robbiefrom13

I think I get the fundamental point - nothing can stop WADA sorting it all and delivering an unbiased unpragmatic finding; but my point is, will it have traction here? "Far away in Switzerland" works two ways. I expect CAS will clobber Essendon and their players - but the AFL, the media and the public look like they will be rushing to the aid of the party. Some players will suffer from the judgment no doubt, but the club? A change of faces and on we go, I suspect; with dodgy concessions from the AFL: Friday night games, list-filling measures, etc.. Of course I want to see Essendon slaughtered for their misdeeds, but I also want drug experiments deterred with such severity that the game is clean in future. I cannot get interested in car racing for example, where it's technology that mostly decides. I love the stretching of what we see human beings doing - through dedication, imagination and focus. The mind - not the laboratory. If a finding against Essendon at CAS does not result in the AFL, the media and the public being disgusted and turning their backs to Essendon, then it will merely be an inconvenience, a job for the PR boys, damage limitation and ultimately a set-back, a challenge, in their pursuit of the same goal they had their sights on when apprehended. Just need to be cleverer next time.... I'm naive. I want public disgrace, back from which they cannot crawl. Partly my outrage, but partly because I hate the thought of the cost of cheating being affordable. As I see it, CAS simply can't do it all, not from that distance, with the powers they have, against all the on-the-ground resources Essendon has. Athens found, Napoleon found, America has repeatedly found - you can't fight a war that far from home. I'd really wanted to see the forces here lining up alongside WADA. Maybe the Federal Government wlll, under pressure from the Olympics crowd. But the failure of Australians - especially in the football world - to align with WADA gives me real disquiet. Edit: what on earth have I done there? Nasher edit: fixed it for you.

I'll bet it irks WADA too, to see EFC and its tame journos lobbying the Australian public to barrack against the clean sport people; and lobbying successfully it seems. While WADA try to retrospectively get the gate closed on Essendon's anti-sport behaviour, maybe it's too late - the Essendon lobbyists have gotten up a revolution against fences, and people seem to be buying it. They actually don't care about what Essendon did - that just isn't the story. Maybe any punishment of Essendon will be hated - and effectively result in no message at all other than the football crowd and the AFL telling ASADA/WADA/CAS "leave us alone!" And close ranks around the "victims", and restore them by whatever means can be gotten away with. Maybe Essendon's time-wasting was not only to have the 34 retire before any sanctions could be applied, but also time for getting the public on side - via spin, an alternative story of underdog heroism, and investigation fatigue - "it's all just taken too long..." The race to the finals is the overwhelming reality in play. Essendon have consistently refused to discuss the issue of what was injected - and their exoneration has always been in terms of "you had no right to challenge us over it like this" and "you couldn't prove it" - never a case showing "we didn't do it". To Essendon, drugs in sport is just not to be the issue, and nor is it to apparently increasingly large numbers of football people in the press and the grandstands. So that regardless of any decision WADA might come up with, the collective AFL mind is pretty decided - they want Essendon. The more they're castigated from afar, the more they become Jung's folk heroes. Are we who wait on WADA hoping for what is fast becoming an irrelevancy? Like the way the letter of the law ("man and a woman") is now just irrelevant against the tide pushing for "marriage equality"? Or how one country after another is legalising marijuana? Politicians lying no longer counts, it just doesn't matter. Sports Science is as acceptable as full-body lycra, perhaps? "Supplements" - how can the public be expected to get on board an arbitrary list drawn up by who-knows-who, overseas? I'm depressing myself... BB, are we trying to apply standards that faded away a while ago? Saying "ought" when there is no longer any consensus about the rights and wrongs, no matter what the rules still say? Has our thinking passed into the past?

Long thread, with post 2 in effect the OP; and then pages of posters many of whom exposed themselves, in proof of the effective OP. We didn't be very nice to each other, either. Maybe we collectively are no worse to Aborigines than we are to anyone else? Justifying (sort of) those who argued they are not racist. Bit of a mess, when you read the whole thing.

Plenty of fair points about Jones, but still, real leadership inspires, and causes others to walk tall, to rise above themselves. Out of all we have, I think Hogan looks likeliest to do that. To lead you have to be at the front, you have to have clear purpose that gets the rest to hurry up a bit, and at the end of the day you need to have taken them somewhere. Not just been among them, doing whatever you do when you are shuffling forwards and backwards and round and round in circles.... Actually, I want to see a leader who changes Jack Watts' sense of urgency and self-confidence. I don't reckon bullying worked, so we need a leader who gets what's going on in these underperforming guys whose undoubted desire is to play well. I want to see a leader who can get inside the heads of our under-performers. These players need to be led - obviously. Nothing really wrong with that - like needing to be coached. But their being led or coached effectively only happen when there's a leader or a coach who sees exactly what needs to be done. Sees his team and understands what will motivate and energise them. If nobody at the club can do that, then we haven't yet found the sort of leader we need. Our current problem is either the players (no change possible there at present, and hard to make huge gains in the off-season; so i hope that's not the only answer we can come up with), or it's the coaching (everything that could be done there has surely been done, and done well), or it's the on-field leadership that's failing. I'm going with leadership - the club needs to improve that area, through professional development of the incumbents, and probably through targeted recruiting (a la the recruiting of Ditterich to Melbourne, or Barassi to Carlton). Roos gets the players fired up and it lasts a bit, but out on the ground they rapidly wilt under pressure. The team leaders are out there...

