It is all a bit weird to have a guy that is in charge of Essendon now try to lead and defend his club but he actually was not there when the unprofessional nonsense went on. Little was never there.
He actually does not know what went on himself. All he has is second and third hand accounts. Good luck to him in this battle with ASADA. Essendon got themselves in this mess. Someone has to get them out of it.
The AFL has dealt with Essendon on this matter however now ASADA want to deal with the players and people in charge after their long drawn out investigation concludes the players of the time have a case to answer.
Meanwhile James Hird suspended from club role is only a few months from being allowed to take up office again. That will be a PR problem though. It's hard for Little to then deal with a situation of Hird back in charge of player group but was the head coach in charge and had a big say in the mess they got themselves in. Little himself then made it even more complicated by giving Hird an extension when he got suspended from the game by the AFL. Mind boggling why Little would do that...
Hird was big talking about having his say, well here is his chance when this gets to court. I feel sorry for the players and many innocent people involved with the stress they have to deal with. However, at the same time I also think, geez, you guys were really dumb and kind of only got yourselves to blame for collectively putting trust in people asking you to sign a waiver form. Any time you sign such a form any person should give good thought to what it means. You just don't sign stuff recklessly. Dumb of them to do so. No guilt there but DUMB, oh YES!!!
I don't pretend to know what Dank was thinking but he obviously was most aware person about what the intentions were with supplements being used, the nature of them in context of sporting industry in general.
It amazes me to read last year how unprofessional the football department and club were in how he became part of their club. Wheapon himself a middle man out of his depth defending his reputation and left out in the cold by Essendon.
The only thing I feel sure of in all the time I read about the whole mess is that no players were trying to cheat and the nature of the supplements was a grey area that no one person has really been able to clearly say anything about. All conjecture for most part, but reading between all the crap it has never sounded to me like anything that is going to enhance actual match day performance for our game. The problem is WADA and ASADA are watch dogs for sport in general and they don't give a toss about the players or game. They are like most government departments. They just want to do their job. That's fine but the AFL need to do their job of protecting our game. They need to monitor closely what goes on from here and not let ASADA dictate what happens in our game. The AFL run our specific game. Let ASADA have a say but the final word is from people that run our game. They should not let an organisation that does not really care how their view affects our game be telling us what happens. If at any stage in the future of these proceedings ASADA start doing more damage to interest of our game and not actually helping it the AFL need to step in and let it be known we run this game. Not you guys. So far the only damage is ASADA being so slow with investigation. Let ASADA have their say. If Essendon legal proceeding show ASADA themselves is just as much a joke of an organisation as the running of their football department then their case itself against the players is not worth even wasting the courts time with. Absolutely nothing would surprise me with how this story unfolds over the next year or even two to three years. The only thing that would shock me if it was not to drag on forever. Nothing from ASADA has impressed me. I can't imagine Essendon can just accept a guilty verdict for their players. When you know morally the players were not trying to cheat you got to support them as best you can.
I hope ASADA are shown to be every bit as incompetent as the people that got Essendon players into this mess we are all sick to death of. Strangely the person that seems to have dealt with this whole drama the best was the key figure in it. Dank himself. He seems to have taken the stance of considering ASADA incompetent themselves and shown little regard for giving them the time of day. He is probably the only person that actually knows or will ever know everything that went on and why. Be fascinating one day, probably well into the future, to find out from him, what the real story is.
