Compounding the confusion of Brisbane’s sacking of Brendan Fevola, it now appears that the prima facie reason for the sacking, charges out of his New Year’s Eve engagement with the Police, are to be dropped.
So, once more we have an AFL club taking extraordinarily drastic action, throwing a person’s life into a maelstrom, before a pronouncement of “Guilty!” Is this to be a habit? Will AFL clubs now dispense summary justice on a whim?
Neither Fevola nor Andrew Lovett are choir boys, yet surely they’re entitled to the same presumptions of legal process that the rest of us expect as our due.
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2 comments:
So you also think Ben Cousins was harshly treated by WCE???
Well, in one sense, yes. He was never charged with anything. Of course, by the time he was sacked it was pretty much an open secret, so I think even he accepted that some sort of circuit breaker was required.
But there's also the question of how his situation was allowed to get as out of hand as it did. I don't know the ins and outs of how it all unfolded, but I think the club had a responsibility to step in and prick his balloon, but chose, as it seems to me, on-field success over doing something to stop the individual's life spiralling toward disaster. I'd say Cousins was harshly treated in that sense as well.
I know that won't be a popular view, but it's one I hold very strongly. I believe the clubs are the guardians of these young men they recruit and there's a responsibility — almost that of surrogate parent — that they are morally obliged to take on.
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