Quote ="Superted"That is unfortunately the very real worry - which makes the rest of the conversation irrelevant.
Whether it's genuine mental illness, or just poor life choices, or a mixture of the 2, he's clearly got a self destruct button and a trigger happy finger.
So then it's a question of is/has the game done enough to support him - he's certainly had plenty of opportunities and has had more than his fair share of '2nd, 3rd and 4th chances' at various clubs. We couldn't be sure what other support has been given to deal with whatever issues he has as an individual, but there does come a line where the game are no longer responsible and it's over to him and his friends/family to get things sorted (maybe with the help of the NHS etc).
Fundamentally though, my belief is that if the game was much tougher on some of the contributing factors such as drink, drugs, gambling so that anyone joining the sport at pro-level knows there is zero tolerance (and I mean absolute zero tolerance - not the 'turn a blind eye' zero tolerance we currently have), then we wouldn't have as many guys getting themselves into these issues - granted the individuals may still have the same problems (though I'd like to think some would never escalate down that route), but they'd never have been part of our game, so as harsh as it sounds, they wouldn't be our problem. Culturally, if it's a no go in our sport, we don't need to have this conversation.'"
I don't think zero tolerance towards drink is practical, no one would be able to field a team!