Lance feigns superiority just like Hird does. Irritating. For me, when CAS comes down heavily on Essendon's outrageous challenge to sport, the thought that Hird and all the Lances of the world have finally been silenced will be one minor part of the satisfaction. I can't stand con-men and spin-merchants and liars. But in the meantime surely Demonland would be better off without Lance? All his posts are evasion and denial, trying to give the impression of being the reasonable and intelligent one here, with all the cards. Why on earth would any of us give his bulshit the time of day? It's not as though he's here to listen or to concede anything. And who cares anyway? I wonder (just briefly) whether he feels better after making his airy displays of nonchalance on Demonland? Can he really be as self deluding as that?

what I hate is the instant reply when we finally do score. Cancels out any gain, in confidence as well as scoreboard. I hate that.

Jones plays poorly and we really collapse. Maybe this explains Jones making such a strong statement about the value of Petracca. So now, Viney is our best hope in the last quarter - the interest is in seeing what he can produce when needed.

yes - it is only 8 minutes out of a total 100 - and we get time-out to reconfigure. Put away your razors, show a little of the toughness you want to see in the players!

thank goodness it was basically and not literally

re-jig and start again. It's only 14 points. Big moment for the club.

It seems to me pretty pointless to say Adam Goodes is not a great of the game. His CV is outstanding. It seems to me pretty pointless to declare yourself not racist, too, because of course you can't tell: it's like taking it for granted you haven't got bad breath on the grounds that you haven't smelled it. I sat in the gate lounge at Tullamarine once, waiting for a delayed flight to Hobart, and could not help but hear a loud American in a pretty strong American accent holding forth to his friends about Tasmanian history and social customs. Quite a lot of I-assume-Tasmanians sat like me, just staring in silence and almost disbelief at the pontificating ignoramus. Some of us looked at each other and rolled our eyes, shook our heads, at the spectacle. How unaware can a person be? And, inevitably, the further he went in his confident explaining of it all, the more he got wrong and the more he displayed what in the circumstances can only be called a high level of unwitting arrogance and disrespect. He had no idea... On racism, I think Adam Goodes has the floor before the likes of us on this subject - at least until there's really good grounds for calling him factually wrong, or excessive in his vehemence, or in some other specific way unacceptable. Racism is a subject in which the minority racial groups must make the definitions and set the agenda - that's the only way it can be. Any other way and it's simply further ignorant and insensitive paternalism, or in other words, further racism. It's just stupid to suppose that comfortable white Australians understand the issue of racism against the Aborigines in Australia. We have to listen to the Aborigines. It's like supposing the Abbotts of the world are going to understand the life of someone living on welfare. I have a 34-year-old son on a disability pension. Last time he had to explain his medical circumstances (again) to Centrelink, the person interviewing him ended up in tears - but well-off and healthy Abbott targets people like my son. Sheer arrogant ignorance. If you have no experience of the abuse/misfortune, you are not in a position to make reasonable decisions. So if some of us are uncomfortable hearing what Adam Goodes says, I say fair enough - it's his turn and he knows what we have not had experience of. I don't think you can say there's anything especially radical about what he wants. A lot of dignity in the way he's taken on our game and become a champion at it, and now speaks fearlessly but without rabble-rousing. Australian of the Year. Fine man. What he speaks against is abuse, what he wants is respect - which I think he personally has well and truly earned and which in context of his people's history since white settlement is well and truly overdue. So I suggest some of the posts on here stink; let those who can smell it give you the word.

I don't think there's anything about Hogan that could be described as waiting. He's here.

SWYL, timid you ain't. But Toumpas can play football...

?? and what do you want - that today's players aren't good enough for you, sitting pontificating in the grandstand, or grandstanding on your keyboard? Ex-players I know are semi-crippled, having been broken for our entertainment. Today's players will be too - and you call them princesses! I respect players. They earn a lot more than I do, but there isn't anybody'd call it entertaining or pay money to come and watch me for an afternoon a week - or discuss me on a site like this. These guys are on a different level to us, and they put in and get knocked around beyond anything we face in our lives. (Except I suppose possibly those of us who are in the armed forces.) What exactly is your point, claiming players want a rest every 4 minutes? - to keep 18 on the field they'd have to be less than one minute rest each time, making over 20 rests per game by 18 players = more than 360 interchanges per game. Your big-talk is drivel.

