Jobe Watson Brownlow: Mark Robinson and Jon Ralph debate whether the Essendon star should get to keep his medalHerald Sun
February 7, 2016JON RALPH: Come on Robbo, you have drunk the Kool-Aid. Jobe has to lose the Brownlow. The AFL can’t take its bat and ball and go home when it doesn’t like the CAS ruling.
MARK ROBINSON: Truly, I have not spoken to anyone at the club. In fact the club has gone to ground on this issue. And the issue of compensation. But we are talking about Jobe Watson.
My gut feel was Jobe had to lose the medal. But it’s always nagged away at me and I have changed my mind.
JR: But we accept that CAS came over the top of the AFL Tribunal on everything, or nothing. If he gets to keep the medal, then the AFL could just allow the players to play too. That can’t happen.
MR: That won’t happen. Separate the Brownlow issue from the players’ issue. We are talking about a medal that has been awarded for 90 years. And it would seem the AFL will strip it from a player because of a finding of comfortable satisfaction. To take the Brownlow Medal, surely you need absolute satisfaction that banned drugs were taken.
JR: We don’t live in a world of absolutes. Even in a criminal trial, a case is proven with a burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt. Nothing is ever 100 per cent. And if you read the CAS findings, it’s hard to think players didn’t take thymosin beta-4.
MR: Think. There is that word again. We think they did it, we think he did it. The CAS finding was a detailed but often confusing legal document which I want to point out to you, Jon, is being severely scrutinised by sharp-minded people — QCs and player managers who have described this as the greatest miscarriage of justice in Australian sport. You can ignore that or as a journalist raise the antenna just a little bit and ask was the evidence used by the CAS panel as concrete as the finding suggests.
JR: That might all be true. If they win on appeal, Jobe keeps the Brownlow. But all we can go on is the highest court that has currently ruled on it and accept their ruling.
MR: So as the Herald Sun detailed there is going to be an appeal of sorts, and we are still waiting for Jobe’s decision on an appeal. In that case, the AFL is going to have to postpone their decision scheduled for February 15.
JR: Spot on. What I do agree with you about is that Jobe was somehow malicious or “wholly unconvincing” in his CAS testimony, as they put it. He said he had lost faith in the program but didn’t stop the injections.
They painted that as complicity with an illegal program. He might be a lot of things but no one ever believed he felt he was putting banned drugs in his body.
MR: The punishment as a collective really hurt Watson. CAS said he didn’t make enough inquiries about what they were taking, when that is just a lie. Watson testified to ASADA that he asked Stephen Dank about thymosin and he was told there was good thymosin and bad thymosin and he was taking the good thymosin, which was thymodulin.
When asked about AOD-9604 on the couch, Watson said I did it. Watson from afar has followed protocols other than perhaps declaring to ASADA what drugs he was taking. Now, that is not compulsory. But when the poo hits the fan, as it did as Essendon, if you don’t detail your program with ASADA, it can be viewed as a veil of secrecy.
JR: Ben McDevitt certainly hung the AFL players with that. The point remains — take out the emotion and he won the Brownlow in a year in which he has been banned by WADA. And had the best year of his career in that season.
What if Jobe gave the Brownlow Medal back? Whenever he might front the Commission? What if he refuses to be defined by a Brownlow Medal? Because let’s face it, it might be a powerful symbol of success, but he knows his career will be defined by these horrible years even if he kept the Brownlow.
MR: Defined by a Brownlow Medal? If they take the medal off him it will forever and a day be the moment the AFL said Jobe Watson was a drug cheat.
JR: Triple Brownlow Medallist Bobby Skilton. “Former” Brownlow Medallist Jobe Watson. Bobby has a couple of mates with three medals, but he will be Robinson Crusoe, won’t he? No one else has been one, and then not. Quite incredible.
MR: I will say it again, he will be defined as a drug cheat. And the AFL, let alone WADA, and CAS, cannot absolutely say Jobe Watson took a banned drug. If they take the medal, he’s a drug cheat. Don’t give me circumstantial evidence. Where is the overwhelming proof. Because god knows, if you take the medal off Jobe, you better be right.
JR: Sorry to say, but by the highest anti-drug authority’s ruling right now, Watson and his 33 teammates are drug cheats. That term “drug cheat” doesn’t sit comfortably with any of us, but them’s the breaks.
MR: If it doesn’t sit comfortably with you, then why do you accept it?
JR: Because court cases and drug cases aren’t about who has the most emotional argument or who should win. They are about what the judges read out when they give their finding. That is all that matters.
James Hird still believes the AFL investigation was unlawful — and it certainly had whiskers on it — but the Federal Court smacked his case out of the park.
To pick and choose when we want to accept that finding — or elements of it — just isn’t open to the AFL Commission.
MR: It is an interesting question. Emotion is not in it for me. I don’t know Jobe very well, but it’s a matter of right or wrong. The AFL can stand up to the CAS decision if it wants to. Now remember it stood up to the CAS panel when it pleaded for mercy for the players if they were to be found guilty. Now the AFL might take the medal off Jobe. So one week it is look after the players and the next week it’s sorry Jobe, you have lost the medal.
To me it’s the AFL swinging in the breeze.
JR: I spoke to the AFL because they have been caned by both of us over asking Watson to front the Commission. Their view is that he is absolutely entitled to front the Commission to defend himself.
MR: Defend himself from what?
JR: Not sure. Does he beg for mercy? Throw himself at Fitzy’s feet? I just think if he does that and then still loses the medal, it rubs so much salt into the wound.
MR: He should walk in, say hello, and ask what is your decision? That is even if it gets to that. My understanding is Watson would have been talking to the AFL before then. But it can’t happen now. The appeal is off and running. It has saved the AFL from making a decision that is probably on one hand their conscience telling them Jobe has done nothing wrong and on the other, appeasing the political correctness.
JR: So here we are again — in limbo. Jobe keeps the Brownlow — for now. The lawyers get rich — again. And you are off to Switzerland. Pack your lederhosen ... and brush up on your French vocab. Au Revoir, chief.
MR: Happy to have changed your mind and you are no longer a sheep.
JR: Baaa. But if the medal is safe for now, only a successful appeal by the silks can save it.
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