WTF is going on at West Coast ???

[Richo]

Ok guys, if you haven't noticed (by the times I post), I am on night shift (In MLB) so I sleep all day and I miss the news. What the hell is going on with West Coast ? Who can fill me in ???

 

[Ja$e]

Cousins has been suspended for 2 weeks for missing mondays practice due to "personal issues". Thats as far as I know as I 've been busy with uni for the last 2 days.

 

[33WING]

Ok ght shift guys, if you haven't noticed (by the times I post), I am on night shift (In MLB) so I sleep all day and I miss the news. What the hell is going on with West Coast ? Who can fill me in ???

Your not with 171 down in Melb are you? The news is different everywhere you go and the news is talking about a suspension indefinately?
West Coast are cutting their own throats if they suspend him. I'm sure the club will give him time to sort out his problems.

 

[Richo]

No not with 171 Cowboys......

Man Cousins must have some issues.......not happy Jan !
Got tickets to Sydney v WCE and was looking forward to seeing a full strength team play but it doesn't look like that will happen

 

[33WING]

No not with 171 Cowboys......

Man Cousins must have some issues.......not happy Jan !
Got tickets to Sydney v WCE and was looking forward to seeing a full strength team play but it doesn't look like that will happen

Sorry, but i don't mean to be nosey. I just realised from an old thread that your in the same line of work as myself. As for West Coast at full strength, i think their still going to be pretty tough to beat even without Cousins on board.

 

[Richo]

Yeah no worries dude, I knew you were, I just didn't want to expand on it for obvious reasons. I didn't think you were being nosey

As for WCE, I am a little worried about how this will effect their on-field performance

 

[Benny J]

Here is some info.....

West Coast has suspended former captain Ben Cousins indefinitely.

The ban was given to the Brownlow Medallist for breaking team rules after he missed a weights session on Sunday morning, chairman Dalton Gooding confirmed today.

Gooding did not comment on why Cousins missed the session, except to say: "Ben has a number of very personal and private issues which the club is helping him to work through."

Gooding said the length of the suspension was not set, but could be as long as the entire season.

Throughout the suspension, Cousins will not be able to train with the club. This is a similar punishment to that handed out to Michael Gardiner last year before he was sacked by the club. Cousins will not be playing for his WAFL club, East Fremantle, this weekend.

In a further statement, the club said: "Ben has failed to fulfil his commitments as a professional member of the West Coast Eagles team to such a degree that his current situation is untenable.

"When Ben has addressed his ability to commit to the required level, his situation will be reviewed.

"It is with great sadness and regret that the club has been forced to take this action against a much-loved champion who has served this club with great distinction for more than a decade."

Cousins, 28, was stripped of the West Coast captaincy last year after he fled from a police booze bus.

Four months ago, the 2005 Brownlow medallist was arrested in Melbourne for being drunk outside Crown Casino.

THE West Coast Eagles should not delude themselves that "eastern staters" are out to get them or their football code. If that were the case, please explain the kind action of a Melbourne soccer player who rescued a dazed and confused Ben Cousins from a street corner last December, hours before the Brownlow medallist was photographed unconscious outside Crown Casino and later taken into custody by police.

It happened a little after 2 am on Saturday December 2, when the good samaritan stopped at a traffic light near the casino and saw a young man standing in the street, "shivering".

"I asked him if he was all right and he walked towards the car and I realised it was Ben Cousins," he told The Sunday Age yesterday.

Cousins is renowned for being able to run all day — and a long way at night to avoid a booze bus — but this time the iron man of the midfield could hardly move.

Cousins was so "out of it", the social soccer player — and Rules fan — later told friends, that he offered him a lift to get him off the street for fear he would be run over. Cousins waved a $50 note and mumbled that he wanted to go "back to" Eve nightclub, a few hundred metres away, and threw himself into the back seat of the car.

The 30-year-old driver, who does not want to be identified, says he was shocked and concerned at Cousins' distressed condition. "He was sweating and paranoid. He had his hands over his face and was looking around as if he was frightened someone was chasing him. He said someone had hit him — he pulled up his shirt and showed me his stomach. He was jumping all over the back seat. I think I can tell the difference between being drunk and drugs and I'd say he was tripping out bad — his brain was fried on some hard-core stuff, I'd say."

Cousins was aware of his condition and concerned about being recognised, the driver said. "I had a girl with me who didn't recognise him until I said his name and then he said, 'No, no. It's not me!' He stayed in the car about five minutes, talking. I really gave it to him. I said, 'What are you doing, ruining your career, mate?' And he said, 'No drugs, no drugs, I don't want that.' "

The driver took him to the nightclub from where, Cousins had claimed, he had been "chased" earlier. "I don't know if someone really chased him or not," he said. When the driver politely refused his offer of payment, Cousins thrust a $10 note at him, got out and walked unsteadily towards the casino.

