Remember the Geelong concussion waiver scandal? Feels like about a dozen outrages ago, doesn’t it? The Cats president, Grant McCabe, raised the issue on the weekend, putting the onus back on the AFL to come clean on how much they knew about Jake Kolodjashnij’s “voluntary assumption of risk” agreement. By then, the alleged events at the Pullman Hotel had cannibalised the news cycle. By Monday, a country Victorian pub was issuing statements about player behaviour. By Tuesday, Geelong was newsworthy for the potential acquisition of Zak Butters, Toby Greene and Rowan Marshall.
When it comes to the concussion story, both Geelong and the AFL have employed some classic crisis management strategies – deny, dilute, diffuse, distract, delay. Both parties initially denied the existence of the agreement, and pushed back on the journalist who broke the story. They then sought to confuse the issue as much as possible, dropping the word “complex” into every second sentence, hoping that the general public would be so bewildered at what this was actually about that they’d quickly lose interest. They diffused the situation by framing it as an administrative oversight rather than a question of ethics and leadership. Sydney took care of the distraction part of the strategy. And engaging James Peters KC to examine Geelong’s evidence continues to delay the findings.
