Enough is enough. I am, more times than not, in Chris Connolly’s corner. I’m a wrap for the bloke and for what he’s done and is doing at Freo. His strength of character is second to none and it’s why Fremantle has advanced enormously as a club. However, that been said, this is one time where I can’t back him in. He has to change his stance and stand over anyone who is in his way and get Jeff Farmer back in the side immediately.

Lets be straight up here, Jeffery Farmer’s absence from the side is hurting no one but those who don’t deserve it, especially at this critical time for the Fremantle Football Club. Rightly or wrongly, in today’s game it’s all about winning and nothing that isn’t and if that view isn’t taken then you get left behind. Good efforts and honourable losses attract no sympathy and in fact only open the door for a greater degree of crititizm.

We already play in a competition which accepts inequality in monumental proportions. The tribunal system, especially in 2007, has in all seriousness shafted the Fremantle Football club and it isn’t appearing to gain any form of consistency except its consistent inconsistency. We travel every second week which, even though they were terms we agreed to when we signed up, still puts interstate sides at a massive disadvantage. The uneven traveling across the board really hit home for me when we played Geelong a few weeks back. In roughly one hundred and fifty plus games it was Chris Tarrant’s first visit to Kardinya Park. I had never really thought about it before but that is disgraceful and is a shining and blatant example of the unleveled playing field which we’re speaking of.

The point being in all this is that we need to forget about the Earl J. Hickey Karma theory because it doesn’t exist. There are no footy Gods. The team up the road has evidently and seemingly been doing what they wanted inside or outside the law for as long as they’ve liked and what resulted was a premiership. Daniel Kerr is running around suffering not the slightest of penalties after allegedly been involved in incidents which, in comparison, makes Jeffery Farmer appear to own Mother Teresa like qualities. In what reeks of arrogance and smacks of contempt, Ben Cousins enjoys a four week holiday in Malibu then a relaxing two weeks surfing in the north west and now the push is on the get him back playing within weeks. Should this occur, and you wouldn’t bet against it happening, this would mean a similar outage from the game for both himself and Farmer for their two vastly different, in degrees of seriousness, respective incidents. Meanwhile we’ve got Farmer running around in the WAFL and he gets knocked out. Now I’m not having a go at Cousins or the Eagles here because they know the score and how best to advantage themselves and good luck to them. I’m more so taking a bit of a shot at the Freo Footy Club for dropping the ball.

The club suspending Farmer for as long as they did was an enormous knee-jerk reaction and they went a long way overboard. At the time the Eagles were supposedly being put through the ringer and somehow the end result was a Fremantle player copping the penalty.

Jeffery Farmer popped a night club bouncer! I mean lets be fair dinkum here….at the risk of making light of the incident, who here among us hasn’t wanted to knock out one those steroid filled and fueled Shrek look-alikes? Truth be known Farmer was wound up by these clowns whose enormous arrogant and ignorant manners are only outsized by their inflated egos and self claimed worth.

Now I know he probably shouldn’t have been there and the football purists and social do-gooders will speak up with the ‘footballers are role models’ routine but the actual incident in the scheme of things is a drop in the ocean, compared to what has obviously occurred with other players and other clubs.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming anyone but Jeffery Farmer himself and, in terms of the punishment, the Fremantle Football club. They deadset made a massive blue in putting Wiz out for that highly excessive period of time. The inappropriate penalty was for no other intention than to keep the AFL from sticking their Eyebrow in to Freo’s affairs. The determined length of the penalty was obviously made in an extremely hasty manner and sure; I totally agree something had to be done but not to the extent which it was.

Surely there has to be better and more productive ways to punish players should the need arise. Player’s today hurt more when you substantially hit them in the hip pocket. Suspension penalties hurt the club, the fans and other individual players and can in fact, through a team’s lack of success because of it, cost careers of those indirectly involved.

For mine, a mistake was made on the determination of Jeff Farmer’s penalty. It was over the top and it has hurt everyone involved at the Fremantle Football Club, fans included. We all know about Harry Hindsight. Sure it’s a wonderful thing and had we had the chance to see how lightweight the AFL were with the Eagles involving many more and far more serious incidents then you could bet your dusters Fremantle wouldn’t have gone for such a harsh and lengthy penalty. Maybe Fremantle was a victim of timing but regardless it was a penalty that even without hindsight you immediately knew it was always going to be highly detrimental to the Fremantle Football Club’s 2007 fortunes. I’m of the opinion that we should always act in the best interest of winning games and what was going on with the AFL and the Eagles should not have entered into Fremantle’s calculations and neither should it have had a bearing on how we dealt with Farmer.

We’re 12th on the ladder. We’re two games and percentage from the eight and almost half the season is gone. We may well be playing better football now than at the same time as last year but a winning streak of eight or nine games once is beating enormous odds. To do it twice in consecutive years is Thursday Night Powerball odds. This is the year of vital importance and the repercussions felt will be apocalyptic if we miss the finals this year. We’re going to cop flack for missing the top four, even if in fact we do finish 5th to 8th. The line in the sand must be drawn and its now time for the gloves to come off and as a team start punching; bouncers in the way or otherwise. For mine Wiz is worth at least four goals a game, albeit a combination of kicking them, setting them up or stopping them. We do not have any other options here so what this means is that we need to stand up as a club, which we’re entitled to do, and say to the competition “Sorry guys we’ve had a change of mind and Wiz is back in the side this week to play the Tigers.” Nothing more nothing less.

If Jeffery Farmer says to the club he his Ok to play, wants to play and the concussion hasn’t lingered to the point where it will drastically be detrimental to his game then as far as I’m concerned he lines up. If a one legged Headland can be selected then a half concussed Farmer gets the green light.

I don’t know about any one else but I’ve lost more sleep over Wiz not being in the side than I have over the moral issue of him turning out some night club bouncer’s lights. 

Bring back Wiz now!