robbiefrom13

bugger it, censor the thing anyway.

well, in the 60's a ffag was a cigarette...

wow! more censorship today than there was then! putain, in French, I suppose. More like 1972 or 3, too. Great movie. David Stratton had oddly enough never heard of it when I requested it on SBS years later, but he got it and put it on and said very nice things about the movie introducing it. Not well enough known - but on initial release it ran for weeks at the old Playbox in Russell St. It nailed the late 60's self-absorbed and earnest non-stop philosophising scene - if you were a lefty and screwed around, you're in that movie. Absolutely nailed it - very funny, very recognisable. Brilliantly done.

2001 didn't do it for me, but Tarkovsky's Solaris did - and the very impressive statuesque Natalya Bondarchuk introduced it at the Australian premiere. They were great times... And on the subject of Zefirelli et al, has anybody seen the Kosintsev Shakespeares? Seriously good cinema, also from that period. Some on here would have enjoyed Jean Eustache's Mother and the [censored] in 1971, too, I bet. Another great movie, with maybe Jean-Pierre Leaud's greatest role. Memories of fun times, when you could see Donny Williams with a pie and a [censored] in the outer during the Reserves. And down to the Dental Hospital for the late show with Renoir, Truffaut, Eisenstein, all the classics. Dreamed of one day somehow (my mates thought I was insane) owning a projector and a couple of really special movies that I could watch at home whenever I wanted to...

yes, it has. It may be thought a jokey comment today, maybe, but is it really? Why would any of us watch Essendon games? Every time they have any success, HH's comment must spring to mind. How can anyone be sure the year-long (?) drug regime hasn't been a contributing factor to any success current Essendon players ever have? Who can really say for sure how Essendon players won this game? I am holding on for WADA to knock those cheats (principally, the club bosses who did it) out of the game - otherwise the precedent will just keep on presenting, keep on whispering its promise... Remember West Coast's premierships? Only this time, the elephant in the room's been named, and excused; presenting supporters and club officials with the question arising out of the Essendon precedent, and clear knowledge of the methodology for getting away with drug-cheating. No rule change is going to close this gate. The players will never escape the shadow. If Essendon's not totally stopped, why would you watch any AFL?

Can WADA sanction the AFL?

and at 1:15, you'll be up there muttering to anyone who'll listen, "just another loser..."

nonsense. The wrong outcome is the wrong outcome. More was riding on this than just "a decision", and they cannot have been ignorant of that fact, nor should they have felt free to ignore it. This judgement had far greater ramifications than just the 34 players, and those ramifications follow inevitably from this wrong decision. The practice of law should not be reduced to a clever intellectual game - it has to be more than just contextless fine definitions of law, or it serves no useful purpose in society. Here was a case where law stood in a position to push back the barbarians, and chose not to. Those 34 cheats run out to compete in a few days, and they should not. In the movie Belle the Lord Chief Justice gives his finding under law (weighing it the way he chooses to, in its wider context), then removes his glasses and addresses the courtroom on the moral reality behind the case. Leadership, and fulfilling the noble function of law in society, not Pontius Pilating under the bureaucrat's Nuremberg defence. Poor effort, to be now cleaned up by someone else if they can. But, yes, let's see what happens next. (Apologies for sounding disrespectful to you, WJ. It's not my attitude to your posts. Seriously disappointed with what seem to me to be excuses exonerating a Tribunal that failed the need of the hour - in other words, failed their function when we looked to them.)

The day the disease that was to lead to R.I.P. took hold - the day the Tribunal gave the germs or whatever a compromised immune system for a few weeks. Yes, Essendon will be crowing, and then regrouping against an Appeal, and on that will go; but it's the AFL that is mortally sick now. This will metastisize all over the game.

I'm still waiting for War Crimes charges to be laid against USA for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Big enough is untouchable, I know... But surely Essendon have trashed WADA's authority? How big? Who? Waiting, with scissors poised over my interest in AFL. Thank goodness for Dees2014's insight, for the moment - resulting in suspended disbelief, for the moment. But maybe it's just all too clear, already.

Today either we hear Emperor Hird's nakedness called out, or we know where we stand in all this: it's about to become clear whether we have a fair-dinkum "No Drugs In Sport" policy or whether it's been a cardboard cut-out all along. Either way, something will be gone come 2pm today. The AFL went an each-way bet with tanking, but this time it appears they can't - WADA lurks in the wings. Despite that, we have watched in growing horror as the AFL eventually set about systematically queering the pitch, showing no more respect for processes aimed at keeping the code clean than Essendrugs have. And the tribunal today - they are in the position of the Dutch kid and the dyke - except that their motivation in ruling on the mess is compromised by their being paid by the AFL, who in turn are paid by the media, who love the EFC... Spare a thought for those poor buggers obliged to hand down their decision today - they are about to be trashed, whatever they rule. Sad, sad day. Sadder still if the absurd travesty of a decision that is being anticipated should be delivered. So much to be repaired, even with the best of decisions; and seemingly irretrievable if it goes the other way. FUEFC.

