He's Cypriot.Hope the corrupt fat Greek prick gets whats coming to him
Won't ... get ... Drawn ... Into ... It ... Again ...
having just read through to page 4 of the thread...looks like you have been drawn in....again :P
Poor Hirdy comes back and it starts again,also amazing how quiet the age is so far.
I hope Robbo has something better than that hidden away in his vault. That’s pretty Meh as far as revelations go.
I’m happy for them to go after the AFL, but yeah… Good luck with that.
Poor Hirdy comes back and it starts again,also amazing how quiet the age is so far.
The Age - and she who must remain nameless - get all their leaks from AFL house and Vlad. As they're probably all spending big overseas at the moment, the Age has no propaganda to run with.
I am interested in Patrick Smith's next AFL article - His last one called for Vlad to stand down.
There is alos this and looks like there will be more tomorrow.
IT was all about the optics. The previous night, James Hird had been at the MCG, coaching his football team to a remarkable win. Now he found himself sitting in the home of AFL executive Gillon McLachlan, being told he would not coach Essendon again for the next 12 months.
It was a Sunday, August 25, the day before Essendon, Hird and club football manager Danny Corcoran, assistant coach Mark Thompson and doctor Bruce Reid were due at AFL headquarters to answer charges of bringing the game of football into disrepute.
This was the first time since early in the scandal that Hird had faced his accusers.
McLachlan, the AFL deputy chief executive and lead negotiator, was there with Andrew Dillon, the league's general counsel who had brought the charges against Essendon and its officials. Hird was accompanied by his solicitor, Steve Amendola.
Hird wanted to present his side of a complex story; the administration of unauthorised and, in some cases, unknown substances by sports scientist Stephen Dank to Essendon footballers.
For months he had said as much publicly; that once he was freed from the confidentiality undertaking he had given the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority, he would state his case. Only then, people could judge fairly.
What soon became clear in McLachlan's house was that guilt and punishment had been assigned. Where Thompson would eventually be fined, Corcoran compelled to take four months' leave and the charges against Reid abandoned altogether, Hird would be banned from football for a year, no less. It was non-negotiable.
Why did it need to be 12 months? Australia's biggest sporting scandal needed a face. Dank had left the club along with Dean Robinson, the high performance manager supposed to manage him. Former club chief executive Ian Robson, the man ultimately in charge, had quit months ago.
So it fell to Hird, a third generation Essendon player, premiership captain, Brownlow medallist and now senior coach. The AFL had decided: it was all about the optics.
Andrew Demetriou, AFL chief executive for the past 10 years, promised that the case against Essendon would not be prejudged. "To suggest the AFL Commission somehow pre-determine an outcome is just offensive and completely wrong," he says.
As late as August 21, when the AFL upped the ante in negotiations with Essendon by releasing a 34-page statement of grounds containing the full allegations against the club and its officials, Demetriou insisted everyone accused would be given "every reasonable opportunity" to answer the charges.
The AFL had no intention of letting this happen.
The night the AFL published the damning allegations against Essendon and its officials, Essendon chairman Paul Little was livid. He publicly accused the league of being belligerent and declared the club and football supporters had "lost total confidence" in the AFL executive team. He called on AFL chairman Mike Fitzpatrick to intervene.
Confronted with a collapse of negotiations and a Supreme Court writ lodged that morning by Hird's lawyers, Fitzpatrick's response was swift and decisive. Within hours of the release of the statement of grounds, Fitzpatrick and Little established their own negotiations, with Australian Sports Commission chairman John Wylie as intermediary. Neither the AFL nor Essendon wanted the supplements saga to escalate into a protracted legal dispute.
Little, renowned as a business pragmatist, knew that unless the club agreed to terms with the AFL before the next month's finals series, any penalty would most likely involve the loss of premiership points in 2014, with devastating consequences for the club's membership, gate receipts and sponsorship.
The AFL wanted the scandal kept out of open court. Hird's writ contained allegations that Demetriou had tipped off Essendon about an Australian Crime Commission investigation, potentially in breach of federal law.
Demetriou denies the allegation but any court case promised to be a bruising affair for the AFL and its senior executives. There had to be a deal.
Fitzpatrick, having previously entrusted much of the handling of the supplements issue to his executive team led by Demetriou and McLachlan, placed his faith in Wylie, a fellow Rhodes scholar and a close friend. Wylie also has strong links with Little, having advised the former Toll Holdings managing director on the biggest deal of his career, the takeover of Patrick Corp.
