The morning following the Tribunal decision, the suspended player's manager Dutch Slaven rang the CEO of Allsports. Slavens was worried – at 5 a.m. he had awakened from a troubled sleep and raced to the local newsagent to get the first editions of the morning papers.

The headlines were bad – "Star Player Guilty Of Striking"; "Evans Guilty Of Sneak Attack".

The journalists had a field day – "If the Tribunal got it right, Essendon’s young champion used the camouflage of a pack to deliver a king hit on Carlton’s Broadbent. No one doubted that Broadbent had been hit with an elbow, and the Chairman was clearly unimpressed with Evans’s attempt to deflect the blame onto an innocent team-mate of the victim".

The Allsports CEO was also far from impressed. "Listen Dutch, I advise you to read clause 3.1 of your client’s contract. We can pull out if your boy does anything to compromise his reputation with those wide-eyed youngsters who follow him around like a lapdog."

"Mate…"

"Don’t call me mate," the CEO interrupted angrily, "just fix it."

True to the prediction of the Allsports CEO, the radio talkback calls were full of the righteous indignation of dozens of disappointed parents: "What am I supposed to tell my son," one father bemoaned, "that his hero is a coward and a liar?"

By coincidence, in a South Melbourne café not a hundred metres from the radio station, a breakfast meeting was taking place.

"We've only got till 2 o'clock this afternoon to lodge an appeal," Essendon Chief Executive Basher McGee said to the three men around the table.

Within minutes they had agreed to take the next step.

Basher grabbed his mobile and retreated to a quiet corner of the busy café. "Lodge the Notice of Appeal," he instructed his assistant. "Draft a covering letter that we want Evans to have a lawyer with him. And find me some kind of video hot shot, someone who can pull a rabbit out for us."