Football has its fair share of idiots among players, coaches, managers, administrators, supporters and spectators. Just sit on a Disciplinary Hearing or an Appeal Hearing and you will be amazed at the rubbish some of these idiots trot out to justify unaccaeptable and anti-social behaviour. And there is a healthy population of repeat offenders.
The Capital Football disciplinary structure has more holes than a lump of Swiss cheese. Its part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The Nearpost Local has been informed that Captial football has the disciplinary process under review. We must find out more.
The article below by Virginia Trioli is first rate. Leaving aside the appalling nature of the offence which the player has been charged with, so much of what Trioli writes should resonate with our code and Clubs.
The message is as good as it is simple - Don't take on badly behaved players or troublemakers, especially when you know that is what they are - you can't save them. If you have got a badly behaved player in your club, on or off the field of play get rid of them - quickly!
Lovett: Innocent until proven a liability
By Virginia Trioli
Go to the article on the ABC Website here:
Just days ago Andrew Lovett was charged with rape. (AAP: Julian Smith)
There was a saying amongst my older brother's contemporaries back in the Vietnam War and Watergate days: "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it".
It was an arch admonishment against self-pity and shock; a cynical acknowledgment that, when things go wrong, you should have expected nothing less.
I'm reminded of this as I watch yet another football club - this time St Kilda in the AFL competition - cut loose another wayward player - Andrew Lovett - all with the rounded eyes of bewildered and disappointed parents.
Just months after it picked him up in a high-profile draft selection, St Kilda has sacked Lovett, who just a few days ago was charged with rape and will make an appearance in court on Friday.
The club says Lovett's sacking has nothing to do with the rape charge - he is, after all, innocent until proven guilty, the officials were at pains to say. Instead, the transgressions are said to precede this matter and they were enough to "bring the club into disrepute". Lovett would have to go.
The football bad-boy stories are the evergreens of Australian society and the narratives all seem to run to a familiar script. The often childish and sometimes even criminal behaviour of some high-profile sporting figures is ignored, then hidden, then absolved, and then justified by their clubs - right up to the point where the organisation appears suddenly horrified by the revelations - and then the rope is cut.
The shock is all of a kind, too: where-oh-where did it all go wrong?
In the case of Lovett, the job always seemed a dangerous one. The question is whether these clubs ever really know how to handle the task they've taken on.
When St Kilda, a perennially almost-successful Melbourne club, picked up the former Essendon player, the club clearly knew it was buying talent.
He had shown himself to be an explosively impressive player; but equally he was trouble.
An intervention order had previously been taken out against Lovett by his former girlfriend, which he then breached, and while at Essendon he had been suspended for missing matches after big nights on the town. The club eventually dropped him.
At St Kilda the form continued: missed training sessions and a charge of public drunkenness soon followed. St Kilda started to shrug the young man off - this wasn't what they had signed up for!
But it was. Why take on such a difficult player in the first place? And if you do, what duty of care do you owe the relatively young and clearly troubled young man?
The answer to the first question lies within an easy formula: when talent and bad behaviour appear equally weighted, many sporting codes around the country are prepared to take the heat. Rule-breaking and even law-breaking behaviour is not always a deal-breaker.
But the answer to the second? Sporting codes stuffed to the gunwales with lawyers and corporate image advisers have not yet figured that out.
We'll leave it to the lawyers to rake over whether Lovett's recent club infractions constitute bringing the club into disrepute - a close reading of the AFL's Players Code of Conduct certainly doesn't indicate he's reached the institution's upper-level of patience.
But the timing of the sacking makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion that St Kilda has brushed aside the presumption of innocence for the difficult Lovett, and that's an action that serves nobody.
It doesn't assist the woman, who must have found it difficult enough to take serious charges of rape to the police and have them rigorously tested in court.
While her wider identity might be shielded by laws prohibiting identification, within football circles that extraordinarily tough decision to go to court has been made even tougher by Lovett being found intolerable even before his day in court.
And as a matter of consistency, the decision is bewildering, when a breached intervention order was clearly not enough to convince St Kilda that this was a player whose attitude towards women was clearly always going to be a problem.
The club brought home a fire-breathing dragon and has fallen about in horror when it set fire to the curtains.
Risk management in sport always seems to me a tricky thing (isn't a club-room full of competitive, aggressive, physically powerful and universally adored young men inherently a risk?), but when it's not backed with consistent standards of what's acceptable and what rules you out from wearing the club jersey in the first place, the job becomes dangerous to everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment