Good article on Cousins and West Coast

[Jazz_84]

Cousins shafted by AFL club
Thursday, October 18, 2007

The sacking of Ben Cousins is an outrageously gutless act by a management team more interested in protecting its cashflow and image than its players.
The career of AFL star Ben Cousins is over but the pious hypocrites who have condemned him will continue in their high paid jobs, peddling their deception that somehow the West Coast Eagles are now clean, that the drug demons have been laid to rest.

With Cousins facing drug charges and publicly humiliated, the club men who sacked him will drink to their own survival. Cousins' spectacular fall from grace has saved them from the truth that the club and the AFL looked on while his life slowly disintegrated over several years.

They looked on while a raft of West Coast players consorted with drug dealers, killers and gangsters, gaining access to the pills and powders that have become the signature recreation of the club. They drank, they dropped drugs, they fought, they lied and they ran from the law. The law caught up eventually.

The next head to roll over this must be West Coast Eagles chief executive Trevor Nisbett for his role in Cousins' farcical rehabilitation earlier this year. Cousins spent a ridiculously short amount of time in a celebrity rehab centre, less than most players spend off the field while injured.

A number of the board should offer their resignations too. Nisbett has failed the families of a number of players who should have been controlled and counselled long before this, even sacked for their own good.

No parent should feel comfortable with their kids playing at this club while the negligence is allowed to continue in pursuit of sponsorship dollars. It's said that star midfielder Chris Judd left the club to get away from the drug culture. These boys have been treated like rock stars when they should have been controlled and monitored like rock apes.

In March 2002, it was revealed that Cousins and fellow player Michael Gardiner were socialising with convicted heroin trafficker John Kizon. They were cleared in an internal club inquiry, despite being caught in a police sting ordering cocaine. That was more than five years ago. A year later, Cousins refused to answer questions about making a call to a bikie who had been involved in a Perth night club shooting. No sanction followed from the club. Quite the opposite, they made him captain.

As long as Cousins was playing great footy and looking pretty for the cameras, the club was prepared to turn a blind, drunken eye to his drug use and his underworld connections that inevitably follow. This is not surprising, AFL football has proven itself to be a booze-ridden, drug-addled culture steeped in denial and deception, a bastion of binge drinking and random assaults.

The AFL three strikes drugs policy is all about protecting the AFL's image rather than protecting the players. How many other players are being shielded, how many should have been identified and assisted with their problems? They should expect to be jettisoned in much the same way as Cousins when the heat gets too great.

Sacking Cousins was one of the most gutless acts this columnist has ever witnessed in public life, the most blatant example of arse-covering in the tawdry history of the AFL. Cousins' antics, well-known to his team mates and night clubbers around Perth were not a problem to the Eagles while he was winning Brownlow medals and premiership cups.

The club made great play of supporting Cousins rehab in the US early this year but allowed him back into the fold after a matter of 28 days. You get more time on the sideline recovering from a hamstring tear than Cousins did to kick a life threatening ice habit. A 40 000 strong paying crowd for Cousins' return at Subiaco Oval must have quelled any doubts about the decision.

This episode shows the real allegiance in AFL is to money, not to the players, nor the image of the game. At the very least, Cousins' needed a year out, to re-acquaint himself with the man that he really was, to equip himself with coping mechanisms when temptation returned. Instead, amid the backslapping and the roaring approval of the crowd, he must have simply forgotten that he had a problem. All the same stimuli were there for Cousins' return to drugs and he didn't disappoint.

Any drug counsellor will tell you Cousins' rehab was a sham, a dirty piece of media spinning, complete with faux apology on video from Cousins. Bizarrely, it was left to Cousins to pronounce himself cured - a call that he was not qualified to make. It allowed him back into the warm cocoon of the team, where a man rarely has to look himself in the eye, where the boy never has to grow up. Playing AFL footy helped Cousins become a drug addict.

A year on the sidelines would have helped him understand himself as an adult. They pitched him straight back into his comfort zone instead and the hollowness of the drug addict remained. There was only one way to fill it.

