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.

Jason Mifsud’s apparent role in the latest controversy over indigenous AFL players should make his position as the AFL’s community engagement officer completely untenable, but AFL House clearly doesn’t enjoy admitting error so he is reprimanded and counselled.

Nevertheless, AussieRulesBlog wouldn’t have swapped places with Mifsud at his press conference as his boss savagely cut across him to stop him putting his other foot in his mouth.

Just to refresh readers’ memory, Mifsud joined — a week later — with The Age’s Caroline Wilson in accusing James Hird and Paul Roos of advocating race-based recruiting. This accusation was nonsensical, as we commented at the time.

Then, more recently, Mifsud mysteriously took two months to report a conversation with Matt Rendell that had “deeply offended” him. Three strikes. The dust still has not settled on this one with reports that the AFL are to offer Rendell a job.

Whatever his other qualities may be, Mifsud has demonstrated a spectacular lack of judgement and seriously damaged the industry’s standing as a leader in indigenous issues.

The whole Matt Rendell–Jason Mifsud scenario this last week is puzzling indeed. Rendell and Mifsud are reportedly friends. In a meeting in January, Rendell apparently made some remarks that Mifsud took exception to, but, puzzlingly, he didn’t confront Rendell at the time. Instead, he reported to AFL HQ and they wait until March to get involved (at least publicly).

Why the delay? If Mifsud was “deeply offended” as reported in The Age today, why didn’t he yell, curse, accuse, berate or simply punch Rendell in the moments following the comments?

One explanation for the delayed action might be that a couple of high-profile indigenous players have featured in “controversial” stories between January and mid-March. There’s also been the storm in a teacup over comments by James Hird and Paul Roos, which AussieRulesBlog has commented on a number of times.

Is this a confected controversy with Rendell as the fall guy? Well, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck . . .

It’s worth noting that AussieRulesBlog took both Mifsud and Caroline Wilson to task for their disingenuous interpretation of Hird and Roos recently. If Mifsud could take an extreme position on comments by two of the milder personalities in football, then there’s a prima facie case to call into question his later interpretation of Rendell’s remarks.

But let’s consider the reported remarks. AussieRulesBlog condemns in the strongest possible terms anyone disadvantaging any indigenous person simply because they are indigenous. If Rendell made the remarks as reported, that he and his club would only recruit an indigenous player if the player had one ‘white’ parent, he deserves condemnation.

This remark, the context of which is now hotly disputed, apparently followed on the departure of a number of young indigenous players who had difficulty adjusting to the city and to the AFL environment.

We should just remind ourselves here that there are a number of non-indigenous recruits each year, including some high-profile prestige draft picks, who fail to adjust to the AFL environment.

AFL clubs are testing environments. There’s a lot of money and millions of people’s heartfelt affections resting on teams’ performances each week. This is not place for the timid or the unmotivated.

Each year, kids from a wide variety of backgrounds are thrown into this meat grinder that is the AFL. Some emerge, like Daniel Rich or Dyson Heppell, and look like they were born to it. Others, like Jay Neagle, despite undoubted talent, can’t take the last step. The kids mentioned are from relatively privileged backgrounds. Despite that one of them didn’t make it.

For some of those kids drafted or rookied, we also need to factor in extreme cultural dislocation. The cultural chasm between an outback lifestyle and the footy played there on the one hand and the AFL environment and its football on the other hand could hardly be larger if the kids were sent to Mars to train. Is it any wonder some struggle to make the adjustment?

The point Rendell now says he was trying to make, that a couple of years of less-highly structured acclimatisation for indigenous players before entering the AFL environment would prove beneficial for players and AFL clubs alike, seems to make a lot of sense. It’s a great pity that it has been lost in the sensationalist accusations being flung around.

We suppose that Jason Mifsud, the AFL's national community engagement manager, might be excused in part by his job for launching into Paul Roos and James Hird in today’s Age. Mifsud follows the Caroline Wilson line which we’ve discussed previously. Lets get to the heart of the matter. He and Wilson are wrong.

Mifsud warms to his task, identifying one after another indigenous AFL player who exhibits endurance in some attempt to show that Roos and Hird have mis-spoken. The only problem is they didn’t say EVERY indigenous player was bereft of endurance.

Roos and Hird have been around the game a little bit and, unlike journalists and perhaps a national community engagement manager, have seen players away from the public’s gaze. It’s likely they’ve had the opportunity to observe quite a number of indigenous players in the stress of training as well as in games. They’ve formed the view, based on their experience, that a change to a two-and-two bench could make it harder for indigenous footballers to get drafted.

They are NOT saying that clubs should not draft indigenous players, although you’d hardly know that from the inflamed criticisms being thrown at them.

Mifsud’s most egregious error is to relate “the statistics on longevity of primary-listed [indigenous] players in the AFL over the last five years.” All very nice Jason, but we’ve had one year of a three-and-one bench, prior to which coaches have been interchanging at ever-increasing rates. Quite how these statistics relate to what Roos and Hird said might be an impact of the proposed two-and-two bench eludes us.

Sure, Adam Goodes is an astounding athlete as Mifsud reminds us, but he, Lance Franklin, Andrew McLeod, Nicky Winmar and Peter Matera are as exceptional amongst indigenous players as Gary Ablett (both of ‘em), Wayne Carey, Nathan Buckley and Chris Judd are amongst non-indigenous players. So what?

“The logical application of [Hird and Roos’] statement is that we should manage out Cyril Rioli, Liam Jurrah and Chris Yarran because they can't run 15 beep tests and revert back to the dark — and not so secretive — days of race-based draft selections. Of course, this is absurd.”

 

It certainly is absurd Jason, because it’s your ‘logical’ conclusion, not theirs.

Enough! Stop building straw men that you can knock down in virtuous dudgeon.