I interpreted Eddie Betts comment to mean the allegations in the report to the Hawthorn FC are most probably accurate. He avoided saying it directly because, I suspect, he is fully aware of how bad the blowback could be.

But on the subject of avoidance, I noted Jordan Lewis’ comment that he wasn’t privy to what had happened in this matter while he was at the club. This struck me as an interesting form of avoidance, especially as he repeated the phrase “wasn’t privy” – as if he had rehearsed it.

I was hoping either Gerald or Robbo would ask Lewis this: “Did you recognise any part of the Alastair Clarkson described in the ABC news story as the Alastair Clarkson who had coached you so many years at Hawthorn?” THAT answer I’d be very interested to hear.

Again, you’re misreading my post. I used the word “alleged” in relation to the notion of a supposed policy. And I did so to raise the question, not to assert a fact of which I have no knowledge.

But let’s go to your first point: “Not sure how you can shift the blame (if established) from Clarkson and Fagan to the club”. Blame for what? Your criticism is too vague. And blame is a loose term.

Better, I think, is responsibility, and here there appears to be plenty to go round. (Again, note “appears”.) Responsibility can be direct, indirect, vicarious, negligent, reckless, careless, tangential, minor or inconsequential. But more simply, no matter how one views the “tough love” dished out at Hawthorn. the argument that management is absolved from the behaviour of its employees in an enterprise that is 100% based on human physical performance and employee interaction just does not wash, any day of the week, IMHO.

There was no blame shifting intended, though your separation of Clarkson from the club he works for creates further questions. You’ll note my post was “if Hawthorn FC etc.” It’s all in the “if”.

A bit early to calling for sackings although things don’t look good for either man about now. The worst allegations are directed towards Clarkson and I confess, even playing devil’s advocate, it’s going to be hard to come up with scenarios that completely reconfigure these events as benign acts by him. So, my expectation is that North Melbourne FC will be looking at its contract with Clarkson and studying the clauses that deal with morals, ethics, violations of law & regulations, etc. and sometime during the holidays will probably issue a joint statement to the effect that “in the interests of the parties, Clarkson will not be the new coach in 2023”.

But the bigger story, IMO, is neither Clarkson nor Fagan. The bigger story is that one of the top football clubs is being alleged to have formed a view that young indigenous talent require coercion, control and the deprivation of their liberties and own decision-making as part of their employment at Hawthorn FC in order for the club to extract its maximum benefit from those players. If you wanted to be kind, you could call that misplaced paternalism.

But if Hawthorn FC truly believed that teenage indigenous players can’t be trusted or relied upon to grow up like, well, like white lads, perhaps they shouldn’t contract indigenous players in the first place. Instead they appeared to have decided the boys will be okay so long as they’re led with a firm hand: no women, no other indigenous influencers or relations, just football and nothing but. No, this doesn’t sound like paternalism; it sounds like well paid slavery.

Didn’t 20 indigenous players respond to the Hawthorn FC outreach to learn about their experience at the club? Pretty sure it was more than two.

As a Swans supporter in Sydney since the 80’s, will really really miss Jordan in the team. He’s quite a catch by the Crows whose style of play under Nicks I’m guessing Dawson will prefer to Port.
As a Swannie now living in Adelaide, I get the attraction of living here, but a lot will depend on how the rest of the team perform to see whether Jordan will thrive here. All the best to him & his family. I hope the Crows supporters don’t expect him to single-handedly perform miracles and cast fairy dust on everyone else in the squad. (Remember, even Lance Franklin joined a squad that already included Adam Goodes, Josh Kennedy, Tom Mitchell, Gary Rohan, Dane Rampe, Luke Parker, Heath Grundy, Nick Malceski plus Dan Hannebery, Jarrad McVeigh, Rhyce Shaw, Kieran Jack & more.)

Great that the Giants have made it to their first GF – they’re highly talented and play great footy. I’d like them to win Saturday but Grand Finals are a prize that needs more than showing up. Richmond will have one less finals game of exhaustion and adrenaline spent than the Giants and a significant advantage: experience. They’ve beaten the Giants in finals, they’ve won the flag once already and they’ve now atoned for last years’ prelim loss to the pies; their self-belief should be peaking about now.

it.

There’s many ways to lose, but the Swans’ performance was a mighty disappointment. Injuries didn’t help. A quarter of the team was missing: Sam Reid, Callum Mills, Gary Rohan, Nick Smith, Lewis Melican. The young kids were clearly out of their depth: Hayward, Florent, Ronke, McCartin. There was nowhere to hide for underperforming Jack & Robinson (question marks on both for next year, imo). The only silver lining was that by going out in the first game, we’ve been saved the embarrassment of being shown up by Richmond or Collingwood, teams arguably even faster and harder working than GWS.

You can’t plan a season around how the team and its captain respond to savage criticism after one loss; you might as well credit the Crows win against Sydney to the critics who found a way to needle the team to action. Tex and his team mates have to know how to win on their own ignition.