That was the last the driver saw of him until a photograph of his famous passenger appeared in the newspapers two days later. Someone had caught Cousins "asleep" on the ground near the casino before the police came and locked him up for four hours.

He still has the $10 as a memento of his brush with celebrity.

 

[JZA]

how can a team be so bloody good on field yet such complete morons off it?

Ill be honest, being a crows man it gives me GREAT pleasure to see these pampered egotistical dicks implode. a lot of people reckon they will be lucky to make the 8 this year and i dont think they will be that bad, but no way do they have the discipline or the hunger for that premiership anymore.

I dont like a team like, say Sydney, but bugger me i respect and admire them a hell of a lot more as a footy team than WC. they are a structured, ego-less team, with discipline on and off the field.

I hope the club continues to go soft on these stars of theirs...it will simply allow the players to get more and more out of control and ruin whatever chemistry they had, thus slowly killing the club from within. exactly what every other club wants to happen

 

[mattyj]

haha you have it all planned out there Jez I like your plan...

 

[MetallicA']

man Cousins is drug fu**ed and i love their reason for his suspension because just about every1 knows theirs more to it. I saw a interview with Worsfold on fox sports news and he got asked about drugs and his team and he frooze and you wouldnt get a straight answer out of him. After a slight pause of silence he just preety much left. WC have some complete and unprofessinal tools on their team. :shock:

 

[ace e]

the rumour i have been hearing is that he has been on the sniffy sniffy and is avoiding training until it gets out of his system , the club knows about this and is making a public thing so it dosnt seem like a cover up.

 

[whereiswally78]

Cuz just wants to be traded to Freo ... he knows where the future of WA footy lies ... it'll be put into his contract that he has an 8pm curfew and daily drugs tests, though. If he fails, they won't make the results public ... they'll just let Mr Farmer eye gouge him [-X

 

[cliffy21]

WOW! I have been checking this thread for news on the Eagles! Down NZ way we don't get anything on the AFL. The only sites I have been checking is afl.com and msn.com.au. Guys it sounds like everybody think he is a drug addict. Is that true or just a rumour... darn it after we win the flag too. Any extra info please?

 

[Allstar cards inc]

One other thing this issue may do...and they suggested as much on the Footy Show last week....is give Chris Judd more reasons to come back to Victoria....Richmond could have a few spare dollars by then!!

 

[Benny J]

Another article....

THE AFL's most invincible party boy yesterday finally fell to earth.

The West Coast's Ben Cousins, whose career has been decorated and now damaged by his on and off-field highs, learnt his life at the top had come to an end in a searching conversation with coach John Worsfold.

Cousins, whose substance-abuse problem had become an open secret in the football community, has been suspended by the premiers in an atmosphere of acrimony and finger-pointing that has spread from the playing group to the club's board and administration.

The official reason for Cousins' ejection — he and the club will get legal advice on an allegation he has broken his contract and should not be paid — was that he twice failed to attend Monday training.

The truth is that the 2005 Brownlow medallist and four-time club champion finally ran out of lives. In recent weeks, he has broken up with his long-time partner Samantha Druce, a break-up that was not necessarily the catalyst for his latest meltdown, but came as a result of it.


So desperate are Cousins' personal problems — which is how West Coast chairman Dalton Gooding described them at a press conference yesterday — that his emotional state is dangerously fragile. Mr Gooding stopped short of saying Cousins had had a mental breakdown.

Cousins was drug tested at the club on Monday and told of his punishment by a devastated Worsfold and the club's football lieutenant Steve Woodhouse.

The news did not come as a surprise to Cousins, who seemed to expect it.

Although he was suspended and not sacked, there was a genuine fear among shattered club officials last night that Cousins might never play again. The West Coast is reported to have urged him to seek rehabilitation, potentially over an extended period at a facility, a suggestion Cousins' family has been subtly pushing for several months.

There was a suggestion his father Bryan Cousins, a star player of the past, has been disappointed in the club's failure to address the Eagles' cultural problems and issues with illegal drugs.

The issue seems to have precipitated angry altercations between two of Cousins' teammates, Andrew Embley and Daniel Chick, in recent days, acrimony that resulted in Chick storming from the club yesterday after an argument with assistant coach Peter Sumich.

Cousins had briefly moved home with his family, which had become increasingly concerned with his dangerous lifestyle and attempted several times in recent months to help him, but he returned to the home he shared with Chick — whose fast lifestyle has also become an issue for the team.

Over what should have proved a happy weekend for the club — most players attended a party thrown by teammate Michael Braun on Saturday and the jumper presentation took place on Sunday — instead turned to scandal when Embley and his wife Rayne accompanied Ms Druce to Cousins' house.

