The Kurt Tippett contract issue was questionable for all, the sanctions given to the player and Crows CEO Steven Trigg very light.
In Melbourne’s tanking allegations, it would have been a good idea to actually have a definition of tanking before starting an investigation into it.
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It also would have been beneficial if there had been acknowledgment that rules providing lucrative draft concessions might have given clubs a reason to seek ways to lose football matches.
With Essendon’s drugs problems, waiting until August to sanction the club was months too late. Evidence was there to act earlier.
The AFL wouldn’t compromise the integrity of the finals series, but allowed the home and away season to run while it waited until it could wait no longer.
The NRL acted swiftly, decisively, brutally on Melbourne Storm early in 2010. Had the AFL done similarly in 2013, a lot - but certainly not all - of the carry-on we are still enduring would have disappeared.
So it hasn’t been a good 18 months for the AFL and the AFL industry as a whole.
During the week, certain elements outside the game tried to tell us the AFL had yet another serious problem: that it was sexist.
It came on the back of heavy criticism of Tania Hird, wife of suspended Essendon coach James Hird, after she again questioned a version of AFL events relating to the Essendon drugs investigation.
This column was highly critical of Tania Hird for two reasons.
One, because it has long held the view that asking questions of who said what to whom, along with who said what when, was superfluous to the main story: Essendon’s own independent finding that there was “a pharmacologically experimental environment never adequately controlled or challenged or documented within the club''.
The time to fight James Hird’s case had expired too. Once the AFL sanctions were signed, the right to claim being made a scapegoat had been removed, especially when signing off on those sanctions allowed for a big payment this year.
Several other commentators criticised Tania Hird too.
Louise Milligan, the reporter who aired Tania Hird’s views last week in a very well compiled and detailed piece on ABC TV program 7.30, felt the criticism of Tania Hird was based on her gender.
Milligan tweeted: “#AFL also seeing a lot of sexism in criticism of #TaniaHird. To use #footy parlance, playing the (wo)man, not the ball.”
Milligan then stepped up the AFL industry sexism angle with a comment piece on abc.net.au.
She wrote: “The AFL mates decided the lady doth protest too much. The next day I woke up and thought I must have been catapulted into the 1950s. 'Shut up, Tania Hird, and get back into the kitchen of your Toorak mansion', appeared to be the vibe of the thing. Don't you know there's football to be played?”
To suggest some in the AFL industry based comments on the fact Tania is female is just wrong; offensive actually.
There was not one comment, one observation, one criticism, made of Tania Hird by AFL industry people - and the thousands of trolls on Twitter and other social media don’t count, they never do - that even bordered on being sexist.
That Tania Hird was criticised by this column had nothing to do with her being a female. Nothing. Why would it? One’s gender has zero to do with how an issue is covered, dissected, analysed.
If the exact same 7.30 interview had been with Tania’s husband, James, the exact same criticisms would have been made. The exact same. No more, no less.
It would be wrong to say there is no sexism in the AFL, for there is, as there is in every industry. In 25 years of covering the game in media, and in being exposed to other sports and industries in that time, it is fair though for the AFL to argue it is industry-leading on this front.
The AFL and all high-end facets and aspects of it often make for a brutal industry. Dialogue is regularly aggressive, occasionally unpalatable.
Individuals often have their characters questioned, their personalities pulled apart, even their human worth queried. The words often impact adversely not just on the individual but those closest to them.
It is an unfortunate by-product of what the AFL has become. And maybe this is the aspect all of us in the industry really need to explore and reconsider.
