'The drugs in football affair illustrates what happens when the interests of one particular team are put ahead of care for its players and for the competition of which it forms part. Eventually the group allegiance crumbles as individuals look out for themselves.' Andrew Hamilton's succinct summation is one of the best observations to have emerged from the thickening miasma of evidence, speculation, rumour and point-counter-point surrounding the Essendon Football Club since it 'self-reported' its supplements program at the start of the 2013 season.
Group allegiance has indeed crumbled, some individuals are certainly looking out for themselves, and the players — caught in the middle, grievously uncared for in the past under what the Switkowski report called a regime of pharmacological experimentation, worn down week after week by pressures, accusations and stresses they are ill-equipped to cope with — are now playing without heart or firm intent. As Steve Waugh has memorably remarked, you don't lose innate ability from one week or one month to the next, but, under certain kinds of conditions, you can lose form. For the Essendon footballers, the conditions have now bottomed out.
I am an avid, reasonably well informed fan of the game but no more than an interested and slightly bemused onlooker when it comes to understanding the complexities of a catastrophe like this drug scandal. I don't pretend to have the insights of the many experienced and accomplished sports journalists who have written thousands of words on this sorry business. For a disengaged onlooker like me, there are merely small but possibly potent straws in the controversial winds. One of these is a statement Essendon coach James Hird has made several times, namely that Essendon has a 'right' to play finals.
Now, of course, we know what he means on the face of it: simply, that Essendon have at the moment won enough games to qualify to play finals in September. It's a curious way to phrase it though, and Hird's emphatic claim of a 'right' runs deeper than mere statistics.
When you wed that word 'right' to Hird's often proclaimed passion for the club and his aspiration when chosen as coach to put Essendon back where it 'belonged', 'right' starts to assume the force of due privilege, a status not available to other clubs. Those who have convinced themselves they are in the nature of things privileged rarely tolerate much opposition. But a football competition thrives