Having said that, the next 3 rounds should be fairly plain sailing against Carlton, Port & Bulldogs. I score it WIN – TOSS-UP – WIN for the Crows. The Giants, Hawks & Richmond games later on will tell us if the Crows can stand up and keep standing up.

Tex, the time for persuasive talking about loyalty to the club was before Jake made his decision; carrying on afterwards in a blunt manner is a waste of breath and reveals more about your shaky leadership skills.

Personally, I think demanding loyalty to the club over and above renumeration is something from a bygone age, anachronistic to the point of irrelevance. Team spirit and professionalism can and do live side by side in modern sport. As it is, your comments come across as suggesting that professional athletes are not entitled to be paid their worth but instead should compromise their livelihood in return for some fatuous club credo.

I don’t think it’s ever one thing; the reasons why players want to leave a club (not just the Crows) vary as much as the position they play (and whether players of their ilk are in demand or not), the stage they’re at in their professional career, what’s happening in their personal and private lives, and factors beyond their control, such as whether the club wants to keep them and is giving them hints their future is not good staying there.

But if we’re talking about the Adelaide Crows specifically, you have to ask about the culture at the club, especially after reports recently in relation to Lever, that (a) several senior players went to the coaches and asked he not be selected to play, and (b) club management told Lever not to attend the club B&F. Personally, I think there’e something seriously wrong with players lobbying the coach over team selection; if the players think their team mate is a dickhead, the issue should be addressed by the player group. And matters have got seriously out of hand if a club can’t be both civil and professional enough to say goodbye eye to eye.

(My reading of the B&F issue is that a bad case of insular Adelaiditis fan disease has spread to the players. I hope instead it’s a case of being in the dumps still after that less than impressive GF performance, and the break will set them back on track.)

Back in early August, it was reported that Crows coach Don Pyke didn’t like to experiment with player selection too much, and preferred the playing group to just keep training and playing. Maybe that was a clue to the Crows performance today in the GF, when, after the Tigers wrestled their way to a half time lead, it seemed to me the Crows were crying out to try something different. But nothing much happened that was different, and the Tigers exposed the Crows playing style as rigid and unadaptable to events. Credit and congrats to coach Hardwick and the Richmond team. You didn’t need to be clairvoyant after the lead up games in this finals series to know how they were going to play, but to look at Adelaide’s performance, you could be excused for thinking they never saw it coming.

Basil Zempilas must really believe in his particular style of commentating because he’s often been criticised for it yet he sticks with it. It’s not hard to find AFL fans on various forums deconstructing his technique from as long ago as 2012 and 2014. My understanding is that he models his style on Dennis Cometti. But the difference is that when Dennis got excited about a passage of play or about a player, I always felt it was genuine. With Basil, straining for effect, it always feels like artifice.

I find it interesting that you mention Bruce McAvaney as being top of class as a broadcaster before going on to question the efforts of the former-footballer class. I agree with you that BT regularly puts his mouth in gear before engaging his brain, and Ricciutto has one of the lowest return rates of worthy utterance to output. But you’ve missed one of the unseen but (listen carefully) powerful influences on broadcasting performance: the peer pressure the former footballers put on the non-footballer broadcasters.

Sometimes it’s overt, such as the occasion when Luke Darcy jumped on Anthony Hudson during a broadcast when Huddo ventured a different opinion. Darcy said words to the effect “And when did you play football to learn that?” Other times it’s peer derision, such as a few years back when BT criticised Matthew Richardson for his opinions in games (BT has improved markedly since).

But it’s been sad to see Bruce McAvaney’s declining confidence in his own broadcasting abilities, in part because of this peer pressure. Listen to Bruce’s commentary today; it is peppered with lack of confidence in his own opinion, expressed as questions to his fellow commentators for their approval.

As a fan of neither club, this was a tough match to watch. In a season of close and unexpected finishes, the Suns put on a display so out of kilter with almost every other team in the competition that the AFL must seriously consider doing a major repair of the club. Even despite their injury list, the performance by the players on the field was woeful. From late in the first quarter, the Suns played over an hour of football without a score, not even a rushed or miskicked behind.

Their workmate was poor, their chasing mediocre, their tackles half hearted, their wasted kicks into the forward line where none of their teammates were moving was brainless. Their movement by hand of the ball between themselves up the flanks looked like a three quarter pace slow motion training drill without a plan for what to do once they reached the half forward line. At one stage, I counted 5 successive dropped marks by Suns players from kick receives by their own team mates.

No-one should overestimate the Port performance. I expect they will bow out of this finals series in successive weeks if they make the four. They may have restricted the Suns to four goals in China, and now 3 in Adelaide, but they were playing on opponents who played as if they didn’t want to be there.

