The Straight Dope by Chip Le Grand

Author:Chip Le Grand
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522868517
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

David Evans is a collector of people. He likes to be surrounded, supported, liked. He thrives on consensus, rather than conflict. He is thoroughly decent but not always decisive. The deeper the Essendon crisis grows, the less trust Evans places in other people at his football club. He has taken leave from his business to manage the scandal unpaid, full time. His circle of advisers shrinks to Liz Lukin, the public relations consultant who had previously worked for unions, the ALP and the AFL, and solicitor Tony Hargreaves. Both are experienced professionals but outsiders at Windy Hill. Increasingly, Evans looks to his friends at the AFL for guidance—chiefly Andrew Demetriou and Bill Kelty—rather than his fellow Essendon directors or senior officials at the club. He has an open line of communication with ASADA investigators John Nolan and Paul Simonsson but his relationship with James Hird becomes more guarded. Before the drugs scandal, the strength of the Hird–Evans relationship was already a weakness at Essendon. Hird liked dealing directly with the club chairman and Evans encouraged the coach to come to him, even on relatively small issues. As a result, senior managers, like chief executive Ian Robson and football manager Paul Hamilton and other board members, were excluded from Essendon’s ruling clique. Once the Hird–Evans relationship starts to fracture, it leaves the club chairman isolated.

‘He tried to do it on his own,’ assistant coach Mark Thompson says. ‘I think it overwhelmed him in the end.’19

Evans believes he is protecting the club. He believes he is acting in the interests of the players. He is genuinely distressed by what he has learned from ASADA about Stephen Dank’s supplement regime. He is convinced the scandal is too big for the club to try to handle on its own. It needs the help of the AFL and others. On 5 March he had asked Ziggy Switkowski, a business associate of his late father Ron, to report on what took place at Essendon. The idea of an independent report was suggested by Lukin, who argued the club needs to be seen to be doing something. Evans is convinced that if Essendon addresses its own mistakes it will count in the club’s favour when its inevitable reckoning with the AFL arrives. Switkowski’s brief wasn’t to establish whether Essendon players took banned substances. As a former chief executive of Telstra and a prominent board director, Switkowski’s expertise isn’t in pharmacology or the complexities of the World Anti-Doping Code. Rather, his task was to examine the extent to which management and governance failures contributed to the scandal. His full report, prepared for the Essendon board, was not made public. A summary of his findings was published by Essendon on 6 May, the same day Paul Simonsson gives his ‘rocks in my head’ address at the club. The published summary, with its colourful turn of phrase and damning findings, lays bare the organisational dysfunction at Essendon throughout the 2012 season and provides the most quoted line of the entire

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