Essendon players’ failed appeal: Jon Ralph on Jobe Watson Brownlow Medal

JOBE Watson had made the agonising decision to hand back his 2012 Brownlow Medal. As JON RALPH wrote a month ago, it's the right call.

JOBE Watson had made the agonising decision to hand back his 2012 Brownlow Medal. As Jon Ralph wrote a month ago, it's the right call.

Before the year is out the AFL Commission will make their most emotional decision in recent memory as the last chapter in Essendon’s four-year ASADA scandal.

The only decision they can make is that they must strip Jobe Watson of his 2012 Brownlow Medal.

BREAKING NEWS: WATSON HANDS BACK BROWNLOW

The irony is that the league’s financial future carries far weightier ramifications and yet as a symbol of all that is good about the AFL, the Brownlow Medal stands above all else.

The Commission so dreads the decision that they hoped Watson might even hand the Brownlow Medal back himself early this year before an appeal before the Swiss Federal Court was launched by players.

Yesterday the players’ final avenue of appeal ran dry.

And so Watson’s 2012 award is all that is yet to be judged.

In one way it is so very simple.

The highest applicable court has ruled that Essendon’s players deserved to be banned for their rule in the 2012 peptides scandal.

So the AFL Commission must make the tough but fair call to strip Watson of that Brownlow and hand it to joint recipients Sam Mitchell and Trent Cotchin, tied for second in the 2012 count.

Jobe Watson training at St Bernard's College in Melbourne in September. Picture: AAP Image/Julian Smith

Yet the message Essendon president Lindsay Tanner and CEO Xavier Campbell have publicly pushed is that the AFL’s own anti-doping tribunal cleared Essendon’s players — so the league has the ability to allow him to keep that Brownlow Medal.

To allow Watson to keep the medal — ignoring the subsequent decisions of higher courts which overturned the AFL’s ruling — would make the AFL a laughing stock.

We cannot condemn Russian drug cheats and Lance Armstrong’s disgraceful conduct but pick and choose when we believe our own AFL players should be sanctioned for drug-related suspensions.

We know the AFL Commission doesn’t want to make the decision, because AFL chief executive and Commission member Gillon McLachlan told us so this year.

“Everyone involved, if they had to make that decision, would dread it,’’ he said.

“I think the people charged with the responsibility of making that decision will not have made a more difficult decision — not just in their time in football but almost in their lives.

“I don’t want to overdramatise it but that will be as hard a decision as anyone on the commission has had to make. I’m sure of it.”

Asked by the Herald Sun only weeks ago about the prospect of losing that Brownlow, Watson said he was not defined by the medal and had not considered its loss in recent months.

But what should be one of the best months of his life — signing on to return to AFL football, celebrating the Bali and Perth weddings of both his sisters — will instead be dragged back into the painful events of the past.

The only hope is that Watson’s words of that press gathering ring true.

In it he said this: “I certainly feel like I am at peace with where I am at.”

“I am comfortable there are a lot of things in life that I can’t control and I know that and I can’t control how I feel or how other people feel towards me or the whole situation.”

Watson has made his mistakes in Essendon’s grand scheme, paid a savage price, walked to the brink of retirement and finally pulled back.

That Brownlow Medal is a powerful symbol.

But that is all it is.

Time to accept its inevitable loss, return to football in Round 1 next year and use the Western Bulldogs’ story as inspiration in the quest to make new memories that will be his final legacy in football.

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