Pies To Stick By Fallen Stars
The Sunday Age
Sunday August 10, 2008
COLLINGWOOD would hold a pre-planned seminar this week to form a "blueprint for the future", president Eddie McGuire revealed last night.
Declaring again that the under-siege club would stick by and support the suspended Heath Shaw, Rhyce Shaw and Alan Didak, rather than abandon its own, McGuire said the Magpies stood determined rather than humiliated, and certain that most, if not all, players who came through the club left as better people.Heath Shaw and Didak were suspended for the remainder of the season after Shaw reportedly blew .144 after crashing his car on Sunday night last week, the pair then lying about the fact that Didak had been a passenger. Rhyce Shaw, suspended for two games, had been drinking with the pair."We would rather make a mistake protecting our players than enjoy the sanctity of indifference," said McGuire, who quoted former US president Theodore Roosevelt during his pre-match president's address before the Pies took on St Kilda and said he was staggered by the level of media coverage over the trio's misdeeds."This is a club that cares for the community, it is a club that will never turn its back on the disassociated or its own when they need us most."As long as we bring young men into our club, there will be a potential for such events as this week. We will try as hard as we can for it not to happen but if the best our governments, our bureaucrats, our social workers can come up with at the moment is 2am lock-ins, portable mobile prisons near nightclubs and attacks on alcopops, the challenge is there for all of us as a community, football and the greater community, to do a bit more thinking."McGuire said the club was "dismayed by the actions of three players not doing the right thing by themselves and their club" ahead of last night's match against St Kilda and that while the lies of Shaw and Didak were understandable, they were not acceptable."Far from being humiliated, as the headlines screamed this week, this club stands determined," he said. "This week we had planned a seminar from which we would form the blueprint of the future of the Collingwood Football Club and it couldn't have come at a better time."I can't wait for that meeting on Tuesday, all day it will go and it will go and go and I might see you in a month's time. We've copped our whack this week and we acknowledge our shortcomings, we acknowledge our failings but there is no effort without error or shortcoming."
© 2008 The Sunday Age