I like your thinking nutbean. For me, work and bills require logic and realistic management; making the dreaming of culture and sport so very important.

Who does the AFL want to keep - the drug cheats or the sport-loving public? WADA cannot afford to be weak here, and possibly the Federal Government would get involved if the AFL dropped the ball, so that quite possibly the AFL doesn't have the option of saving the drug cheats anyway. How stupid do we think they are? How likely is it that they have no idea what the reactions from WADA and Government are likely to be if they stuff it up? I can't understand how anyone thinks Essendon have any chance here.

I hate Essendon, for lots of reasons - but the key thing here is, our game is on the line. Essendon's behaviour in 2012 was a cancer in the game, and their behaviour ever since has been that of one of those cults that refuse to allow medical treatment. The clock goes on ticking away while nothing is done, more and more speculating on how their defense should go, what indulgences should be granted them, why surgery might be uncomfortable somehow... Watch the thing metastisize if it is not definitively excised. Of course there should be joy when the disease is absolutely, definitively, permanently dealt with. Heavy penalties will stop the spread, and provide a safe margin around all that was rotten. Since there seems to be doubt about whether this will be achieved, it will be a joy of great relief - not hatred-inspired. We may hate Essendon, but greater than that is that we love the game, and we love sport.

Last time I saw MFC playing in Ballarat, we had a big win and Norm Smith left at three quarter time..

Fear of getting wet if we clean up is a poor reason for letting the filth go on growing. Which it would.

T&W, this discussion is about MFC, not Demonland. you sound like Lobsang Rampa, to me. Or Kahlil Gibran or someone. I con't read German, there's ignorance you can laugh at too. Laugh away - right away...

Essendon neither complied nor co-operated, and that must irritate ASADA/WADA. Not just the infractions, but the unrepentant and aggrievedly names-calling attitude of "leave us alone, ok?" What would happen I wonder if ASADA/WADA got to the point of recognising that a governing body such as the AFL has an increasingly similar attitude? It does appear that the laws about drugs in sport mainly target rogue individuals, not endemic abuse on the scale of Essendon's. Where a whole sport is under management that is not particularly affronted by drug cheating, and wishes to be left alone for business as usual, what must ASADA/WADA do? What sanctions exist - and what power to impose them? I'm talking about law-breaking on the scale of Gandhi's civil disobedience or Islamic State's disregard for the norms of a civilised social contract. Shameless and self-righteous and widespread. Police have to walk away... And, in such a scenario of top-down tolerance of drug-cheating, the governing body tut-tutting publicly but colluding privately, running the place with a mix of self-licensing multi-national-style non-accountability and pie-night indulgence of misbehaviour, what would "clean" clubs in that sport have to do? What would sports-lovers opposed to drug-cheating do? First, the target has been the players, when actually the real problem was the club. But what if the underlying problem is not even the club, but the League?

Failing is disappointing. And, for a student averaging 20 or 30%, significant improvement doesn't necessarily mean passing. But the pass mark doesn't change just because they were very poor last season. So, some of you appear to be saying, "there's very little likelihood of MFC passing this year". What exactly was this discussion about?

Improvement is not the issue - we're talking about the pass mark. Why not straight 50% wins? That used to be a pass.

Hang on, what have we (Tassie) done wrong?

four wins last year was a major disappointment. Key injuries cost us several games, so that I would consider 6 or 7 wins last year as a 2014 base level. How much improvement on that? Barring exceptional bad luck with injuries, which will always justify special consideration, I'd be looking for 9 or 10 wins as a pass.

yes. Getting the players to sign waivers indicates the club recognised the possibility of comeback. And by having secured both the waivers and the absence of any documentation, EFC make plain their a priori plans for never being called to account. It is not credible to suggest no player asked what they were being injected with. If they were lied to, they have a get-out-of-jail card - but not one has tried to use it - ergo, the players knew and figured EFC's strategy to evade punishment would cover them too. There will one messy fan, and room, sooner or later! Mindboggling to imagine the legal "brains trust" at EFC thinking this would work - they have departed from all normal medical practice so far that the onus has to be on them to explain why, which they cannot, so that "guilty as sin" is the only rational conclusion. Penalties have to be exemplary, both for the systematic long-term doping and for the deliberate attempt from the outset, as well as ever since, to be unpunishable.

Essendon's cheating and using money and lawyers to fight the AFL's and anyone else's right to call them to account is on a different spectrum to our shortcomings. Totally different. Is that not obvious to some?? This is unprecedented. And unrepentant.