http://www.theage.com.au/AFL/AFL-news/i ... r5u2v.html
It's an old story: AFL football finds a woman to blame
This is a story of deceit. It is the story of a naive footballer doing a profoundly stupid thing, trusting the advice of people who should have known better and running from responsibility.
At the moment that is the story – sex, drugs, lies and football. It is now for authorities to decide if that story is fact or fiction. What this story is not about is the blame and fault of others, or more accurately the deceit of a girlfriend.
This is a story of drug-taking and evasion, what a player might have done, what his boss might have told him to do, of where he went and why he went there.
But that story is starting to be challenged by a competing narrative. This story of Greater Western Sydney player Lachie Whitfield allegedly trying to evade a drug test only got this far because of text messages between Whitfield and his then girlfriend. Without the texts, there would be no case.
The then girlfriend was worried about Lachie's behaviour at the time – about drug-taking, hiding in houses, dodging drug-testers, listening to bad advice
– and went to get help or answers at the club.
Somehow who she told or that she told anyone at all has become relevant in this story. Let's be clear, it is not. This is about what Whitfield, Allan and Lambert allegedly did, not her.
This remains a favoured response in football: deflect responsibility onto a woman.
It never takes long for there to be someone other than a player to be at fault and normally it is a woman
First, the stories emerge that the girlfriend went not only to the club to complain that her boyfriend was taking drugs and being encouraged to hide from drug-testers but that she later also went to ASADA.
This is totally irrelevant. What is relevant is what she gave them, not when she did so or why.
What is important is whether the contemporaneous text messages sent between Whitfield and her – when they were together – paint a believable picture that Whitfield was hiding from drug-testers on the advice of his football manager, Graeme Allan, and staying at the house of the club's welfare manager, Craig Lambert.
She would only be relevant if it could be proved that the entire exchange was a fabrication. Phone records can quickly and readily verify where and when texts were sent and thus whether they construct a convincing narrative.
So that is all. Beyond that, she is redundant within this story other than verifying the fact that someone close to him was troubled by his behaviour and corroborates not only his wrong-doing but the wrong-doing of club officials.
Yet helicopters circled her house on Wednesday, a teammate Cam McCarthy called her out for being erratic and other former Giants muttered darkly of her behaviour.
Allan and Lambert both told their prospective new employers – Collingwood and Brisbane – that the AFL integrity investigation was a flimsy go-nowhere probe because the claims were a baseless invention from a jilted girlfriend.
The AFL has sent the entire brief, including the text messages, interviews and phone records but without any recommendation of action, to ASADA to assess.
Whitfield has insisted to his club that he took an illicit drug not a performance-enhancing one. No one doubts that. That is part of the reason for the hand-wringing at the AFL over what is alleged to have occurred. Presently, if found guilty, Whitfield, Allan and Lambert all face four-year mandatory minimum suspensions, a length of sentence that is heavy for what is thought to have been outrageously stupid, but not cheating.
every single fumbler follower in here has referenced that its likely the girls fault