THE hellish football tragedy that is Ben Cousins, his fallen career and dismal prospects continued to baffle the AFL and its commission last night as competition boss Andrew Demetriou prepared to return early from France while his board of directors individually pondered what might have been.

While the poll-driven federal politicians continued to link Cousins' ruination with the flawed AFL illicit drugs policy, the sad fact remains that Cousins would have been Cousins whatever the rules and no decision on the three strikes will take place until after the election.

The tougher question for the competition remains how to deal with West Coast. Demetriou, who met the still hostile Gaelic Athletic Association in Paris late yesterday, was keeping his cards close to his chest, but it remains highly unlikely the club will face any further harsh punishment.

Demetriou took the decision to miss the rugby World Cup final and last night was trying to catch an early flight home. Clearly, that move was as much for appearances as anything else because in the short term, Cousins himself is beyond AFL help.

But this is a crisis for the competition, a crisis that remains laced with hypocrisy. From West Coast's point of view, the club has hit rock bottom.

One Brownlow Medal-winning captain looks certain never to play again and another — the best player in the competition — simply didn't want to be there.

Yet another dual premiership-winning favourite son is dead with a cocktail of illegal drugs in his system, and sponsors are bailing out.

Only one of the three-man champion midfield, Daniel Kerr, remains at the club and the harsh truth is that if the Eagles were truly serious about changing their culture, they should probably remove him, too. They won't. A fourth in Chad Fletcher clinically died in Las Vegas late last year and a senior football official was present. If the club truly addressed that issue in terms of punishment, it was subtle about it.

Only Daniel Chick has been sacked, but he is 31 and there is a view on the commission that West Coast let him go too late, keeping him on its list until a fortnight ago. Still, it would be wrong to portray Chick as the sole offender in all this.

Chick was not around when Cousins and Michael Gardiner — captain and vice-captain of the club — were cavorting with Perth's best-known underworld figures as long ago as 2001. Nor was he involved in the litany of early misdemeanours and warning signs that former club chiefs ranging from Brian Cook to Ken Judge tried to alert the board about.

The club's chairman-elect Mark Barnaba and chief executive Trevor Nisbett faced the media two nights ago to announce Cousins' sacking, while Dalton Gooding granted interviews from Italy. All those men have endured a dreadful time; all must take some responsibility for a culture that looks far from fixed.

Nisbett, in particular, has been through hell. He is a players' man and tried to claim on Melbourne radio yesterday that certain aspects of the Eagles' problems had been blown out of all proportion.

He is kidding himself. Nisbett also said that the club had put processes in place last November to fix the problems. That was before the Cousins disintegration, Kerr's latest misdemeanours and Chick's unsavoury pre-season involvement with Cousins, to name just three issues.

Were Nisbett the chief executive of, say, BHP, the staff crisis would have had him resign by now but that is not the Eagles' style and Nisbett, like Gooding and Barnaba, has a close ally in Demetriou.

The fact remains that the club, the West Australian Police and even the WA Government have been complicit in what was clearly a cover-up that was played out over several years and now has unravelled. The AFL is a well-connected organisation and knew the stories. It must have been hearing them for years.

It aided and abetted West Coast in bringing Cousins back to football so soon after his trip to California and the commission ducked its head when it had the chance to penalise the Eagles in May.

It will meet next month — about a week before the national draft — and consider penalising the club in the form of draft picks and money and even premiership points but that would be to shut the gate after the horse had bolted.

Cousins is a drug addict who is probably lucky to be alive and who still doesn't get it. That he never came to terms with the harsh fact of his addiction and the way he let down his club and his code seemed to have been lost on West Coast and the AFL — publicly at least.

It is not lost on them now. The AFL and the Eagles are rightly angry at Cousins for his refusal to face the music. But the men in power at West Coast — the same ones who watched their social disease spread while they strived for a premiership — surely must be questioning their own futures.