They pay with their knees, their head injuries, their loss of privacy, their curfews and team rules and weekly workplace appraisals, and with the round-the-clock fact of being public targets for every loud-mouth seeking an audience by trashing others. Well and truly earn every cent. But "supporters", you would think, would be on their side...

Give it a few weeks. Fitzpatrick and Watts are important to us if they can find their range. Toumpas hasn't yet done what we hoped to see once he got past his hip problems. Trengove ditto his foot. Too early to tell on these guys, i think. We stand on the outside, and the players just don't tell it the way we do. Wise-guy negativity aside, we have to accept it's too early for us on the outside to know.

"Breed" our way out of this?!!! Fascinating....

The intangible "team spirit" is what has slipped overboard. A far bigger challenge for Roos than personnel. As long as key players keep getting injured, our fragile confidence will remain vulnerable. A now longish history of poor results leaves us with very slippery decks. But, key players who don't get beaten will do us good, and this is accumulating. Plus we do have probably the best leader/developer of men in our coach. Give it time! - the ship's afloat, and no sign of sinking yet.

thing is, BB, one day they'd win a game. From that moment on, they've gotten away with it. Every time they won another game, their punishment would be fading, on the way to being finished and forgotten - WADA's judgment would become in effect a rallying cry for the team to unite against - an obstacle to triumphantly overcome. Every time they were happy after a game, they'd be rejoicing in that moment with a rejoicing tangled up in the knowledge that what WADA did to them didn't stop them. Wrong message. We've had a lot of pain - you know it doesn't take too many wins to erase the pain. Read the board - supporters blow in the wind. Essendon would too - even after a WADA-scaled clobbering. It needs to be permanent to last at all.

The honest souls who argue for a team in Tasmania have more right to play in the premier league than those Essendon cheats. Or whoever else - I say, Essendon have disqualified themselves. If the Essendon 34 are found guilty they will be so guilty as to be unacceptable anywhere - or so I'd hope. A Tasmanian team may struggle for a while too, likely enough - but we'd at least all be clear about drugs in sport. But that's the least of this matter now. I expect the whole world will take a very big interest in WADA's examination and findings. I am serious in hoping the AFL see sense and cut Essendon loose, expressing shock at having been so systematically lied to; because if the AFL scapegoat Essendon, I reckon their credibility has a better chance of recovering, and our game may escape being seen by the rest of the world as a cult-like cesspit of lawlessness and collusion in cheating. If Essendon are wiped out - lose their licence or however it can be done - it may help appease world hostility towards Australia as a sporting nation generally. That matters - there is now a whole lot more than just the Essendon crowd, or even the AFL crowd, facing world-wide image-destruction - it's become so much bigger than just the mess Essendon got themselves into. I don't think Australia can afford them any more.

I disagree. Rebadged and still playing is not the message that WADA need to send to sporting bodies world-wide. Would-be cheats need to know they destroy themselves and their team. Less than that, and the lawyers and spin-merchants will be reassuring everyone in no time; media lapdogs in tow, in full raptures and looking to the future... I think we need to see Essendon gone; and people connected with Essendon left ashen-faced, with no second life to come once WADA have gone back home. Tough, but unequivocal and non-rewriteable. WADA has to win, and be unambiguously still in control of the outcome ten years from now. This has to be a precedent that says you cannot just batten down and weather the clobbering, in the unfortunate event of your getting caught with a fistfull of syringes. I'm not sure how I see WADA's investigation precipitating that outcome - maybe opening the floodgates to damages claims, on the basis of their damning findings - but for me there's only one right end for a club that first ran and then top-to-bottom closed ranks around such a programme.

Just as I feel better when Watts is picked, because it shows the knockers are wrong (and I want them to be), so I'd love to see Jamar and Watts both back in the side. I hate the cancer of negativity. In some ways it doesn't matter who the guys picked are - if the team is on song everyone looks good, and if for whatever reason they are off, even your good players have little impact. I'd rather see a good spirit at the club than superstars in, or spuds out - a good spirit is surely our greatest need. No negative attitudes or bad blood or disciplinary things going on - and I keep hearing/reading dark hints and whispers about something rotten still there. A good vibe around the club, positive feeling and tight-knit group in my view is above landing Dangerfield or getting rid of whoever you happen to think is useless... It may be tough waiting for it to come together and turn into consistency, but waiting surely beats bellyaching. Get together behind the guys, I say, and hope like hell they are all together too.

The thing is, your second and third sentences are just guessing, based on your anger/disappointment. You are venting, slandering our players. Grow up.

Remember when 5 years of Barassi failed to get us playing finals? He prepared the place for it though...

you think they don't feel as bad as you do?