Wylie would act as intermediary. There would be no direct contact between Fitzpatrick and Little. It was a quintessentially Melbourne, old boys' approach.
Despite Little's genuine anger at the AFL's tactics in earlier negotiations, common ground was soon reached. Little was prepared to forfeit Essendon's place in this year's finals series and, eventually, surrender draft picks. He knew that although four Essendon officials had been charged with bringing the game into disrepute it was Hird, above all others, the AFL wanted to punish. His most difficult task would be convincing Hird to accept the AFL's asking price; a 12-month ban from coaching.
Throughout the 2012 season, Essendon players were given various supplements by Dank, a sports scientist who had previously worked with Robinson at the NRL club Manly and on the AFL payroll with the Gold Coast Suns. Some substances, such as the contentious peptide AOD9604, were approved by Reid. Others were not.
At various times throughout the season, Hird, Corcoran, Thompson and Reid all tried and failed to bring Dank's work under club supervision and control. A club-commissioned review led by businessman Ziggy Switkowski found a "disturbing picture of a pharmacologically experimental environment never adequately controlled or challenged or documented within the club".
Essendon to this day is unable to say with certainty what substances its players were given in all treatments.
Hird was determined to fight the charges against him and didn't trust the AFL to give him a fair hearing. On the morning of August 21, he initiated Supreme Court proceedings to force the league to appoint an independent body to hear his case. That night, when Demetriou, Little and Hird all held press conferences and defended their positions, the dispute appeared at an impasse. But Fitzpatrick, as a former AFL captain, knew where Hird was most vulnerable; loyalty to the club.
Within two days, a secret peace offer had taken shape. Under terms proposed by Wylie and Little, Hird would be the face of the scandal but he would be well looked after. The Essendon coach would be fully paid throughout his 12 months on the sidelines, spend part of his year under suspension being educated at one of the world's finest universities and keep his place in the AFL Hall of Fame.
When Wylie discussed the offer with Little, they floated the idea of Hird enrolling in an MBA at Oxford. Wylie, a trustee of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, is understood to have come up with the idea. At the time, the inducements did little to sway Hird. But the offer of an "outstanding career development opportunity" was not forgotten. Hird has just returned to Melbourne from Paris and an intensive course of studies at Fontainebleau, the prestigious European campus of the INSEAD international business school.
Hird gained selection to an MBA program under his own steam, flying to Singapore to sit a three-hour entrance exam within weeks of coaching his final game against Carlton. It is understood about half of his tuition and living expenses, estimated at $120,000 by the INSEAD website, is being paid through the club. Sources say the origin of the money is not clear.
The Australian and Herald Sun have seen an offer presented to Hird on the morning of August 23. The sanctions it outlines bear striking similarity to those eventually agreed to by Essendon, Hird, Corcoran and Thompson after two days of negotiations at AFL House. Email correspondence between Wylie and Little on the same day include a rewording of the allegations against Hird which echo those contained within Hird's eventual settlement with the AFL.
Both the offer and the email correspondence make clear that if Hird accepted the penalty, he would not be found guilty of bringing the game into disrepute. In the final settlement on August 27, no Essendon officials were found guilty of any charge, despite Demetriou's public comments to the contrary.
The offer may also have shaped a side-deal between Hird and Little inside AFL House before he accepted his 12 month ban. Although Little revealed the key element of that deal -- a two year contract extension guaranteeing Hird's return as senior coach -- at a press conference immediately after Essendon and its officials accepted the AFL's penalties, the details have not been publicly disclosed.
Such was the secrecy surrounding the August 23 offer that AFL commissioners were unaware of its details. Demetriou, a commissioner and the AFL's most senior executive, also appears to have been out of the loop. On the night of Tuesday, August 27, shortly before Hird agreed to his penalty, Hird's lawyers received a blunt message from Demetriou warning that he would advise the commission not accept any settlement in which Hird was suspended with pay. It is believed Hird is receiving his club salary.
The Australian is not suggesting Hird was bought by the AFL or Essendon. Those close to him say his decision to accept the 12-month ban was influenced less by what he stood to gain than what he could potentially lose.
Throughout negotiations between the club and the AFL, Hird was told that if he didn't agree to terms, he would not coach in the AFL again, that Essendon would be wiped from the 2014 season and that players would be dragged into a witness box by AFL lawyers. He feared he would never be welcomed back at the club.
