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Ali Clarke: How the Crows needlessly compounded the camp damage

What were they thinking? A stubborn refusal to engage with real concerns only worsened the Adelaide Football Club’s post-camp problems, argues Ali Clarke.

Aug 11, 2022, updated Aug 11, 2022
The unhappy Crows during their disastrous 2018 post-camp season. Photo: Michael Errey/InDaily

The unhappy Crows during their disastrous 2018 post-camp season. Photo: Michael Errey/InDaily

You can never hide the good stuff. All parents know that.

From the moment you go to where you stashed the expensive, chocolate-covered biscuits only to find crumbs and kid-sized fingerprints, or when you find your one good pair of high-heels out in the back garden bed, ruined by rain after some dress-ups.

It is a quintessential truth: the really important stuff, the stuff that there’s value in, can never stay hidden.

I bet you’ve seen it at work too.

Remember the time that bloke stuffed up and didn’t own up to it and, even worse, when more questions were asked, he tried to blame Jenny in Accounts?

By the time the real issue had been unearthed by a combination of carefully worded questions, follow-up emails and peer pressure, the cover-up had not only made the problem worse, but ruined working relationships, friendships, punished the bottom line and everyone suffered.

It’s a situation as old as time.

You know it.

I know it.

So why do major corporations, politicians and footy clubs always get it so wrong?

Who could forget when the British tabloid News of the World was shut down over the phone hacking scandal, or American network NBC was exposed for actively stopping its reporters from outing Harvey Weinstein’s abhorrent behaviour?

The actions of Big Tobacco, Volkswagen hiding the fact its cars were set up to avoid emission controls and Enron’s record-breaking bankruptcy all came about under corporate cultures of dishonesty and deflection.

Closer to home in the political sphere, think of Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry, the Motorola affair here in SA and, just a couple of years ago, some branch stacking under the Andrews Government.

I know why each of these individual scandals happened, with greed power or pressure the driving forces, but what I can’t understand is how time and time again, they think they can keep getting away with it.

It was never going to go away when people were hurt, games were lost and the whispers started becoming open conversations.

And so we come to sport.

Sandpaper Gate for the Australian Cricket team, racing with everything from horse substitution to cobalt and in footy you can probably start around Wayne Carey and head straight to the Essendon Football Club’s supplements scandal that saw 34 players found guilty of having used a banned peptide.

Which brings us to the Adelaide Football Club and that bloody camp back in 2018.

I swear more column inches have been written about those four days than the five Premierships the club has won.

It has been divisive, damaging and disastrous.

It elicits anger, sadness and disbelief.

For those still in doubt about the goings-on: in what workplace would the treatment of staff with psychological taunts – using information alleged to have been given confidentially – not only be signed off on but embraced?

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In even more simplistic terms, how was that ever going to make someone kick the footy better?

While it appears a culture of groupthink suppressed those who were hurt – which marginalised the aggrieved further – I can’t help but think how this entire situation could have been different if the starting position wasn’t: ‘There’s nothing to see here’.

Of course, that might have been because the loudest voices were saying everything was fine, but the decision to push on with ‘there are no lingering issues from the camp’ even after disquiet was aired in the press, was the ultimate poke of the bear.

How did anyone read those early reports, knowing there was even the slightest bit of unhappiness from players and staff, and not decide then and there that whoa, the proverbial is hitting the fan, we had better get our house in order by getting to the VERY bottom of what happened.

Once that was done, they should have come completely clean on everything, and I mean EVERYTHING.

Because you know what? In this (at times stupidly) football-obsessed state, it was never going to go away when people were hurt, games were lost and the whispers started becoming open conversations.

The next decision should never have been ‘we’re going to try to control the message’ or as I was told repeatedly when asking for interviews on the subject, ‘there is no story’ and ‘thanks, but we’ll just let it run its course’.

Whenever one plus one is presented as three, it will do nothing but pique interest and boost an insatiable drive for scandal, which ‘they’ can easily brand as an altruistic search for truth.

So here we are. Good people hurting and others wondering what went wrong. We’re caught in a trap as old as time.

If your people are telling you that something is wrong, then even if you don’t understand it or necessarily agree, the onus is on you to not rest until their concerns are addressed.

Perhaps some of our big businesses, bosses and pollies should remember the lessons that parents try to instil on those kids who steal the good bikkies … Mum and Dad can only fix the truth.

Ali Clarke presents the breakfast show on Mix 102.3. She is a regular columnist for InDaily.

She conducted the research and interviews for Eddie Betts’ biography, The Boy from Boomerang Crescent, which shed new light on the camp controversy in the past fortnight.

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