FEV FEVER OVER

It was interesting to read in the Herald Sun yesterday that the Carlton football team is to head off for an end-of-year holiday in Las Vegas. But they won’t be accompanied by perennial bad boy and drunken Brownlow night wrecker Brendan Fevola. According to the report, under the lurid headline Hideaway of Shame, Fevola won’t run the risk of being evicted from another casino but instead will be spending the next few weeks at a luxury Gold Coast villa.

And maybe it’s just as well. Because the last overseas jaunt that Carlton went on apparently caused some embarrassment. It was a trip to Malaysia in January. They went to a resort on the island of Penang courtesy of their new sponsor Malaysian Airlines and Tourism Malaysia.

It featured the leadership group, including Fevola, Chris Judd and Marc Murphy who posted a blog on the Carlton website. Also on the trip were the coach, Brett Ratten, the CEO Greg Swann and club president Stephen Kernahan.

That group went on Richard Pratt’s private jet. Others flying commercially  to meet them were assistant coaches Mark Riley, Brett  Montgomery and Robert Harvey. And some media people went including the Herald Sun chief football writer Mike Sheehan.

It seems that the old rules still apply: What goes on tour, stays on tour.

In his blog, Murphy writes ‘I was thinking that I had forgotten to include one incident that really summed up the visit to Malaysia and just how good it was and  indeed how lucky we were’.

He wasn’t referring to one incident which is doing the rounds since Fevola’s latest drunken antics at Crown.

It seems on that trip late one night, surprise, surprise, copious amounts of alcohol were consumed and several players ‘behaved inappropriately’ with some women at a local nightspot. That’s how my source delicately puts it.
Maybe they mistook them for ladies of the night, not unknown in Malaysia, and knowing the late Richard Pratt’s penchant for prostitutes.

Some local males understandably took exception and the footballers, led by Fevola, scarpered back to the safety of their hotel, the Shangri-la Rasa Sayang at Batu Ferringhi where they locked themselves in.

There were various glowing stories written about that trip including them all singing the club theme song in a restaurant one night. But that one wasn’t written. What goes on tour stays on tour. To be fair some people on that tour, including the media, may not have known about it.

But the club hierarchy were all there. If anybody was carpeted I do not know. Yesterday a club spokesman denied all knowledge. (That was shortly before the club bosses decided enough is enough and announced they were putting Fevola up to be traded.)

In his blog Murphy praises Tourism Malaysia and says ‘if part of the purpose of the visit was to show off Malaysia and have us become ambassadors for the country, it worked.’

Not sure the Malaysians feel the same way.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009