than they used to be, but not absolute. And even courts have a degree of discretionary latitude - far too big and complex an issue for the AFL to be strapping on their six-guns and riding into the fray. If it comes up on their watch, yes, they have it in their in-tray. But if they go hunting elsewhere, it sounds like more misguided self-importance, and the intolerance would be an unconvincing mask attempting to hide their almost total incompetence when it comes to problem-solving equitably and justly. megalomania to me. Small government. please, AFL - your benevolent dictatorship is not reassuring. ZIf a club i9s concerned about peer pressure or an example set, one player disrupting the group, then the club should act - for those reasons - and not as a special branch of the drug squad. Don't know that this is a brilliant "solution", but it's logical enough.

can anybody find a safe seat to offer Demetriou?

Always helpful to have Ben-Hur clear up for us what we meant to say and why we're stupid

Not fair! The Oracle of Apollo was respected for a thousand years. The priestess a peasant woman with no experience of the world, who somehow came up with the goods. One late report of her going troppo under the influence of prophesying, but the vapour story pretty well discredited. Big mystery, the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. Unlike madam wilson. Venting and leaks and madness would be notions associable with madam wilson in a way they are not with the humble pythia of Delphi. But this Fairfax fake is not going to be listened to for long, one would imagine, unlike the Oracle of history. I don't know that too many people would still be hanging off wilson's every word unless they are just infotainment-addicted and idling in mental neutral.

was that as clever as it looks?

nice. you must be pretty sure about that, then?

It's pretty clear that there is no smoking gun - surely it would have leaked out if there was. Some of what has leaked out is absurd, and will certainly hurt the AFL rather than the MFC if it comes to the public fight we have more or less promised if we get clobbered initially by the AFL. Even the media is overall taking a very much changed view of the whole issue. If it drags on indefinitely, the cries of "bully!" and "unfair!" will start coming from all sides, against the AFL. Yet, when Anderson left and Vlad had the chance to shut the thing down, he didn't. I don't buy it that the AFL is simply too stupid or too proud to do the obvious. I still think that what we have not yet heard is, who is the puppeteer here? That's what I want to have come out into the open. Then there will be an alternative story, that will take the heat off the MFC.

29's not old. If he's not limping this year, of course he can.

"I think the club will get off - and probably Schwab as well - but the AFL will look weak if they don't chase Connolly as evidence that they have the power and are prepared to use it. Scapegoat - pure and simple." Connolly could fall, as a scapegoat, with the explanation that there has been a lot of smoke alright, but actually all there was behind it was an individual making stupid jokes. Damaging nevertheless - witness the extended investigation and media clamour, and the exciting of generally negative public opinion - and so he will have to pay for the besmirching of this squeaky-clean and over-scrutinized game. Now, repeat, 'there is no tanking...", and back to your seats...

Middle of the night, ok? Round one is for us on Easter Sunday. So I idly asked myself if there was a useful analogy lying around here. If the tanking investigation is unfairly heading towards a crucifixion, can the biblical precedent shed any light on it? McLean fits the role of the Judas - he put us in it. Demetriou is certainly playing the Pontius Pilate card - standing apart from it all, trying to look wise and pretending it's not his doing. Who today will end up loathed and hated, if we try to parallel the biblical story? - not the investigators, whose role and mentality is pretty much like that of the Bible story's Roman soldiers. Judas and Pilate are obvious villains, but the synagogue power-brokers lurking in the shadows were the real instigators of the crucifixion in the Bible story. So, I ask myself, who's driving this attack on the MFC? Mclean (like Judas) backed down when he saw what he'd done. Anderson gets the blame from some, but he left the building before it got anywhere near a crucifixion. Wilson has gone quiet. Carrying the thing forward has to be down to Pilate-like Demetriou, but in the Bible story Pilate isn't really the driver of the crucifixion: he just wanted to not get mired himself, and couldn't see any other way to placate the troublemaking Synagogue push. Somewhere in the apparently evidence-free zone of the tanking inquiry, surely there has to be someone with unyielding agenda to get the MFC? Someone exerting pressure that won't go away and which ensures the momentum of the whole thing? Who? What is at the heart of their agenda? Jealousy in the Bible story, and surely that isn't it here. Ok, it's the middle of the night and I've got nothing worthwhile to think about. How we long for the footy! May we too rise above the crap on Easter Sunday...

thanks for that. But it's consistency of procedure at a pretty high price, surely? This case is, apparently, anything but cut and dried. If what we are hearing about the report is accurate and representative, the AFL can hardly be saying that they are "concerned" about the stuff C&H came up with. AND meantime, disrepute hangs like a miasma over everybody involved, and the press vultures circle... wouldn't you expect the AFL would be thinking a different modus operandi applied in this instance? You're suggesting that normal operating procedure is the whole story here?