As a Swans fan, Stevie J has always been an opponent I feared because of his talents, whether he was at the Cats or the Giants, and always breathed a sigh of relief if his impact on a game was minimal. But even if he can be successfully tagged, he’s rarely suppressed for a whole game. Feared, but hard if not impossible to hate, Stevie J is one of the characters of the game. He makes going to the footy more than a sport.

What was impressive for me, as a fan of neither side, was Adelaide’s wet weather skills. Hats off, also, to the quality of the turf at the ground. But the Power were so switched off, it would be unwise to make overly optimistic predictions about how Adelaide will fare in the finals series based on this game. The real story here is that Port Power hasn’t beaten a top four side all year and on this performance, shows no signs of coming close to doing so.

Don’t agree regarding Reid. He’s increased his merit as a footballer over the last couple of years almost across the board – improved fitness, stronger body, more resilient confidence – all of which has allowed his natural marking and kicking talent to flourish without as many self-doubts. I think he’ll be an asset to the club for quite a few years yet.

Tippett, on the other hand, has got at best one more season – 2018 – to demonstrate his body can cope longterm at what has evolved into a much more frenetic high contest game. Sinclair’s challenge, on the other hand, is to show his skill set can become broader and more consistent.

Darcy Cameron’s progress will also play a part in the decision about the Sydney talls going forward.

As Wayne Carey said, the little things matter. The kick-in at the 15minute mark by Essendon: one of the Essendon defenders was there in support to block Papley’s press on the kick-in. But there was no supporting defender at that last kick-in and Papley was free to smother the kick-in. The result – a goal scored, the match lost.

Sometimes a person’s greatest strengths can become their greatest weakness. I think Hird made successive misjudgements as a participant in the events at Essendon in 2012 and beyond, and now, as if in a Greek tragedy, is reaping the consequences. We are all, to some degree, trapped in our characters – none more so than Hird, a major figure whose excellent career rested on its celebration in the public eye of AFL. The heroic figure, however, standing alone, face to the winds of misfortune, can’t keep doing it forever. We’re not islands; we are a communal species and a day of personal and private reckoning was always inevitable. We don’t know the trigger; it’s not our business to know or to enquire. With patience, love and both professional and familial support, he can address his own nature and his deeds, atone (if atonement is needed), learn from the whole ugly mess of it and move on. He needs to do it for himself, and, rather than abandoning him to his misery, we need to see him do it to begin welcoming him back.

Having been beaten twice before by the Dogs, it was clear going into the GF that the whole Swans team had to turn up and play an exceptional game. Yet, despite Coach Longmire having said openly several times during the season that only a whole of team effort would get the job done, the main event proved once again the ultimate test of players’ ability and application. For the Swannies disappointing games from Rohan, McGlynn, Parker, Tippett, Richards – that’s a quarter of the side. Complaining about the umps isn’t relevant – Swans don’t complain about what we can’t control – missing set shots is more relevant, as well as critical decisions in the heat, like trying to take 3 seconds to dispose when the Dogs tempo of tackling only allowed one, and trying to play back out of congested contests rather than going forward – going back just gave a leg-up to the Doggie press. Congrats to the Bulldogs – 2016 is theirs to celebrate.

A nasty spiteful game that for three quarters failed to reflect what’s supposed to be elite professional first class football from two of the top four teams in the competition. In the end both sides were too tired for fisticuffs and Hawthorn’s luck with close finishes was temporarily missing.

A well written tribute to one of the characters of the game. Not much more to add really, except hopefully this marks the beginning of the end for sleeve tattoos at Collingwood. One of the worst examples of peer pressure in Aussie Rules has been to see young men signed to the club and consequently signed on to skin ink with dubious improvement to their football skills and team cohesion.

Mr Hird continues to demonstrate new methods of fudging the truth. Firstly, who was the preferred candidate working in the English League? May we double-check please that he was unable to take up a position with EFC and would have done so but for bad timings? Secondly, Dr Reid wrote to Mr Hird on 17 January 2012 saying “I have trouble with all these drugs.” And following the team leaders of Watson, Hille and McVeigh voicing their concerns with Mr Hird the day before, a team meeting in the club auditorium was held with all players, Mr Hird, Dank, Robinson, but absent Dr Reid – the same Dr Reid that Mr Hird now insists in his newspaper piece had to give his final approval. Mr Hird, you may recall, texted Mr Corcoran on the 30 January to say the other clubs were way ahead of Dr Reid and that “Reidy… (is) stopping everything”.Does this look and sound like the behaviour of a man who wanted the club doctor to have final approval of the supplements? No, it’s the behaviour of a man who wanted to avoid Dr Reid being involved in the selection and administration of the supplements. Mr Hird’s insistence on legality and consent forms was a facade of responsibility to cover his cavalier abandonment of care towards these players. And now we are to believe he was saddled by accident with the wrong team who did him wrong. Mr Hird has perfected the art of digging his own hole deeper than anyone thought possible.

Well said, Peter. If that point had been appreciated by so many anti-ASADA commentators from the outset, we might have had a lot less irrelevant and unhelpful posts.