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http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/a...s/news-story/cd3d3a6542b136847ffeb0f1b41511f1
A SECRET tape recording has emerged of a crisis meeting held at the height of Essendon’s drugs war with the AFL.
The extraordinary 2013 recording of Bombers chairman Paul Little, coach James Hird, senior assistant Mark Thompson and football manager Danny Corcoran lays bare their fury as they come to the view they have been betrayed by the AFL and its deputy chief, Gillon McLachlan.
In the recording an angry Little says: “I rang him (McLachlan) last night and I said, ‘You know, you’ve really upset me here, because you’ve gone back on your word, Gil’.
“He said, ‘No no, I haven’t, I haven’t’. I said, ‘You have. You told me one thing, and now you’re doing something else’.”
A clearly desperate Hird says: “They’re a pack of f---ing lying pr---s — and they have done from the start … ”
Little also says McLachlan told him the previous night, “there is a 99 per cent chance that the players won’t be charged” for doping.
The August 8 meeting at Windy Hill was called just hours after lawyers for the AFL told Essendon that charges would be laid against the club and officials over the 2012 drug injections program.
The tape, until now a secret, exposes how the Bombers felt the AFL was threatening them to either accept sanctions or be “stood down” as a club. Little says: “That’s the gun at our head.”
After reading excerpts of the recording, Labor federal MP Kimberley Kitching has now joined a push for a Senate inquiry into the conduct of the AFL and ASADA.
Senator Kitching said on Thursday night: “It is clear mistakes were made by regulators and others, and those mistakes must never again be repeated.”
The league has always maintained that the AFL Commission “hearing” to decide the fate of Essendon and its officials — held two weeks after the recorded crisis meeting — was not compromised by backroom deals and negotiations.
The leaked tape throws serious doubt on those claims.
Campaigners for an inquiry...
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Detailing another conversation with McLachlan about the clearing of the Essendon 34 from doping charges, Little says: “He’s now saying to me, ‘Oh, I was referring to (AOD)-9604’, and I said, ‘That is f---ing crap’.
“I said, ‘We parked 9604, we all agreed that that was going nowhere’, and then we spoke about getting the players cleared, ‘unconditionally’ was the word I used ...
“And he said ‘What do you want from me?’. And I said — no, he then said to me, ‘There is a 99 per cent chance that the players won’t be charged’.
“And I said ‘Well, I’d like to believe you, but are you happy for me to use that language in front of the players?’
“And he said ‘Oh no, you can’t do that’. And I said ‘Well, f--k, you’re telling me one thing and over here we can’t say anything to the players’.
“And he said ‘Let me work on it. I will try and give you some language that will give you the comfort that the players so desperately need’.”
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