As the fall-out continues from Collingwood's strange decision to appoint Graeme Allan on a long-term deal as the club's football boss, the biggest question still surrounds why Eddie McGuire and Gary Pert pushed through the appointment despite realising Allan was in serious trouble.
Now the pressure is mounting upon both men. McGuire's leadership after an extraordinarily successful presidency is looking truly shaky for the first time. There are genuine signs that those directors who have rarely challenged him - despite some horrendous gaffes in the past - are starting to do so and the Allan move has weakened his standing.
Pert, who has insisted the appointment that disenfranchised so many staff at the club was his call and not a McGuire captain's pick, has also come under scrutiny from some board members who have pointed to — among other things — the disappointing 2016 financial result.
The directors are not aligned in their views on Nathan Buckley, have questioned the heavy cost of establishing the netball and women's football teams and must surely be mystified by the Allan appointment given staffers had been tipped off that he faced a significant sanction over the Lachie Whitfield affair.
Even allowing for the fact that Allan insisted to Pert and McGuire that he had no case to answer, they surely must have questioned the flimsy defence that has now come to light. As revealed by Fairfax Media, Allan has backed Whitfield that he concocted the entire drug fear story as a ruse to deal with his problematic girlfriend.
So much about the appointment has damaged Collingwood. Staff feel deceived and the cavalier treatment of respected senior personnel is reportedly one reason why the Magpies' people and culture boss Belinda Leaver wanted to leave, feeling her role had been usurped.
Allan is famous for his clever manoeuvring of club lists, which is one reason why the AFL put him in charge of the establishment of its 18th football team, Greater Western Sydney. The state of that club's list and future draft prospects are a credit to him. But questions remain over the legitimacy of a number of negotiations enacted between Collingwood and the Giants in the last year of Allan's time at GWS.
And they have continued since he came on board at the Holden Centre. Already disappointed at losing Neil Balme, who was liked and respected and yet treated by Pert and McGuire with less respect, the recruiters at Collingwood were shocked at the move to sign Docker Chris Mayne to a four-year deal worth $2 million — $500,000 a year.
Allan conducted that deal with Mayne's manager, Colin Young, without the full knowledge of his football colleagues and certainly not list management boss Derek Hine, who had offered Mayne a three-year deal worth $380,000 a year.
McGuire must hate hearing this but his failure to chart out anything remotely resembling a succession plan is not putting the club's interests first. By all reports, that could be changing. Certainly Mark Korda's name continues to emerge when future presidents are discussed. Relatively recent board appointment Christine Holgate is understood to have not backed away from challenging the status quo at the club.
Whether the Buckley appointment proves ultimately successful or not, McGuire and Pert own that decision and should not be proud of the fact their favourite son has now worked under four football bosses in little more than three years and looks headed to serve — even temporarily — under a fifth before the start of next season.
The tentacles that have spread from the Whitfield affair — a bungled operation if ever there was one — threaten to strangle a number of reputations. The player faces a lengthy suspension, as does Craig Lambert, who had been so proud of what he achieved at GWS. Allan's football career, saved by McGuire, who reveres him, remains under threat.
The AFL deserves scrutiny for its lack of action over more than a year, which raises more questions of stalling, and the hierarchy at the Giants cannot escape at the very least accusations the club whitewashed the incident.
But, as they say, the bigger they are the harder they fall. And it is Allan who remains the focus of the harshest critical observation in this case. And the potential damage — not entirely collateral — falls upon Eddie McGuire and Gary Pert at Collingwood.
