AFL disgraced in Essendon saga

[Robbie]

Blatant hypocrisy,

Do the following substitutions,

Buckley for Hird,
McGuire for Little, and
Collingwood for Essendon.

Now imagine the outrage from the media, the other clubs, governments and other footy supporters.

I am over the stinking AFL, in my opinion the double dealing is out of control and a purge is overdue!

I must be thick because I don't understand what it is you're suggesting, and what hypocrisy you're referring to.

[HAL]

How did you get over it?

[London Dave]

Blatant hypocrisy,

Do the following substitutions,

Buckley for Hird,
McGuire for Little, and
Collingwood for Essendon.

Now imagine the outrage from the media, the other clubs, governments and other footy supporters.

I am over the stinking AFL, in my opinion the double dealing is out of control and a purge is overdue!

I must be thick because I don't understand what it is you're suggesting, and what hypocrisy you're referring to.

I believe the point being made here is if this was us, Nathan Buckley would not be on gardening leave for a year with a million dollars to count for starters!

I personally can't wait to hear James' side of the story, the one he's been desperate to tell us since day one but hasn't quite managed it yet.

[qldmagpie67]

Quote:
THE AFL has banned Essendon coach James Hird and suspended footy boss Danny Corcoran from attending the club's staff Christmas party.

Now that will teach Hird !!
You can keep your $1 million salary whilst suspended
You can keep your undeserved place in the hall of fame
You can coach again in 12 months
You can bring the game into disrepute and drag it through the mud with no punishment

But you can't attend the bummers Xmas party
That will teach you James
Oh Vlad you have taken punishment to a whole new level

I'm waiting for the civil libertarians to storm AFL house with court injunctions and placards in hand demanding such cruel and unusual punishment be outlawed.

Stand firm Vlad you are now showing the absolute strength of character we expected of you !!

[mudlark]

Blatant hypocrisy,

Do the following substitutions,

Buckley for Hird,
McGuire for Little, and
Collingwood for Essendon.

Now imagine the outrage from the media, the other clubs, governments and other footy supporters.

I am over the stinking AFL, in my opinion the double dealing is out of control and a purge is overdue!

"""""I must be thick because I don't understand what it is you're suggesting, and what hypocrisy you're referring to.

"""""
You are taking the piss, Right???

[David]

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/d ... ment-asada

Unbelievable. The AFL truly is a toothless tiger.

[stoliboy]

WADA has to come in and clean this mess out.

[Albert Parker]

Sources close to Essendon suggest to me that Dimmy told Essendon to find a way to pay Hird. This "I'll go to my grave that Hird isn't being paid" is all b**lsh%t.
He is complicit in this and is trying desperately to cover things up.

WADA better find something because the AFL isn't interested in getting to the bottom of it.

[David]

This 'not paid for 12 months' clause that Hird's lawyers walked through can be put down to two possible causes:

1) ineptitude
2) complicity.

Neither would surprise me, but both reflect terribly on Demetriou and the AFL as a whole.

[think positive]

Quote:
THE AFL has banned Essendon coach James Hird and suspended footy boss Danny Corcoran from attending the club's staff Christmas party.

Now that will teach Hird !!
You can keep your $1 million salary whilst suspended
You can keep your undeserved place in the hall of fame
You can coach again in 12 months
You can bring the game into disrepute and drag it through the mud with no punishment

But you can't attend the bummers Xmas party
That will teach you James
Oh Vlad you have taken punishment to a whole new level

I'm waiting for the civil libertarians to storm AFL house with court injunctions and placards in hand demanding such cruel and unusual punishment be outlawed.

Stand firm Vlad you are now showing the absolute strength of character we expected of you !!

OMG how scary is that, how fricken pitiful!

Maybe they are worried someone will start a collection!!

[watt price tully]

This 'not paid for 12 months' clause that Hird's lawyers walked through can be put down to two possible causes:

1) ineptitude
2) complicity.

Neither would surprise me, but both reflect terribly on Demetriou and the AFL as a whole.

Nah, I think it's one reason:

Complicit ineptitude

then again it could be inept compliicitude


(David, don't tell Tannin though )

[Lazza]

You bet the bombers will be in financial ruins in a few years

no..... the AFL will bail them out

All you have to do is to merely threaten to take the AFL/Dimi to court and bingo! you get what you want! They MUST have a lot to hide............

I have NEVER seen an organisation SO frigging scared shitless of legal proceedings.....

[buzzlightyear]

This 'saga' starts with banned & illegal performance enhancing substances and will end there. ASADA will bring this issue to a close soon enough. The rest is as a former prime minister used to say, merely embroidery on the fabric.

And once this happens, James Hird will be a figure of the past, EFC irrevocably damaged and the game forever scarred.

The only antidote at least for those without a 'schadenfreude' bone in their body, is a Collingwood Premiership in 2014.

[Neil Appleby]

It really is astonishing the lengths to which the AFL will go to prevent a court case. Demetriou's back-flip is almost as embarrassing as Christopher 'Poodle' Pyne's Education funding back down.

It's not just Demetriou who is looking exposed; Mike Fitzpatrick also looks incompetent. Essendon has played them for fools and this after Vlad bent over backwards to protect the players.

Patrick Smith, a former Essendon member, wrote one of the best articles on this whole sorry mess last week. I can't provide the link because it will just take you to a pay page. If the mods can find a link then, by all means do so. Meanwhile here is the article.

