Carlton Supporters Club

We cannot really go there MBB, because we do not know the facts surrounding the event, but we can clearly comment on the public reaction and public responses!

The fact that we suspended him has people thinking there is more in it.

Yes I agree.

Further fans are reacting to this news after the fact.

The media and the club clearly knew about this before the weekend, it raises questions around why it took so long to surface. In the old days it would have been in the Saturday morning editions! It's pretty clear the club approved the excursion.

MLG and Lloyd were both active in the broadcast media on Saturday and Sunday before the game, but there was NADA in that content! They had the opportunity to cut off the serpents head but instead by inaction they offered it a sacrifice!

It would have been as simple as one of them steering a conversation and making some proactive statement like this on Saturday,

"At Carlton, we want to be part of the wider community, for example Daisy spent last night volunteering his time at a charity diner to raise funds for Camp Quality!"

Sorted, issue dead and buried, it's that simple! If any smart-ar5e blogger or journo tries to raise the drinking issue after that sort of public pronunciation they just make themselves look like an asshole! Because making a football issue around a charity fund raiser for sick children means you are an asshole, Caro!

When it broke the way it broke Monday, all we had to pose as a question was this on Tuesday,

"Why is Caro(or The Media if you wish to be less personal) politicising a children's cancer charity fund-raiser, is that really how low we are prepared to go?"

Yet NADA!

McGuire, as much as I hate him, has us covered in spades. I don't know who manages or advises our club on media issues but they are dead-set worthless!

Judd said he had no problems with a player having one or two drinks before a game, but acknowledged it was a bad look given Carlton's plight.
Thomas allegedly has told the club he had two glasses of wine at the dinner.
"I'm not one to 'infantise' players - if players have a single beer or a couple of wines over dinner, I don't have a huge problem," Judd told Channel Nine's Footy Classified.
"Needless to say, drinking, full-stop, in public, two days before a game when you're 1-9, fails the stupidity test clearly.
"So we'll wait and see what the result of the investigations are - I actually don't have the detail, I'm not spinning that.

If we had taken this tack

"Why is Caro(or The Media if you wish to be less personal) politicising a children's cancer charity fund-raiser, is that really how low we are prepared to go?"

I reckon we would have been cut to pieces for trying to deflect it using 'cancer charity' as a cover.

You see the wider community doesn't regard the Media as biased against Carlton...they just see them as reporting on a struggling club having another issue to deal with with.

I agree we need to be more proactive but this one isn't a battle we would win.

What the wider community think is irrelevant, if you want to build unity and a culture what Carlton people think, the coaches, players, families, staff, sponsors and fans is the really important perspective.

If the publicly exposed order of events had been different in most cases it's usually first in best dressed. I'm not sure you can make the bolded argument retrospectively. In my experience the opening statement sets the agenda and perspective, it's why print and broadcast media structure reports and headlines the way they do, they know most people form opinion on the first line or two of a report and never read or pay attention to the rest!

Have a look at CheatsFC, despite the early claims being clearly exposed as false, to this day it's still the opinion of CheatsFC fans that the players were ignorant of any wrong doing! But that lie by deliberate omission of a fact, set up the structure of support for the players and ultimately stronger support for CheatsFC as a club!

The reason I think the bit you wrote about using the charity function as a defence would backfire is that I'm a Carlton tragic and a Daisy fan....and I felt uncomfortable that would be the line we'd take.

Rather than banishing him to the vfl we get him to acknowledge his stuff up, issue him a fine with proceeds to said charity and we move on.

Club could cover the fine and everyone is happy.

Or we could have just given him a warning like what every other club would have done.

It was such a minor offence.

About a quarter of all AFL players have taken drugs, but yeah let's pretend that isn't happening and crack down on veteran drinking a couple of shiraz's at a charity event.

Or we could have just given him a warning like what every other club would have done.

Because internally that would be seen as a slap on the wrist and the younger crop wouldn't get the message.