Thoroughly enjoying this, thankyou all. Almost as good as footy, with all the fascinating information and opinions being offered, plus the overheating posters and their digressions. An engrossing read all round. (But thank goodness we have had Neeld's assurance that it is not impacting the players - you would hope that this proves to be the case.) What I would like to hear some thoughts on, is: Why didn't Demetriou read Clothier and Haddad's report, and announce that "the investigators' exhaustive inquiry has failed to produce anything like a plausible case for action against MFC - end of story, thankyou all for your patience and cooperation"? Why keep it going?

so then, why hasn't Vlad pulled the plug on it?

"Know your enemy," my solicitor told me over and over - "how does he think?" and "what does he want?" Demetriou always laughed off tanking, despite most everyone understanding what clubs did when they were vaguely near the catchment area of the priority pick system, or the chance of a home final, etc. Now, with his over-the-top interrogations and computer-seizures and so on producing only the flimsiest "evidence" against Melbourne, Demetriou just won't let go. What is he on about? What do we know of the guy? Maybe tanking in itself has never disturbed Demetriou. He's an aggrandizer and a brusher-aside of nitty-gritties. Leaving aside the expansion sides that are not there in response to regional desires, but rather exist because of his own megalomania, what Demetriou wants at pretty much any cost, is good ratings for the competition. He's willing to carry the new sides, and skew everything to get them going, and he certainly is willing to fling money at other struggling clubs, and rig the draw, but he wants AFL to be irresistible - and for this reason he can't tolerate sustained failure. If tanking strengthens the competition, he'll deny it without a qualm. He did. But Melbourne have tanked, as he perhaps sees it, and stayed at the bottom. For that, in the end they must pay. There is a recognisable mentality here. The out-of-date boss with an unprofessional and under-performing employee reaches breaking point and summarily sacks the employee, or moves their desk, or whatever, trumping up some charge if they have to to justify whatever action they have taken. I say out-of-date because today the boss would be expected to do it differently. "Due process" would require the boss to have carefully documented the deficiencies, and then have a non-threatening formal meeting with the employee, explaining exactly where their deficiencies are and what company standards are, setting up training and mentoring to help them overcome their deficiencies, and setting agreed specific targets and timeframes for doing so. The idea behind this approach is that we are all working together, even though with varying effectiveness, so we should work together to get it right if at all possible. In relation to Demetriou and the Melbourne footy club, how this contemporary way of thinking would play out would have been for Demetriou to have called the Melbourne footy club in and told them that the AFL had some concerns about the club's professionalism and competitiveness. If the AFL ever chose to, it could easily establish advisory standards of best practice for training, list management, game day rotations, coaching methods, etc, as well as obligatory standards of player welfare, injury management, and so on. Structures could be established providing for appropriate channels of dialogue between the AFL and the clubs. Perhaps the debacle over accusations of racism at Melbourne early last year could have prompted the AFL to review the mechanisms they have for involving themselves in the internal operations of clubs. At any rate, if the AFL had developed some capacity to support the clubs in the ways I have suggested, it would then be possible for the AFL to actively contribute to a stronger competition, improved player welfare, etc, instead of being restricted to acting retrospectively on things that haver gone wrong. In such a scenario the AFL might well have looked at Bailey-era Melbourne, and for the good of the competition initiated supportive dialogue with the club. As it was, it was left for individuals at Melbourne to seek out coffee meetings with retired greats, to try and get some pointers - while the AFL product suffered... The sort of positive and collegial approach I am describing of course has not been the mentality of the Demetriou-led AFL. The AFL leads the world in drug testing, it has zero tolerance policies related to racial vilification, sex innuendo and so forth - all punitive practices, not formative. And the present witch-hunt against Melbourne is clearly focused on finding grounds for punishment - apparently at this stage still determined to act on the accusation, regardless of the value of the "evidence" found. The AFL is certainly not carrying out this investigation with a view to ensuring the competition improves. After all, since the alleged offences, Melbourne has totally revamped its on-field and off-field personnel, its training facilities and practices, brought its levels of fitness and physicality steadily closer to industry standards, and its expectations are no longer expressed in terms of "quarters won" and "competitive" being good enough. For its part the AFL has withdrawn the carrot that it accuses Melbourne of having improperly reached out for, so that there can be no question of making an example of Melbourne to deter other teams from trying what Melbourne is accused of having done. No, the intent of the exercise here is solely to punish the Melbourne footy club; the investigation is entirely focused on the past, and is a distraction from the present and the future; in its evidence-defying momentum it reeks of the bloody-mindedness and irrationality of a bully boss who has spat the dummy in frustration. How can Melbourne extricate itself from such irrationality? Maybe rational answers to the "please explain", if delivered with enough legal weightiness to take the bully instinct out of Demetriou's sails, could bring about a truce. But the dissatisfaction would remain as long as Demetriou was there, and perhaps this has to go to court: Demetriou may refuse to let go of his intent, and go down with his vendetta if he has to. But if what has really rankled with Demetriou is Melbourne's continuing poor contribution to the competition, and the drama drags on unresolved, Melbourne becoming seriously competitive as soon as possible may be the real key to having this all go away: it will give the whole saga a different end, and remove the need to punish the club. The public and the media will get completely off Demetriou's bandwagon quickly enough when the club's contribution to the competition becomes exciting - and Demetriou may too. AFL is after all entertainment.