A million bucks for Hird to twiddle his thumbs - quite a punishment

James Hird has been able to manipulate his club, its supporters and members and the competition.

BACK in February when the horror of Essendon's 2012 season was made public, coach James Hird prescribed his own penalty when he said he took full responsibility for what had happened at the club. He was pulling our leg.

If Hird were true to his word, true to the principles that made him make that promise, then he would not be accepting any money for season 2014. But instead, even after agreeing his actions -- or lack of -- contributed to Essendon bringing the game of AFL football into disrepute, Hird will receive $1 million to twiddle his coaching thumbs next season. A million in advance to do nothing. If only every one of us could have such punishment meted out to us for our indiscretions.

Hird is holding his club to a heavy, most selfish ransom. Forcing the Bombers to honour a contract that somehow he had had increased by two years in the final hours of the settlement reached in August. Hird is playing the club, its officials and fans for fools. It is obvious now that Hird had no intention of ever taking responsibility for his part in a coaching regime that saw Essendon players arbitrarily given some drugs that were in breach of ASADA rules, not recommended for human consumption and others that the club still has no idea of their legality or quality.

To underline how outrageous the outcome is for Essendon, consider this: the club is aggressively seeking donations for its new training centre while paying Hird a million to work on his tan.

How Essendon president Paul Little will explain this to his members -- even to his staff -- will be interesting to observe. Little has blown a million dollars at the very time the club is on its begging knees. He should tender his resignation immediately.

That is just one side of the story. Within the last handful of days AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said he knew and was assured that Essendon would not pay Hird during his one-year suspension. It turns out that Demetriou had no idea what was happening. For Hird, the money continued to roll in, only to avalanche in yesterday.

Just how Demetriou could have been so blindsided to what actually was happening with Hird, with Essendon or even with other AFL officials is unclear. But we can say categorically that it is humiliating personally for Demetriou and utterly embarrassing for the AFL executive and the commission.

Hird has been able to manipulate his club, its supporters and members and the competition. He might claim this as a victory but the callous way he has treated the club, the reckless way he has honoured the responsibilities as coach, paints him as a man with an ego that blurs him from what is fair and appropriate. He will prove the biggest moral loser from this saga even if he has been allowed to pocket a million for mucking up his coaching obligations so flippantly.

Nonetheless, the damage Hird has done to the AFL is brutal. Demetriou is now seen as a man who cannot deliver what he trumpets. AFL Commission chairman Mike Fitzpatrick is seen as so arrogant he sought to find a settlement independent of the executive team he and his fellow commissioners had charged to facilitate.

Fitzpatrick worked with the chairman of the Australian Sports Commission John Wylie in the shadows to find common ground with Little. This triumvirate of big boys not only made a great a mess of what was already a rabble but their actions made the league and its machinations look less transparent than ever.

It was the secretive doodlings of these three men that saw everybody bar Hird strangled by a list of inducements offered to the coach. One was that he would receive his pay while suspended. The ineptness of these dealings was matched only by the hubris that drips from the men who took part.

At least it brought a nice symmetry to the biggest scandal to rot away at the AFL's standing in the sporting community. It became a scandal when Hird and nearly everybody at Essendon had no idea what some members of staff were doing. And it has ended with Demetriou and others at AFL headquarters appearing to have no idea what their own representatives were up to.

Essendon has lost much. When the club went public with the knowledge that no one at the club could tell the parents of the club's footballers what drugs had been administered to their children, David Evans, as president, Ian Robson as chief executive and Hird, as coach, fronted the media.

Evans is gone after being undermined by insiders at the club. Robson stepped down - was pushed - because he was the club's senior executive and thus had to take responsibility for what had taken place at the club.

And Hird will not coach Essendon next year, too busy counting his dollars, one to a million. Add to this a suspension to football manager Danny Corcoran, a heavy fine to assistant coach Mark Thompson, the sacking of sport science wild card Stephen Dank and the squeezing out of high-performance manager Dean Robinson and the size of the catastrophe that is Essendon is chilling.

But no less is the damage to the AFL. Especially to Fitzpatrick and Demetriou.

As chairman, Fitzpatrick has been negligent in not taking a more public role. This is the biggest moral crisis to ravage Australian football and he has barely uttered a sentence in public. Instead he whispered clandestinely to Wylie, a man whose judgment must also come under heavy scrutiny.

Demetriou might be mortally wounded. His declaration that he would happily pop into his grave knowing that Hird was not being paid for season 2014 was not his first blunder. He has been badly bruised by this controversy and this column's call on September 19 that he consider his position is only strengthened.

In the end Demetriou's biggest mistake was that he had not considered it possible a man of Hird's (previous) standing in football would not acknowledge the damage he had done and would continue to do to his club and to his sport.

Yesterday Hird made a million bucks at the same time he lost the last drop of his dignity, last dollop of respect.

[Lazza]

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/e ... 6784378408

It's all over. Finished. Matter closed. Nothing to see here, move on...............

What a bloody FARCE! Hird to return to coaching in 2015 without a problem.

And looks like the AFL sponsored hack media have put the issue to bed as well.

I will never forget the lack of integrity shown by Dimi and his AFL commission on this issue. It is a very sad reflection on how some matters can be put under the carpet for good without a problem or too many questions asked after a certain time lapse. Unbelievable......