Nothing at all shane, in fact it’s probably what I would have done.
You’re right, it’s not a court, but you and others have judged him as someone who ‘watched on as his friend indecently assaulted a woman’. If that’s your starting position then you’d never let him in the front door. Of course, if that was true he would have been charged as well.
But if you’re Lyon and knowing him personally and having followed the trial you have concluded him to be someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and genuinely didn’t know something terrible was happening, and you think he’d be an asset to Freo, then by caving to (in his mind) ill-informed ‘community expectations’ you are displaying a lack of loyalty to someone you care about at the expense of the football club. Lyon has shown himself on occasion to be too loyal to his players, and I suspect that is at play here.
Anyway, I’ll probably leave it at that, as we’re in murky territory now and speculating isn’t adding much. I don’t think we’re far apart – from a holistic point of view I think it’s probably a poor choice, I’m just a little less comfortable casting judgment from afar.
