THE AFL administration does not get much wrong. Dummies don't land $1.4 billion media rights deals. Well, not all the time anyway. You do not build the richest and only true national football league by misreading your marketplace.
Such accomplishments, though, do not make you infallible. Sometimes the big successes make you so cocky that you reckon you can ignore problems. Step on your critics. Squash them with a whack of your tongue. Or just pretend that the issues don't exist.
It has been mostly a winning tactic. The AFL chief executive, Andrew Demetriou, has beaten off his doubters at club level. Most recently Cappuccino Kennett. He is still swinging punches but now that Cappuccino is no longer Hawthorn president he is no longer in the ring. He can only shadow box.
This week it has come undone for the AFL. The practice of tanking - football clubs electing to lose matches to win other objectives - has risen from the grave so condescendingly dug during the spread of years in which priority picks at the draft table were rated more worthwhile than an honest finish to the season.
The damning ramifications of Demetriou's ridicule and denial was two-fold. One, by suggesting the practice did not take place, it allowed clubs to continue to throw matches because the chief executive wasn't going to punish what he didn't see or believe. The more Demetriou thumped the table and said tanking was a figment of the commentariat, the more he emboldened clubs to manipulate results. Now that he has promised he will rain hellfire and damnation on any club that dares even think of trying such tactics, he has forced underground the very people who might have been willing to offer some insights into the corruption.
Second, the public began to lose confidence in the league leadership. If the boss could not see what was happening in front of his eyes and that of the whole football community, what else does he not get? And it was the ridicule as well. Only the thick and the slow, he believed, would think clubs would lose matches deliberately so they could manoeuvre into the best positions to grab the cream of the nation's kids in the annual drafts.
It led to football supporters questioning the AFL on everything. Not necessarily driven by facts or insight, just a resentment for being considered fools, ungrateful for a wonderful competition - the house that Andrew built.
The claims of tanking were never properly killed off. Too many people knew that it took place; too many people watched it unfold. Too many club officials winked when the matter was raised with them.
It was the policy of an administration that thought it was untouchable. And so it has thundered back to embarrass Demetriou and his team this week with unequivocal allegations from Carlton mid-fielder Brock McLean. He said on the pay-TV Monday night football show On The Couch that one of the reasons he left Melbourne to join Carlton was the culture embraced by the Demons to lose matches to enhance their draft picks. That was not how he played sport, McLean said.
These remarks followed this frank admission by McLean's former coach at Melbourne, Dean Bailey, when he was sacked by the club after round 19 last year. "I had no hesitation at all in the first two years of ensuring this club was well placed for draft picks," Bailey said. "I think what we've done is the right thing by the club, and if it cost me my job, so be it. But the club is always bigger than the individual. I was asked to do the best thing by the Melbourne Football Club and I did it. I did the right thing by the Melbourne Football Club."
Now, not even Demetriou could ignore the allegations. Any suspicions raised by Bailey's honesty had now been given more credibility. Melbourne appeared to have tanked to get the opportunity to win Tom Scully and Jack Trengove at the head of the draft. The integrity of the competition was now being publicly eroded.
This week Demetriou, in London for the Olympic Games following a holiday here and there with his family, could no longer bop his critics on the head with sarcasm and scorn. On Fox Footy on Thursday night Demetriou changed tack just as violently as the yachtsmen on Weymouth's waters.
"If I'm proven to be wrong, that's fine by me because - if someone wants to come forward and provide evidence - then we should investigate it," Demetriou said.
"My view is that (tanking) hasn't existed, that people have experimented, list management, whatever you want to call it.
"I don't think you can accept the tainting of the integrity of the competition, whatever the issue. If you've got information and you can sustain that information, then you deal with it and you deal with it severely.
"If Brock McLean's got information, apparently he's said that he was happy to speak to (AFL investigator) Brett Clothier, good. Brett Clothier can then deal with what his next steps are. He's got a very sophisticated system of interrogation and investigation - we do it in other areas. I'm glad that they've gone down that track and I'll await the outcome," the AFL boss said.
The lack of faith in the AFL has drawn other commentators to collate a list of the league's shortcomings. This year's 18-team structure does not escape fierce scrutiny. The Gold Coast Suns have not improved in their second year and debutant GWS has run out of breath. Their ritual floggings have been exacerbated by the football incompetence of Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs. Between them, the four clubs have won nine games in 18 rounds.
Football supporters are bored by inadequate teams, lopsided matches and you see it in attendance figures. Last round just 8102 people turned up to see Collingwood play GWS; 14,583 to watch Port Adelaide play Fremantle and, most damning, 20,816 for the Melbourne and North Melbourne fixture.
Add to that dissatisfaction, several commentators list the judicial system, the competition fixturing and video review system as signs of an administration that has lost control of its product. That is too rough a judgment. But it points to an underlying belief that the AFL gives its critics - informed or blustering - no credit.
At the centre of all this heartburn is the bewilderment of the AFL's approach to tanking when it appeared to be at its most rife and obvious. By treating those who challenged the AFL view that tanking was a product of punters' imagination and nothing else, the league officials lost the respect of the fans.
It is going to take more than a little slice of Demetriou humble pie to win it back.
McLean's not the only one stating what went on TLPG.
