THAT football has one set of standards for players and the issue of recreational drug use, and another for rich, powerful officials and corporate theft, has been indelibly underlined by the events of Friday.

After the news had broken that the now sidelined Carlton president, Richard Pratt, is facing criminal charges of lying to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the AFL's CEO, Andrew Demetriou, reminded the community of the importance of the presumption of innocence.

A worthy sentiment, of course, but former West Coast champion Ben Cousins must wonder what happened to that ideal when he faced charges after being apprehended by police in Perth last October. While those charges were pending, and before any of them failed to produce a conviction, Cousins was sacked by his club. So much for the presumption of his innocence. Subsequently, he was deregistered for 12 months by the AFL.

International sports labour law lecturer and consultant to various Australian sports organisations, Braham Dabscheck, was moved to observe at the time that West Coast "abdicated their common law obligation to an employee — an employee who was in rehabilitation seeking to overcome problems with drugs. This demonising of Ben Cousins constitutes one of the blackest days in Australian sport".

When Pratt's company, Visy, was found guilty in the Federal Court last November of having operated a cartel with its rival, Amcor, one source said to me with a knowing sense of certainty that football wouldn't touch him because he was too powerful. Regardless of the magnitude of the fine imposed ($36 million), the scathing assessment of Pratt delivered by Justice Peter Heerey, nor the likelihood that future breaches such as those committed by Visy would soon be rendered criminal by new legislation, it was confidently predicted that Pratt would go untouched by either the AFL or his club, Carlton.

So it was. Cousins, who has been found guilty of nothing, but who has a drug problem, has been disqualified from the game for a year and may never return. Pratt, despite being responsible for a company that was fined $36 million in the Federal Court, was allowed to continue as a significant office-bearer within the game. Now he has been charged with what the weekend's Financial Review described as "an open-and-shut case" based on the record of two separate, but contradictory, items of evidence and football has stressed the "presumption of innocence".

The Cousins problem was easily eliminated. Despite being a modern-era champion, a Brownlow medallist and premiership player, he was merely one among almost 700 AFL-listed players. It's not so easy to eliminate the problem of Australia's fourth-richest man.

The AFL is a powerful organisation, but there are limits. It sought to justify its inaction by arguing that Pratt hadn't been barred from holding company directorships, and also with a fatuous comparison between the case of cartel behaviour faced by Qantas and the circumstances of Pratt and Visy. On the latter matter, there clearly was no valid comparison because there was no equivalent figure to Pratt-the-football-administrator within Qantas.

The matter of Pratt retaining his eligibility to act as a company director is, of course, legitimate. The problem for the AFL is that it has made its own rules on what is and isn't appropriate behaviour for those who operate under its umbrella, and it somehow managed to condemn Cousins while giving the green light to Pratt.

Carlton inevitably found itself facing criticism for allowing Pratt to continue as its president, but it's hardly likely that a club, driven by self-interest, as all football clubs inevitably are, would take a tough decision on itself while the AFL was unprepared to bite the bullet on the same matter.

Now that Pratt has stood himself down as president, Carlton and its wealthy backers should do some serious soul-searching. This is a club that, based on its past 30 years of history, seems unable to survive without molly coddling itself in the bosom of a wealthy and autocratic president. It has won premierships in the process but ultimately lost respect. It is time the Carlton Football Club grew up.