Double standards down the punt road of Sports Betting

Double standards down the punt road
Caroline Wilson


'No excuse' for coach to bet on club
Dean Wallis is suspended from his AFL coaching role for 14 weeks after being found guilty of laying three bets including one on his own team.


DEAN Wallis cut a sad figure yesterday as he contemplated the dismantling of his AFL career, but his story was also a portrayal of the perfect target for corruption.

He was a relatively modestly paid assistant coach chock-full of inside information who placed a bet on football and then lied about it.

Perhaps the AFL has caught him just in time. Perhaps further investigation will reveal they caught him too late in terms of a long-term job in coaching at the top level. Either way, this is why Wallis, 42, has been suspended for 14 weeks and why the game's integrity boss, Brett Clothier and his team, will work to uncover the extent, if any, of his football gambling past.


If Wallis was truthful after being caught out about his previous lies, then the punishment has fitted the crime, and football boss Adrian Anderson has done a superb job of handling an ugly issue with deft humanity. But it is difficult to ignore the double standards at play here. On the one hand Anderson and Clothier are fighting desperately to ensure football remains clean and untarnished from the corruption that has so damaged international cricket.

On the other, the AFL has allowed the competition to be saturated by a gambling culture. Anderson defends this by saying that all the money the game makes from gambling, it spends to protect its integrity.

And yet children who love football now learn about live odds every time they attend a football game or tune in to afl.com.au

Football clubs display betting agencies on their jumpers and clubs make money from their supporters' losing bets.

''Don't be a Wallis with betting,'' trumped the Eskander Betstar website somewhat sanctimoniously.

Wallis himself has played and coached in that culture. His old coach Kevin Sheedy and many of Sheedy's disciples love a punt. There is nothing wrong with that unless you cannot control it, and that question must be asked of Wallis now.

He denied yesterday - in a press conference the AFL worried about allowing - that he had a gambling problem, and yet Essendon does not fully accept this. Wallis played down his financial issues and yet one reason he bet on football was to try to pay for a family holiday.

''I am social,'' he said. ''I haven't got a gambling problem, like I said. It was just a naive, stupid thing at the time.''

The AFL, Essendon and the AFL Coaches Association will work with professionals to get to the bottom of Wallis's issues despite his denials.

Several references were made yesterday to the relative leniency of Wallis's fine, close to one-third of the Heath Shaw figure, when both Anderson and Bombers president David Evans talked about the coach's ''personal'' circumstances and ''human'' element of the issue. It has been said that Wallis is stupid. He said it himself. Why else would someone walk into a TAB dressed in his Essendon uniform and place a bet of a footy quadrella?

But Essendon and the AFL fear there are bigger issues here. Surely Wallis must have had more than the ''vague'' knowledge he claimed of the Shaw eight-week suspension and the Nick Maxwell fine.

His friends and colleagues insist that Wallis is one of the straightest men in football. Grant Thomas, who worked with him at St Kilda, stated on Channel Nine on Monday night that if Wallis claimed something to be true, then it must be the truth.

Essendon and others had believed until Wednesday night that their man would be lightly penalised for one stupid mistake - for placing a bet that he claimed in a convoluted story was for a friend. Now they know he has lied.

James Hird spent time with Wallis yesterday before his former teammate faced the media, and has said the club would support him. That surely counts for something.