Ok everyone I have a question and its to you all but I guess
Jade is probably the best one to answer it.
Why is it when I talk to * fans, or read the point of view of * people (on the *board mostly) the over riding feeling is that they want the evidence that does exist and the people that do know what happed to disappear? They want this to go away! They want this to be written off as a bogus investigation! They want the truth hidden as long as the players are free to play!
I would hope that if this happened at our club, we would handle it differently. I would hope that we would do everything to find out what happened, who did wrong, what the players took (were given) what risk have the players been exposed to.
Importantly those that brought this scourge on my club to be punished, to be brought to justice and to be scorned in public forever. Take the punishment and move on. Would the rep of the club be tarnished? Absolutely! Would it recover? Maybe yes, maybe no. But at least the right thing will have been done!
If just one player gets sick, or has future issues because of this program the club will be forever seen as a disgrace WORLDWIDE! The fact that the club has openly stated that "we don't know exactly what the players were given" blows me away! This disgrace of a club NEEDS to take its medicine, and hat in hand apologize to its players, it's sponsors, it's members, and to this league!
Instead of quoting bits and pieces of your post, I'll try answer all of it at once, however if you think I missed something let me know and I'll go back.
Ok, your impression of Essendon fans. You'll you'll find there will be a wide variety of views on what has actually happened and what should happen going forward. Obviously, as is the case with most issues, the more extreme views tend to be a little louder. That, and confirmation bias tends to make opposition fans more attentive to those posts/statements that fit the narrative they most want to believe.
I can probably generalise the view of the more stable of the supporter base though; we don't know what happened, but we do want to know. Based on that information, we can then make decisions as to an appropriate action to take with the club, players and staff. In my opinion, that can be anything from no action at all against anyone, to a total cleanout of the club. Not a whole lot of point on speculating where on that spectrum of action I fall, because I've repeated over and over again I just don't know what happened at the moment.
Thus, I think it is fair to say that the major chunk of the supporter base does not want to 'cover up' evidence, they want to know what happened.
I will point out an interesting phenomena that has occurred though, and it is particularly visible on BigFooty, but I've seen it elsewhere as well. When this story first broke, my reaction, and I suspect the reaction of almost every EFC supporter, was something akin to 'holy shit, what happened?'.
Of course the reaction from opposition supporters was the first to be, shall we say, hysterical? You know what I mean, wails of drug cheats, sack this person, jail this person etc etc all before any of us had the slightest idea what was going on. And of course, the media in this country, ambulance chasers that they are, jumped on it and fed the beast that was going to sell papers, switch TVs on, and have mouses clicking in overdrive all over the country. I dare say Chief is quietly a happy bloody man as a result of this saga.
As a result, the wider football community, and I dare say population as a whole had made a decision on the guilt of those at the club almost immediately.
When you sit there and think about it, its bloody ridiculous. The body charged with investigating and prosecuting a case has only just completed that NOW, many years after the general public had made up its mind that Essendon were GUILTY.
Now I point this out in order to explain some of what you see. What this did to Essendon supporters, was immediately put them on the defensive, defending accusations, poor opinions etc etc. It's been quite a while since I visited the HTB, but make no mistake, the single most utterly stupid people and/or comments that I've seen on this debacle so far have been there, those spouting that they KNOW who is guilty and why. On the odd occasion I've genuinely seen comments that have made me stop and think, in all seriousness, this person is quite literally mentally handicapped. And I don't mean in that off the cuff way we can sometimes call each other stupid, I mean in the you seriously have mental deficiencies kind of way.
Now of course, we've had a few of those ourselves, who shall remain nameless. People that are so blinded by their allegiance to the club that they too make the serious error of assuming they KNOW what happened and then proceed to spruik that fact as loudly as they can. I have, and continue to work hard to correct those people as much as I correct opposition supporters.
I've been guilty of the defensive behavior myself on occasion. It's hard not to sometimes. But I do try and repeat the same thing, that whilst I will correct/defend/refute/ridicule idiocy, the reality is I, like you don't really know what happened.
Now, you mentioned that if it had happened at your club, you would hope that you'd have handled it differently. This comment, and comments like it, I've always found a bit strange. Because surely common sense tells you that any other supporter base would have acted in the same way that ours has. In fact I'd go as far as to say definitely would. Of course you'd WANT your club not to be guilty, and confirmation bias would drive you to look for the information that supports that, and you would defend yourselves from what you perceived as either ill-informed, or flat out wrong statements and accusations.
I can certainly tell you, that most of your supporter base (and this would apply to any other club), would NOT be screaming to 'just take the punishment' until you knew for sure that you were guilty. I'm sorry if you don't agree with that, but that is exactly how anyone else would have acted.
I will concede one thing though, very few coaches other than James Hird would have survived this far. Now I did start a thread on the HTB many moons ago (back when I thought SOME sense could be talked into them) trying to point out why this is. It's not a cult, its just the particular circumstances surrounding Hird make him a little bit more revered than players/coaches elsewhere are. The obvious retort as a North fan is to point to Carey, but there is a distinct difference there that you do tend to gloss over - you all knew Carey was a bit of a shit of a bloke and loved him anyway, that has never been the case with Hird.
Assumption is the biggest driver of hysteria in this debacle. You may notice, if you read much of my posting, that I will consistently, even annoyingly point out and ridicule an assumption when I see it. And to be honest, it happens so often I could never possibly get to every one. I do it because it dawned on me very early on that people assuming that they know things that really, they don't, is what drove the levels of hysteria to lynch mob levels.
Now there are some further details relating to the substances taken that I am aware of but can't post here, however I'm more than happy to PM the cliffs if you'd like to know so long as you don't put it up here.
I hope this answers some of your question, now where's the sympathy bitch for this ****ing long post....