Credulity stretched to breaking point

So AFL community engagement manager Jason Mifsud so misunderstood a conversation with Melbourne’s Aaron Davey that he gave Grant Thomas a story that Melbourne coach Mark Neeld was engaged in some sort of racist discrimination against indigenous players. And now that Mifsud and Davey have — finally — spoken, Mifsud offers a total apology and retains his job.

 

Pull the other one! Someone, and perhaps everyone involved, is telling porkies.

 

If Mifsud so misconstrued Davey’s comments as to accuse Neeld in the fashion he did, it beggars belief that he remains in his job. If AussieRulesBlog were in Vlad’s shoes, Mifsud would only be collecting a pay cheque from the AFL if he were managing a broom — and that only under very close supervision.

 

There’s another angle to these events which apparently hasn’t been considered and makes a lot more sense than anything we’ve heard from either media shills or the AFL. Perhaps Neeld did conduct a group meeting with the indigenous players on his list. So what? He’s surely perfectly entitled to conduct a meeting with whomever he likes. He might also have conducted one-on-one meetings with other players in the same timeframe. Again, so what? It’s not hard to imagine that there could have been perfectly legitimate reasons for doing both. And conducting two sorts of meetings, one with indigenous players and one with the rest of the list, doesn’t automatically qualify Neeld as a racist.

 

Part of the problem here has been the rush to brand any sort of different treatment of indigenous players as “racist”. Has anybody out there heard of “affirmative action”? Isn’t it possible that different treatment of indigenous players could be calculated to advance them in some way?

 

The whole industry would be vastly improved if everyone involved took the time to find out exactly what was involved in an incident before rushing to label it.

 

As it is, we’re left with more questions than answers from Mifsud’s first few months of 2012.