But the AFL's preparedness to privately offer Hird inducements while publicly prosecuting the case against him smacks of hypocrisy. The boys' club method of resolving the crisis also raises fresh questions for ASADA, the government-funded anti-doping body which took the unprecedented step of allowing the AFL to partner its investigation into Essendon and access highly sensitive information normally subject to strict confidentiality provisions.
The formal charges against Essendon and its officials, publicly announced by Dillon on August 13, were preceded by regular, damaging leaks to the Fairfax press which portrayed Hird as the architect and chief proponent of the club's supplements program.
The ASADA interim report relied heavily on the testimony of Robinson, a disgruntled former Essendon employee now suing the club, and documented in expansive detail business dealings between Dank, convicted drug importer Shane Charter and South Yarra pharmacist Nimo Alavi without establishing a clear link to substances given to Essendon players. "It had some extraordinary leaps of logic," says Julian Burnside QC, who appeared for Hird before the AFL Commission. "If it had've been a judgment, I would have appealed it. I didn't think it was a very good piece of work at all."
The Australian understands that AFL commissioners are reviewing their approach to the supplements scandal and whether the AFL should establish an independent body capable of hearing serious charges against clubs and players in the future. Commissioners are also questioning the dual role played by Demetriou as a member of the commission and the league's chief executive.
"Their system is messed up," says Amendola, an industrial relations lawyer who represented Hird throughout the dispute. "Their system is not independent. It is prosecutor, judge and jury."
The role of Wylie, Australia's most senior sports official, in brokering a deal between the AFL, Essendon and Hird, will raise eyebrows within the Abbott government, which was nonplussed when the previous Labor administration called sporting, police and anti-doping chiefs to Canberra on February 7 for the release of an Australian Crime Commission report into the links between sport and organised crime.
Nearly 10 months later, the report has not resulted in criminal charges being laid in any jurisdiction. However, it served as starting point for the subsequent ASADA and AFL investigation into whether Essendon players had been given banned substances during the 2012 season. ASADA has not issued infraction notices to any Essendon players for doping offences. It says its investigations are ongoing. According to the August 23 offer, there will be no sanctions against players. It reads: "This is the end of the matter."
Tomorrow: Two days of chaos at AFL House.
- See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/afl/private-deals-for-a-public-scapegoat/story-fnca0u4y-1226774575711#sthash.pMKozccQ.dpuflistened to a bit of sen after 12, the two knobs on there just brushed it off and said that's what the expected, no big deal, nothing to see here.
Hird was crucified by the media and afl and now this comes out
"It is however acknowledged …. to the best of the AFL's knowledge and belief, Hird did not promote or encourage an unethical environment within the club; Hird has not brought the game into disrepute."
I hope media turns on the afl like they did with us.
listened to a bit of sen after 12, the two knobs on there just brushed it off and said that's what the expected, no big deal, nothing to see here.
Hird was crucified by the media and afl and now this comes out
"It is however acknowledged …. to the best of the AFL's knowledge and belief, Hird did not promote or encourage an unethical environment within the club; Hird has not brought the game into disrepute."
I hope media turns on the afl like they did with us.
I think Homer already is
It makes no mention of any supposed DRUG DUNGEON.
Article has zero credibility.
how much would you all pay me If I could successfully have Vlad tarred and feathered?
I know people.
Of Vlad l said a couple of weeks ago that WSFHU. My position hasn't changed, but the AFL's has and quickly. Their house of cards is starting to topple and it will come crashing down, as more of their double dealing is revealed. Better hand back that Wakeley, it wasn't earned on merit, it was the result of leaks. Those of you who were worried that Vlad wouldn't ever let Hird coach again can relax a little. l predict that by the time Hird returns Vlad will be out on his fat ear. The AFL will also need to revamp their whole way of doing things. This is the start of things, not the end. Expect Vlad to go into full damage control mode over this, but don't expect him to last.
Of Vlad l said a couple of weeks ago that WSFHU. My position hasn't changed, but the AFL's has and quickly. Their house of cards is starting to topple and it will come crashing down, as more of their double dealing is revealed. Better hand back that Wakeley, it wasn't earned on merit, it was the result of leaks. Those of you who were worried that Vlad wouldn't ever let Hird coach again can relax a little. l predict that by the time Hird returns Vlad will be out on his fat ear. The AFL will also need to revamp their whole way of doing things. This is the start of things, not the end. Expect Vlad to go into full damage control mode over this, but don't expect him to last.how much would you all pay me If I could successfully have Vlad tarred and feathered?