The death of his mate Chris Mainwaring last month in a drug-induced flameout, no doubt intensified the alienation and anxiety.

Remarkably, the Eagles' players were happy to be photographed sipping on beers and cocktails by the pool after their season ended. Remarkable that a drug like alcohol that kills three times more Australians than all illicit drugs combined should raise so little comment. But of course illicit drug dealers don't advertise on television or sponsor footy teams, they don't get giant-sized logos of their products on the set of The Footy Show.

Sports Minister George Brandis missed the point of the drugs in sport debate by several post codes when he said: "If you ever wanted an illustration of the importance of doing everything we humanly can to eliminate a drug-tolerant culture in a sport, then you have the events of the last 24 hours."

Alcohol is destroying thousands more families than illicit drugs ever do and yet if you log onto the National Drugs Campaign website you won't find a mention of it anywhere. What hope do you have in cleaning up footy when the grog pushers sponsor the games Night of Nights, the Brownlow Medal.

Ben Cousins will probably get no more than a fine or a suspended sentence from his drug possession, it's a first offence. But his extra-legal penalty will be much higher, he will wear the cost of a social hypocrisy that drugs are a grotesque anomaly in Australia.

Go to any nightclub in the country on a Saturday and you will find fabulous nobodies high on all the drugs they found in Cousins' car, plus more. It's time for a fair dinkum discussion on drugs, all drugs, in society. Cousins is not wicked, nor a criminal, he's a young kid with a problem. He deserved better from his club.

[bomberdonnie]

Yeah poor Cuzzy he was not given anywhere near enough warnings

[stonersmate]

Great article, alot of good points in there.

[BenDoolan]

I reckon the article is bizarre. They have lambasted the Eagles for not reacting to the problems of several of their players and allowing a rotten culture to develop (fair criticism I might add), yet see fit to also lambast them for finally ending Cousins' contract

I also find the argument comparing alcohol (a legal substance) with illicit drugs (a illegal substance) quite stupid.

And to top it off, calling 29 year old Cousins "a young kid" with problems is extremely queer. At what point does one eventually grow up into an adult and act responsibly? f***!

Any idea who the author of the article is? Not my mate Patrick is it?

[Jazz_84]

Yeah poor Cuzzy he was not given anywhere near enough warnings

thats not the point of the article, it's more about the fact West Coast knew of these problems many years ago and decided to turn a blind eye to it all and now that it's public and common knowledge, they decide to act accordingly, to give the illusion that the club wont tolerate it, in actual fact if West Coast think your worth it they will let it all slide. which i agree is gutless..... the bottom line of the article isn't even about cousins, just his situation is so well known of course he is going to use Cousins as the basis of his article...

and im not sure of who wrote it sorry... i came across it randomly

[BenDoolan]

The article is written by Adam Shand - a jounalist from the bulletin. He also wrote a book on Carl Williams and the gangland wars and is working on a project about outlaw motorcycle gangs. Seems to know what he's on about re: drug culture etc

Maybe I've misread his criticisms. I certainly agree about the Eagles creating the rotten culture by not dealing with the issues earlier. But surely Ben Cousins deserves his sacking after multiple stuff ups. I think Adam is critical of that action because he thinks the Eagles are being painted in a good light for sacking him.

But I simply cannot understand the last couple of sentences

Cousins is not wicked, nor a criminal, he's a young kid with a problem. He deserved better from his club.

[grassy1]

Can't see Cousins trying to sue his old mate TREVOR NISBETT.

Because if he does,you can bet your bottom dollar the CLAWS will come out over it.

Despite giving him all the room to manouvre(like the IDIOTIC frequenting of places he shouldn't have gone to,but it was supposedly part of his rehabilitation process to expose himself to such dangers),he effectively carried on as though BULLET PROOF.

COUSINS and WEST COAST DESERVE AN ALMIGHTY BOOT UP THE ARSE for the CRAP that has happened and the SPIN+LACK OF DISCIPLINE that went with the Territory.