Brett Voss' brother was a sensational player and an inspirational leader but I find it difficult to listen to his moralising and talking about class.
THE personal insult a St Kilda player directed to Essendon's Andrew Lovett last Friday night clearly crossed the line of sportsmanship, according to triple premiership captain Michael Voss.
Voss said yesterday that it was a "cop-out" to blame match broadcaster Channel Seven for airing the sledge — "You bash your f------ missus, mate" — after it was picked up in an umpire's microphone during a dust-up involving several players just before three-quarter-time.
The insult, Voss said, should simply never have been uttered.
While Lovett indicated in a conversation with a senior Essendon official on Saturday that he did not want to lodge a complaint, the head of the AFL Players Association, Brendon Gale, said the comment was "at the outermost extremity" of gamesmanship.
Voss went further, saying he would be embarrassed if he was the St Kilda player.
"I think there's definitely a line, and in many ways, it's just called class.
"I, as much as anyone, was into the mental gamesmanship that you play but … it was more based around their performance. I don't ever recall actually bringing off-the-field stuff onto the field and I would be dead-set embarrassed if I did," the former Brisbane Lions captain said.
"There's a way to do that, to get under peoples' skin, and there's another way not to do it. There's an unwritten code, if you want to call it that. There's nothing in black and white that describes that currently, other than whether you want to play the game in true sportsmen fashion and in a classy way, or whether you want to go about it a different way.
"Anything along those lines, of such a personal nature like that, I find is breaching that barrier."....