I know people.
Wasn't their house of cards starting to topple about this whole thing around April?
It won't topple.
Of Vlad l said a couple of weeks ago that WSFHU. My position hasn't changed, but the AFL's has and quickly. Their house of cards is starting to topple and it will come crashing down, as more of their double dealing is revealed. Better hand back that Wakeley, it wasn't earned on merit, it was the result of leaks. Those of you who were worried that Vlad wouldn't ever let Hird coach again can relax a little. l predict that by the time Hird returns Vlad will be out on his fat ear. The AFL will also need to revamp their whole way of doing things. This is the start of things, not the end. Expect Vlad to go into full damage control mode over this, but don't expect him to last.how much would you all pay me If I could successfully have Vlad tarred and feathered?
I know people.
Wasn't their house of cards starting to topple about this whole thing around April?
It won't topple.
Topple.
Of Vlad l said a couple of weeks ago that WSFHU. My position hasn't changed, but the AFL's has and quickly. Their house of cards is starting to topple and it will come crashing down, as more of their double dealing is revealed. Better hand back that Wakeley, it wasn't earned on merit, it was the result of leaks. Those of you who were worried that Vlad wouldn't ever let Hird coach again can relax a little. l predict that by the time Hird returns Vlad will be out on his fat ear. The AFL will also need to revamp their whole way of doing things. This is the start of things, not the end. Expect Vlad to go into full damage control mode over this, but don't expect him to last.how much would you all pay me If I could successfully have Vlad tarred and feathered?
I know people.
Agree Captain........my concern is that the last time Essendon appeared to challenge the People's Republic of Vladistan and get the upper hand (when it was revealed the AFL said early on that AOD wasn't banned) their response was the release of he 34 page charge sheet that humiliated Hird.
What will they do this time? Psychopathic dictators will do anything when backed into a corner
so is there a suggestion that "Sources say the origin of the money is not clear" relates to the rumours this involves funding from the AFL?
watch this space.
And yet another of Vlads boldface lies re the Hird being found guilty of disrepute will almost certainly go unscrutinised by the wider media.
I think the interesting question is: who leaked this email?
When Essendon was trying to defend itself, in a game it was never going to be allowed to win, it resulted in head kicking fury from Vlad. But if this is the start of a narrative to stop the AFL backing itself into such an unnecessarily destructive corner ever again, then perhaps there is some joy for us.
Vlad thought he was going into damage control when he set us up to go on the front foot and own up to this in April and hang ourselves publicly with Ziggy’s report. However this obviously bought the AFL mountains of negative publicity that the NRL have largely thus far avoided. I think by any “media tracking” analysis, Vlad has been a disaster for the AFL.
Wylie is “Australia’s most senior sports official” and very well connected with Fitzpatrick and Little. These were the people in the know, and involved with the key piece of information generating this story. Perhaps there is some common ground amongst these 3 very powerful people that Vlad has done a ■■■■■ job of this and it is time for him to go.
AFL to respond to new Essendon claims
December 4, 2013 7:03 AM
THE AFL will on Wednesday morning respond to newspaper reports concerning the resolution of the Essendon supplements scandal.
AFL.com.au understands every club will receive a letter from the League clarifying elements of reports that appeared in News Ltd publications overnight.
According to the reports, Australian Sports Commission chairman John Wylie spoke to Essendon president Paul Little during one of the most difficult periods of the crisis.
Mr Wylie is a reported as saying he was asked to help with negotiations between the league and the club by Mr Little and AFL chairman Mike Fitzpatrick, both of whom are friends.
AFL spokesman James Tonkin told News Ltd, "Numerous discussions took place at different levels in a bid to resolve the matter as quickly and appropriately as possible.
“These negotiations were in good faith, in the best interests of our game, were always appropriate and assisted in achieving the resolution.”
Essendon was heavily penalised in August for its supplements program in 2011 and 2012, receiving a fine of $2 million, losing its place in the 2013 finals series and having senior coach James Hird suspended for 12 months.
More to come
http://www.afl.com.au/news/2013-12-04/talks-always-appropriate-afl
Oh oh, more to come…
What really surprises me is that the Age’s gun investigative duo, Baker & Mckenzie didn’t come up with this scoop.
Actually I lie.
I am only interested in Hitler’s response…