Adelaide coach Matthew Nicks admits they might handle an issue like the Tyson Stengle drink driving situation differently next time around.
Stengle was suspended for four games and fined $2500 by the club for blowing a reading of 0.125 when stopped by police on April 9th.
The 21-year-old withheld that information from the club for a few days and Adelaide chose to keep it private once they found out about it in order to investigate further.
They have been criticised for it, with Kane Cornes saying “it’s just not good enough”, given the lack of transparency with members and the media.
Nicks said he was fine with the way they handled the situation, but feels they should have been more upfront.
“I understand the perception that has come through on that. It is something we have spoken about,” Nicks told SEN SA Breakfast.
“We went through this process very deliberately and we wanted to number one, look after Tyson, and number two we want to look after all of our people and all of our members and our supporters and our community and we made some decisions around it.
“In hindsight you look back, could we have come out with a short statement, we didn’t have a lot of information early and that’s why we didn’t, but I totally understand why there’s been a lot of questions asked about that.
“It was nothing more than making sure we got the detail right before coming out and that was all about looking after our player and that’s what we’re about and we’ll be like that going forward.
“I think there’s something in it maybe we might release a short, quick statement earlier on in the piece.”
Adelaide CEO Andrew Fagan was strong in his defence of the club’s decision to keep the information private.
“I think we’ve been very transparent about it. The timing was the issue and we did take a few days," he told SEN’s Dwayne’s World.
“If this was the middle of the season and we were playing every week, then we probably would have a reason to rush this out as quickly as we could, but it would also mean we were having face to face contact with all the necessary people.
“It took us a few days to be notified, then we wanted to sit with Tyson and make sure he was okay and we wanted to investigate the incident properly and try and get the appropriate information from the authorities and it took us a little bit of time.
“Then we had a scheduled meeting with the playing group on Friday morning … we didn’t seek to change the timing of that meeting and the intention always was to release it later on Friday, which we did.
“The fact that we took four or five days after him notifying us is not a significant issue at all. We’ve been very open on what’s occurred.”
