The Finktank

Is Ben Cousins Al Capone? Is Ben Cousins the Kray Twins? Is Ben Cousins Pol Pot?

The way grizzled old guardians of propriety have been harrumphing about his one-fingered salute in the Richmond dressing-room on the weekend in Subiaco, an incident caught on camera, you'd think he's all three.

All the usual reactionary crap you expect when the name "Ben Cousins" is even so much as uttered.

"His action at Subiaco was such a stupid thing to do. Nothing prompted it, nothing can excuse it. If anybody dares defend him, he or she will be inviting mockery," thunders Patrick Smith in The Australian while also swiping the 2005 Brownlow Medallist with the sobriquet "dill", a favoured word of his.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. I'm going to give it a go, Mr Smith.

Should we mock you for calling the Asian Champions League, the premier club football competition of Asia, the "Asian Cup" like you did in March or should we just let it ride and put it down to a mistake?

Where's your $10,000 in fines?

I would normally expect better of a senior journalist in a national newspaper but as a human being I appreciate that we all make mistakes, just like Cousins, who's made more of those than many of us but that doesn't mean he's never going to make another one in his life.

So just let it go, like Cousins has asked.

"I've done enough pre-scripted apologies to last a lifetime. This isn't going to be one of them," he wrote in his Herald Sun column.

"The footage of me raising the finger at the change room camera was filmed an hour and three quarters before the game. I wasn't angry. I wasn't frustrated. It wasn't a message to the world.

"In no way did I think the footage was going to air. If nothing else, I thought someone on the end of the camera in a van outside the ground might have got a chuckle out of it… if people are upset or concerned about what I did, then I wonder where we are headed as a society. Fair dinkum, I had a bit of fun."

Good enough for me. Something in the misguided but larrikin tradition of Graham Kennedy's Vietnam War soldier character Harry in the wonderful 1979 Australian film The Odd Angry Shot, who trying to change his money with an officious sergeant-major (played by Max Cullen) while on furlough in Vung Tau finally snaps and tells him to "Get f*****, you great beer-sodden bag of sh*t!"

"Right, you're all on a charge," comes the tremulous reply.

"Well, you'd better make it murder, because I'm gonna knock your f****** head right off."

The best scene in the film.

And Harry walks away without rebuke or any suggestion of a court-martial.

But Cousins's column is not near enough contrition for the wowsers – or the AFL, which has seen fit to slug him with a $5,000 fine (all of which is suspended for 12 months).

His club Richmond also slugged him with a $5,000 fine, half of which is suspended for 12 months.

Potentially that's ten thousand bucks! For flipping the bird? What if Graham Kennedy had been a Richmond player? He'd have been shot by firing squad, with Andrew Demetriou yelling "Fire!"

Whatever happened to the soul of Aussie rules? It used to be a sport for knockabouts, larrikins, men with a bit of edge and character.

I grew up in an AFL family – my uncle was the late, great Hawthorn legend Peter Crimmins – so I know a bit about the culture of the sport. As a kid I idolised players who were individualistic, uncontrollable and, in my eyes, charismatic as a result: men such as Gary Ablett, Neville Bruns, David Rhys-Jones.

How many of them would get a run in the AFL we know today under such a fascistic, mean-spirited, humourless regime?  What coach, what chairman, would take the risk?

The AFL's zero tolerance of bad behaviour, of larrikinism, and its overzealousness in handing out grossly disproportionate fines for harmless if ill-considered acts is rapidly turning it into the most boring sport in Australia. The fans, like me, who loved the game for its wildness in the 1970s and 1980s are turning off in droves. And it's not good for business.

As one branding expert warned last year: "Fans will turn away in droves if management forces a team into becoming a bunch of prima ballerinas with a clean rap sheet."

So ease up, AFL, and please spare us your Mary Whitehouse-like indignation at anything that upsets your moral antennae. The game needs more colour.

Keep your greyness in the boardroom, by all means, but keep it off the field.


:: For more Fink musings on the big issues in football, check out Half-time Orange on The World Game.