AFL champion Eddie Betts has opened up about the infamous Adelaide Crows ground, revealing he lost his passion for football after the “strange” and “disrespectful” experience.
Key Points:
- Former Adelaide star Eddie Betts has slammed a controversial 2018 training camp held by the club
- Betts has accused camp organizers of misusing personal and sensitive information
- Betts also believes complaints about the pitch led to him being removed from the club’s management group
Betts, who retired last year after a glittering 350-game career, has detailed the significant fallout from the Crows’ 2018 pre-season camp in his autobiography.
Ahead of the release of The Boy from Boomerang Crescent on Wednesday, excerpts from the long-awaited book have leaked via Nine newspapers.
Betts, an Indigenous icon and one of the AFL’s great small forwards, has claimed the group, which he chose not to name in the book, which runs the field misused personal and sensitive information.
“There was all sorts of weird shit that was disrespectful to many cultures, but particularly and extremely disrespectful to my culture,” Betts wrote in the book and published in The Age.
“I was called out for things I had revealed to camp ‘counselors’ about my upbringing.
“All the people present heard these things.
“I was exhausted, exhausted and distressed by the details being shared.
“Another camp jumped on my back and started berating me about my mother, something so deeply personal that I was absolutely devastated to hear it come out of his mouth.”
Betts said what happened at the camp on the Gold Coast and the group’s involvement with the club affected his mental health and form during the 2018 season.
After speaking to the playing group about how unsafe and uncomfortable the pitch made him feel, Betts claims he was dropped from the Crows’ leadership group just three weeks later.
He continued to play for the Crows in 2019, before requesting a switch to his original club, Carlton.
Betts added a further 36 games for the Blues, before retiring at the end of last season.
“I felt like I lost my drive to play football, and to be honest, I’m not sure I ever had the same energy as I did before that field,” Betts wrote.
The field in question was held after Adelaide’s 2017 grand final loss to Richmond.
The Crows have failed to qualify for the finals since that disappointing loss and are three seasons into a rebuild under new coach Matthew Nicks.
An investigation by SafeWork SA last year cleared Adelaide of breaching health and safety laws and an AFL investigation in October 2018 cleared the Crows of any breach of the rules.
AAP