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After three days of finger pointing, note taking, laborious submissions, men in wigs chuckling at jokes we mere mortals don’t understand, and plenty of sage head nodding, what are we left with?
We know that the coffers of several legal firms would have swelled, and no doubt they’ll be licking their lips with the guarantee of far greater bounties to look forward to in the future.
After all this really was just the entrée before the main meal is served.
Was it really any surprise we discovered that politicians like to throw a hand grenade then retreat hastily while others pick up the pieces? What else was ever going to happen after the cringe worthy ‘darkest day in Australian sport’ press conference?
Or that ASADA, a bureaucratic government entity was hopelessly underfunded and under resourced? That wouldn’t be a first.
Not to mention the AFL, a corporate entity that makes decisions, actually had an agenda. How dare they!
Nope, all we were really left with was the certainty that more of this mind numbingly tedious and destructive pantomime will carry on.
Perhaps the most ludicrous revelation was ASADA finally declaring that even if they were to lose this particular battle, they can simply reload their guns and reissue the evidence and show cause notices. Of course, that course of action would once again be disputed in court and off we go again, like the hamster wheel.
Having recently been through a lengthy and expensive court battle, I learnt a few inescapable truths. Firstly, it is not in the interest of any lawyer to find a solution; their existence is based upon continually finding more legal issues to fight. They want this strung out for years.
Secondly, a legal fight is a negative and damaging exercise, it slowly eats away at you from the inside. It consumes your thought process, you take it to work and then take it home, and it permeates in to every aspect of your life. There is nothing good in it. It is caustic.
It is therefore simply impossible for the Essendon hierarchy to function normally. Winning an AFL premiership is incredibly difficult, and the primary role of the administration is to create an environment in which the playing group has every chance of being successful. Clearly this is not the case when the focus of the Essendon board is on a legal fight.
Even the media circus following this debacle is turning in to a fight that belongs in a playground. Of course many journalists take sides, depending on whom their sources of information are, that’s how we get different perspectives of the news. But the mud slinging, ‘he said, she said’ between senior journalists has now deteriorated to such an extent that the real story has been lost.
There has been a distinct lack of impartial, objective debate on this topic. But perhaps even the good journalists are now getting fed up with the whole thing and simply can’t be bothered anymore.
The central question, and the only one that really matters in this whole sorry mess, has long been forgotten. There have now been so many smoke screens, contradictions, denials, about turns and innuendo that we will probably never know if any players were injected with banned substances.
Justice is likely not to prevail, and that is a truly sad reflection on every party that has played a role.
In the meantime, we’ll wait for another four to ten weeks for the judgment to be handed down. Before then, there’ll be more claims of righteousness, victory, new courses of action to be taken, and more leaked information. Then we’ll have the inevitable threats of appeal, justification, staged press conferences and more schoolyard antics.
I’m thankful it’s not my club, it would sadden me greatly to watch them self-destruct like this. And I truly feel for those Essendon supporters who just want to watch their footy team, this wasn’t their doing and they don’t deserve it.
So a simple message to everyone involved in this nonsense: sort it out quickly, stop the bickering, and quit lining the pockets of the lawyers.
We all just want our footy back.
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