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This Essendon saga has been done to death. I wasn’t planning on writing an article about it to join the thousands of overs, but there was some aspects of tonight’s Dean Robinson interview that are worth going into further.
The first thing (that I would have missed if it hadn’t been for a very skeptical mother sitting next to me) is that Essendon conveniently glossed over what Robinson actually said in one of their statements in relation to his ‘Black ops’ claim.
The statement from Essendon read as follows:
“Contrary to reports, James Hird and Danny Corcoran never said the programme should be run as a ‘black op’. This is nonsense and categorically rejected by the club.”
“This assertion is slanderous.”
All very well and good, supporters happy, keep fighting for their innocence in the eyes of the media, too easy. Except they didn’t count on detail sniffing mothers.
Robinson never said Hird or Corcoran asked for the program to be run as a ‘black op’, he said that Dank believed what Hird and Corcoran was asking of him was for a ‘black op’ program.
Hird and Corcoran may not have known/believed that this would have to be how the program is run, and therefore would not have gone out and blatantly asked for a black op program (which, in context, we can be fairly sure is extremely suspicious) to be run.
But while you may think of this as a minor, irrelevant detail this is an extremely fascinating press release. Don’t be mistaken, official statements in regards to allegations like this take a lot of deliberation (and almost certainly legal advice) to compile.
The fact that they have diverted from the actual allegation to a different one is quite simply remarkable, and reminds me of how Lance Armstrong was constructing his fight for innocence.
This is not to say I believe Essendon is lying, Robinson is lying or hell anyone is lying. There is no way of knowing, and the only thing we can currently go from is make educated guesses from who has a track record consistency and reliability in there stories.
From the hundreds or even thousands of stories I have seen, the only one with this track record is Robinson.
I apologise if I’ve missed something here, no doubt I’ve missed many news stories on this saga along the way.
The difference I’ve seen is Hird and Essendon’s stories have inconsistencies, while mainly minor (aside from Hird’s on his own injecting past), they are still inconsistencies.
One who has major flaws in his story is Mark McVeigh, and after seeing him on the review panel tonight I take everything he says with a grain of salt.
The man clearly wants to defend his mate James Hird at all costs, and fair enough too, but this makes viewers understandably skeptical.
The major reason of suspicion of McVeigh for me though is his personal attack on Kyle Reimers for this statement:
”Everyone signed it, it was a personal choice as to whether they took it … it does seem very odd, the type of stuff we were taking. They admitted to us it was right on the edge of the levels you could be taking.”
McVeigh fired back with the following
“He’s a disgruntled player that was delisted by the football club that very rarely turned up to pre-season training in any sort of form that resembled a professional footballer.”
“It was clearly stated to us what we were taking. If you didn’t know, you must have been asleep in the meeting, which, you know what, Reimers probably was.”
Reimers comments have been confirmed in the past, while I am unaware of McVeigh’s response to this development.
But I cannot believe, in McVeigh’s unrelenting defence of Hird on the review panel, this point was not raised to him by any of the panel.
One thing that McVeigh struggled to defend is Hird and doctor Bruce Reid’s absence from a meeting with Dank and Robinson about the supplement program.
Whether Reid knew of the meeting we don’t know, but Hird’s absence shows either a major oversight on his part or, simply that he didn’t want to be there.
Anyway, that’s my largely irrelevant addition to the Essendon drug saga. But before I sign off there are five final things that I want to say on the matter.
1. Enjoy reading the many articles on Robinson’s interview from amateur writers like myself on The Roar tomorrow morning;
2. Everything at the moment (including most of my article) is conjecture, the sooner we have some facts instead of to search for clues the better;
3. One thing we know Hird is telling the truth about is that this is starting to effect lives permanently, and needs to be brought to a close as soon as reliably possible;
4. Andrew Demetriou not being in the country during this time is a disgrace;
5. Having mothers who know relatively little about footy following a news story like this can come in handy.
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