ANOTHER day, another Gold Coast press release revealing breaches of "team standards".
The previous release had come 29 days earlier and had read similarly to Wednesday's offering - that Suns players had consumed alcohol when they shouldn't have.
There was one difference though.
Club captain Gary Ablett bobbed up in this one, decrying the poor behaviour of Charlie Dixon and Jack Martin. In the May 5 edition, he had deferred the public commentary to his deputy Michael Rischitelli in the admonishment of Harley Bennell, Brandon Matera and Trent McKenzie.
We wondered then why Ablett's thoughts on club discipline were not revealed. And we wonder now why he felt the need to suddenly want to be seen to be a proper captain.
It was explained that Rischitelli spoke on that occasion because he had played the previous weekend. Ablett hadn't played because of his long-running battle with a shoulder injury.
But that was the same scenario on the weekend just gone. Rischitelli played against Hawthorn in Launceston.
Ablett was not even in Launceston to watch the game. It's not the first time he has missed a Suns game.
And the travel aspect doesn't wash as an excuse for that either, because that didn't stop him attending the recent mid-week launch of a product in Melbourne.
Yet the previous logic of Ablett not commenting publicly about Suns players' inappropriate drinking was discarded, with Ablett on Wednesday saying the club was "extremely disappointed and embarrassed to be in this position", which had been caused when it was revealed that Dixon and Martin had consumed wine on the Friday night before the Saturday game.
"The team has met and our view is that these unacceptable and unprofessional behaviours must end," Ablett said.
Surely if it is good enough for Ablett to travel for a personal endorsement it is good enough for him to travel with his team when it plays outside of the Gold Coast.
There are so many deplorable practices at the Suns that the captain must, from now, be seen to be doing absolutely everything he can to rectify what has become the AFL's biggest problem: the relevance, not to mention money drain, of the Suns in an expansion market.
Coming back early would be 'selfish', says Ablett
That Ablett is finally fronting up to the public necessities of his job as captain is a good thing. So too that his club, which has won just one game this year, is sanctioning errant players.
But, remember, this is a club which chose to tolerate and maybe even chose to ignore seriously questionable off-field behaviour as recently as last September.
Former player Karmichael Hunt twice purchased drugs early that month at times in which he was with Gold Coast Suns players.
As revealed in a Queensland Court, on September 1 he bought an eight-ball of cocaine. An eight-ball, depending on how it is cut, can produce 60 lines of cocaine. And September 1 was the Suns' Mad Monday.
It was also revealed in the court that Hunt purchased, at 7.32am outside a pizza restaurant on Gold Coast's Mermaid Beach, another eight-ball of cocaine on September 8. By late that morning and for the next two days, Hunt was in the company of a number of then-current and former Suns teammates on a golf tour on the Sunshine Coast.
The Suns and AFL have chosen not to offer public comment on the players who spent time with Hunt on those two occasions.
Michael Rischitelli led the way in Launceston but Gary Ablett chose not to attend. Picture: AFL Media
You would have thought that eight-balls of cocaine in the presence of players was more serious than Dixon consuming one or two glasses of wine, to help him sleep before a game of football, or Bennell, Matera and McKenzie having a few beers when they shouldn't have.
Which is why the Suns' management and board today need to take as much responsibility as their naive playing list.
No one at the club seems to understand what is at stake here, nor be aware of the carnage that would actually be unfolding in a media sense if their team happened to be based in Melbourne.
Five years into its AFL life, Gold Coast is full of people who pick and choose their moments.
Players who love the good life, even at the expense of their football. A leadership group which last month voted to suspend Bennell, Matera and McKenzie for drinking, while at the same time providing an allowance for Dixon to do so, because he was with family at the time in question.
A board which sacks a coach without properly explaining to him and the outside world why. A management team which either wasn't aware of Hunt's influence on others, or chose not to want to know as it facilitated, via its superiors at AFL Headquarters, many millions of ultimately wasted dollars to the rugby league convert.
And a captain who only this week seems to have realised that leadership of an elite level football club is unconditional.
