Not Guilty! (sort of)

The terminology surrounding the decision on the Melbourne ‘tanking’ enquiry is interesting.

 

Melbourne FC, its coach and team did not set out to deliberately lose in any matches

And yet then-coach Dean Bailey is suspended for sixteen weeks and then-Director of Football Chris Connolly for a season, not to mention a half-million dollar fine levied on the club.

 

Add to that mix the then-fashionable view, especially among Demons supporters, that the club was doing its best to shore up the priority Draft pick as well as the number one pick in the main body of the Draft.

 

They may not have set out to lose but there were plenty of suggestions that they found ways to do so once the game was underway. Perhaps that’s where the penalties come from?

 

The statements of the AFL are simply not credible in the context of the penalties applied. If the Board weren’t aware of what was at stake at the time, then they were derelict in their duty. They may not have specifically directed the football department to lose games, but they knew it was going on and did nothing to stop it.

 

This is not an anti-Demons polemic. AussieRulesBlog is on record saying the Demons didn’t do anything that other clubs had hadn’t done before them.

 

We wonder has Vlad fined himself for overseeing the introduction of a Draft process that encouraged teams to lose games to lock in a potentially significant benefit?

 

In the end, we don’t much care whether Melbourne were found innocent or guilty, but it would be nice for the statements and the penalties to be in some sort of sync, and they most definitely are not.