great shot of Robbie, if you ask me - he was a hard worker and it shows - and this is exactly what he looked like under fire just before he ripped 'em open. It's the eyes... Robbie, Norm and Trenners

At all costs we should stick tightly together. "Divide and conquer" may be a faint hope still held out by the mighty Vlad.

I'm not so sure it is a lot of print. Roughly 6 pages of transcripts of interviews etc per day would produce that much. A civil case in the Supreme Court can easily have 800 pages of documents disclosed before things get started - and neither side keen to actually go the distance in a trial. What does it suggest, that the AFL has put the matter to the MFC in this way, I wonder? If there was straightforward evidence of an actual transgression, you would presume that the matter could be stated in a lot less than 800 pages. There presumably has to be a huge amount of dross in the 800 pages, and I expect MFC's lawyers will be repeating a few points over and over in their responses to much of it. Perhaps there is learned argument about the laws of the game - which argument would prompt the obvious counter-attacks, I imagine, about precedents and public statements from Vlad that provided interpretations of the rules, intention and effect of the laws and the obvious inducement written into the rules, plus comment on the legitimacy of the AFL's investigating procedures, etc. All the things that have been canvassed in posts on this site will come into play and do their thing now that the AFL has committed itself to paper. WYL, in the space of 12 minutes this morning you went from posting "From that i get the feeling our lawyers are pretty confident thus far" to "Our legal boys will need to know it all verbatum". I think you have let the loud-sounding process get at you a bit. Relax... I find it interesting that the MFC has apparently not felt any need to connect with public sympathy for their victimisation in all this. Since they have been shown the AFL's hand, there have been opportunities to pick up on public comment about the process and feed the growing public disenchantment with the AFL's behaviour, but we remain entirely poker-faced. Very encouraging, I think. And, I still think that bringing the game into disrepute falls over if the tanking charge cannot be proven. Nobody publicly [censored] on Vlad's statue.

Well, still "developing". Hope Neeld holds his line here. Schoolteacher and all...

I can see that something Connolly - or anyone else - allegedly said could be relevant to a charge of tanking, but if he/they said it privately (e.g. "in a vault!") or even texted it privately, does it in itself constitute any attack on the reputation of the AFL? If the reply is, yes, because of what it caused, you have returned it to a charge of tanking... I am wondering whether the disrepute issue has any independent substance without the tanking charge. Surely going through someone's rubbish bin, or eavesdropping on their private conversations, isn't going to provide acceptable evidence of the victims of these invasions of privacy having brought anyone into disrepute? We're not living in some third-world dictatorship, subject to mind-police, where thinking is an offence... Though, as to those burgling their bins and computers, and then publishing edited versions of small scraps they found, we presumably could well think they were maliciously damaging all sorts of reputations. So, what I am asking is, are we as at risk of going down for bringing the game into disrepute if tanking is not a charge the AFL is going to be able to stick - can the evidence about disrepute stand a challenge if the tanking charge in the end has been abandoned?

The thing is, the team doesn't win. Normal for us has become embarrassingly bad. We don't want more normal. We want football success, and I keep thinking of Shane Woewodin and what he did to achieve football success. Opportunity was slipping by, year by year, and he wasn't getting what he wanted - so he got seriously serious: watched very carefully what he ate, stayed right clear of the booze, etc etc. His over-the-top efforts were rewarded. I wish our players had that level of commitment, because as a supporter, that's the level of success I'd love to see again. But it does sound like some of them don't get it. To me, this goes to the heart of what culture is, when guys join their mates in what is clearly ok stuff to do. Ordinary breeds ordinary. Culture can raise the individual's expectations of himself, his ambition and his sense of what is 100%.

it may be trivial, but it is another MFC story about something other than the club kicking goals. How come they aren't all as [censored] off as we are, and determined that, whatever the cost, they are not going to be written about until it is to describe their excelling on the field? What do they want to be known for? - there's a lot of work needed to get the right answer up. Days off? - don't they feel as though they have had a couple of years off, and it's time to be catching up? yes, it is trivial, but the real disappointment is that it wasn't a different sort of story.