THIS column does not profess to know why Jeff Farmer behaved the way he did on Wednesday night. Any manner of theories, though, would fit the bill. The footballer clearly has personal issues — issues that seem to have worsened since he left Melbourne for the more familiar Perth at the start of the millennium.

The footballer gets into trouble when he drinks, which does not make him a rarity among young men and certainly not among elite footballers. Largely thanks to alcohol, he has been in trouble with the law again.

What was he thinking in heading out to the Burswood casino when he was injured in a week in which his football club was in turmoil? As one of Farmer's teammates so honestly commented when he stepped off the plane into Adelaide and was asked whether the team had been disrupted by the events of the football week: "What do you reckon?"

Perhaps the injured, talented but ageing footballer felt guilty and was drowning his sorrows midweek. After all, despite his gracious resignation, Chris Connolly was pushed out of Fremantle because his team had savagely under-performed this season and the highly rated Farmer has not been there for him. Thanks to a series of ill-disciplined actions on and off the playing arena this season, the player who promised so much yet again after some of the old brilliance in 2006 has had no real impact on the 2007 crunch year for Connolly and will now almost certainly end his career with the dreaded epitaph "What Might Have Been".

What to do with him now? It was too big a decision for the club this week. AFL chief Andrew Demetriou hinted on Melbourne radio yesterday that it might be the end for him, but Demetriou has talked tough before and then found convenient loopholes for going soft. Think Ben Cousins and Alan Didak.

The problem with Farmer is that he has been severely punished already this season and, despite serving his penance, that seemed to have no real long-term effect whatsoever.

If the penny never drops with a player such as Daniel Kerr or Didak or Dean Brogan or perhaps Chris Tarrant — albeit suspended for a week by his new club not so long ago — then at least you can point to the fact that their clubs never truly took them to task by adequately punishing them.

Clearly Farmer's issues run deep, perhaps too deep for a club such as Fremantle to deal with. After all, players become less valuable when they have an age featuring the numbers 3 and 0, and just as Richmond is suffering from an uneven insufficiently talented list and a recruiting malaise, the Dockers must now take a deep breath and attack their lamentable lack of discipline.

Rarely has a victory such as yesterday's over Adelaide proved so unpopular. How on earth could Fremantle lose to the Kangaroos at home when its season depended on it and then defeat Adelaide in Adelaide fewer than six days later? How can such a professional team prove so flaky?

Perhaps the players were shamed into a solid performance by the apparent reluctance of Mark Harvey to take them on.

But Harvey cannot back away from the Farmer decision. Whether he wants to challenge conventional thinking, which two days ago had him a long shot for a senior coaching job — after all, even he copped a drunken whack when out too late with the team in Darwin not so long ago — he must now take ownership of the hapless Dockers.

In agreeing to the relatively highly paid assistant's job two years ago, Harvey, by definition, embraced Fremantle surely knowing that the current senior scenario could happen. He must urge the board to, at the very least, shelve Farmer until the end of the season, and probably forever. Surely in the current environment, the player does not deserve another chance in 2007 whatever his reasons for again letting down his team. The decision would then make a statement about the football club and how it intends to move forward and no one would surely accuse it of using Farmer as a scapegoat.

It could prove timely too given that the AFL will later this week take a big step towards changing the player rules to put footballers at the mercy of the competition should their clubs do not adequately punish off-field misdemeanours.

The AFL will meet the club chief executives for almost two days of talks with more than a day dedicated to player behaviour. Both the competition and Fremantle should remember that off-field misbehaviour might be society's problem but it has disproportionately in the case certainly of West Coast in recent years become football's problem.

In the case of the Eagles, they might have snatched a flag by pushing their big-picture issues to one side but what true good did it do for the club and its players in the long run?