Embley, who has admitted to being a reformed heavy drinker, and Chick clashed and the fight continued at the club on Monday and spilt over again yesterday.

Tensions have spread through the club with key members of the Eagles administration smarting at comments made by Mr Gooding on last week's Footy Show in which he admitted a minority of players at the club had a drug problem.

Although the West Coast has always angrily denied that Cousins had serious problems — his underworld connections drew the ire of former coach Ken Judge and 13 months ago he lost the captaincy after running away from a breath test and turning up disoriented at a restaurant — but there have been indications for some months that his fast life and desperate times were finally spinning out of control.

At Christmas, his family had reportedly delivered an ultimatum that he clean up his act.

AFL chief executive Demetriou said the radical move by West Coast was not precipitated by any AFL pressure or the club think tank next month held to battle the disturbing player welfare issue of illegal drugs.

"They've been dealing with this player for an extremely long amount of time and their problems with him have been well-documented. I believe that they've acted entirely independently of what I've said," he said.

"He's missed training repeatedly and he's had a number of personal issues. I think he's genuinely got serious issues. He and others have been given ample time to get their act together and now their club has taken a stand."

The problem for the AFL — apart from the obvious issue of the drug culture which appears to have disproportionately infected some of its clubs — is the chilling fact that the most successful team in the competition has so openly flaunted its ongoing alcohol and substance abuse.

West Coast may have been woefully inept at dealing with the club's off-field issues and yet it has clearly succeeded in overseeing its champion team's on-field form and discipline — a paradox that has sent the message that you can, in some cases, take drugs, party hard, break the law and still win premierships.

While Demetriou did not say as much there will be one school of thought at the top of the AFL hierarchy that will see Cousins' downfall as a cautionary tale, a message to all elite footballers that even premiership-winning Brownlow medallists cannot get away with a lifestyle as fast and loose and dangerous such as the one Cousins has been leading.

It is a lifestyle that was not his alone and one that Cousins' football club had failed to influence in any meaningful manner. In recent years the West Coast has seen another star midfielder in Daniel Kerr repeatedly in trouble for drug, alcohol and violent offences along with former ruckman Michael Gardiner, with whom the club finally lost patience last season.

Gardiner, whose form and injury problems deemed him expendable, is now at St Kilda.

And yet even after the addled Kerr's assault on a taxi driver last month, the club failed to suspend him after Worsfold declared a $5000 fine was the correct punishment for the repeat offender, who several years ago had even fought with Cousins during a violent late-night dispute.

The club has offered several explanations why Chad Fletcher almost died after collapsing in Las Vegas at an end-of-season players' trip — which was also attended by at least one senior club official — and yet it has failed to address the substance abuse that punctuated the Vegas holiday.

Mr Gooding, who finally admitted he did not know why Fletcher collapsed, said yesterday he was equally in the dark regarding Cousins' failure to attend training. If Cousins, Kerr and Gardiner — to name just three Eagles with substance-abuse issues — are repeat offenders then there is an equally disturbing pattern in the club's failure to address its social problems.

Tomorrow night, the AFL will hold its annual official launch party in the knowledge that its player drug problem is no longer an open secret but a public scandal that has brought down one of the game's greatest champions.

It will also suspect there is more to come

 

[wolvesjr34]

Cousins needs to watch it now, the Police won't be afraid to touch him now he isn't the Eagles midfield champion. He may end up where he may have possibly should have already been, in prison. Everything I've read on this has one thing right Cousins needs help.

 

[Richo]

After reading almost everything on this thread i have to say I am a devistated WCE supporter......living in NSW shield me from most of what goes on over there but I now know Cousins has some serios issues. I hope he gets his act together REAL FAST !

Thanks for all the info guys

Car'n The Eagles

 

[Richo]

Another article....

Benny, where was this article from ?

 

[Richo]

West Coast Eagles coach John Worsfold is confident banished midfielder Ben Cousins will have a plan of attack to get his life sorted out when the two discuss the 2005 Brownlow Medalist's future next week.

Worsfold told a media conference today that he had faith in the 28-year-old's ability to bounce back from adversity after the club suspended Cousins indefinitely yesterday.

"He's indicated he'll talk to me next week and I'm looking forward to that," Worsfold said.

"I'm sure he will have a plan in place."

Worsfold also made a strong suggestion in relation to the drug testing Cousins took part in late on Monday.

"I'm very, very confident the drug test he had on Monday will not be positive."

The 2006 premiership coach also fielded questions about yesterday's incident between Andrew Embley and Daniel Chick.

"Both players have since spoken to the whole player group and expressed their thoughts on that and showed their support for the team going forward," he said.

 

[cliffy21]

Thanks guys for the info - much appreciated. We are up shit creek!