Gerard Whateley’s passionate defence of AFL playing group – SEN

Gerard Whateley has launched a passionate defence of the AFL playing group, in particular those who have left a locked down Victoria to hub interstate for a period of 32 days.
Complaints about the players have raged from the beginning of the COVID-19 situation, whether it was the pay dispute or the response to needing to spend periods of time away from home.
Whateley is sick and tired of the way the players have been treated and has called for some compassion in these difficult times.
The players have already agreed to 50 per cent pay cuts and they will be paid if they dont go into the hubs. Theyre not doing it for money, he told *SENs Whateley.
This callous conversation around the players, it must stop. We ask them to do this to keep the game going and they have done it. They have done it at every turn.
They have been routinely painted as villains desperately unfairly and no amount of money and no amount of a good job protects you from loneliness when you leave your family behind at such a time.
This is a troubling time for Melburnians. I would find it extremely difficult to leave my wife and kids over the next five weeks while this is going on having already seen what isolation looks like with the burden of home schooling and the like.
Just because theyre good at football and they do get well paid in an industry that has been awash with money, doesnt guard them against any sense of loneliness.
Your bank account doesnt keep you company while youre sitting alone in your hotel room and you said its a luxury resort? They are in two weeks of hard lockdown where they cant leave other than to kick the footy on the grass outside.
They are not living it up. Its just an unfair picture of what theyre doing.
They are staging the game for our amusement and to keep the jobs of an industry of many including myself viable and going.
The football economy collapses if the players go, ‘No, were not going to play’.
They have done the right thing by the game at every step while being pilloried along the way. I think theyre entitled to a little bit of gratitude and a little bit of compassion if they feel a bit lonely having left their family and theyre brave enough to say it rather than pretend its not happening.
I just think as footy fans, we have to be fair to the players in this instance. Especially when were going to turn the radio and the TV on on the weekend and were going to find comfort in the game being there. Thats what was missing last time around.
If you despise the players so much, why do you follow the game? I just cant grasp this callous attitude towards the players that were not prepared to treat them as sons and husbands and fathers and young men.
I cannot understand the attitude and it has me at my wits end. To pour that on the players, Im just not having it.

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