‘Pull your head in, Harley’: AFL great’s Docker bake

The Dockers are investigating claims Bennell was involved in a nightclub altercation on Sunday night, which reportedly led to his absence at the club’s first 2018 training session on Monday.

Frawley said Dockers coach Ross Lyon had a “really big challenge on his hands to convince the playing group to let him back into the fold”.

“Ross won’t say it now, but I think it’s at breaking point right now. The straw’s not broken, but obviously … he’s on their list, they’ve got him,” Frawley told SEN.

“He’s just thought about himself — it’s as simple as that.”

Frawley added that the fact Bennell failed to show for the first day of training for 2018 proved he had “no idea about what team ethos is at the moment”.

“We’re not telling them go and like a young apprentice bricklayer ‘go and bend your back all day’, or a shearer up the bush that you’ve got to put your head over and shear sheep for eight hours a day,” Frawley said.

“We’re saying go and actually train and get yourself fit. Come on.

“Pull your head in, Harley.”

The latest development has placed fresh scrutiny on the troubled midfielder’s AFL career, which has seen him endure a string of injury problems amid off-field indiscretions since joining the Dockers from the Gold Coast two years ago.

The club has stuck by Bennell but mid-last year ordered him to undergo counselling and fined him $ 10,000 — half of which was suspended — after bizarre behaviour while watching a WAFL game last month.

The 24-year-old twice interrupted the three-quarter time huddle of the match between Peel Thunder and Swan Districts to speak to his cousin Traye Bennell. Bennell was also kicked off a Gold Coast-bound flight before it departed in April because he was intoxicated.

Before joining the Dockers, photos emerged of the then-Suns player allegedly using illicit drugs.

Frawley said he would be bitterly disappointed if he was the chief executive of Woodside — Fremantle’s major sponsor — and saw Bennell in the headlines for the wrong reasons again.

“I’m putting in three mil ($ 3 million) and I’m sitting there and I’m thinking: ‘Why does my brand have to get tarnished with this as well?’” Frawley asked.

“In the past, it was just the player and the playing group. Now you’ve got your membership, you’ve got your major sponsor, your sponsors, your supporters and the AFL — it’s all-encompassing.

“At some stage, the Fremantle Football Club have to weigh up the pros and cons of keeping Harley — it’s as simple as that, right now, in my opinion.

“In the way the landscape is and the amount of money that’s put into the Fremantle Football Club, knowing he had a few warts coming here and he hasn’t set the world on fire (at the Dockers) — he was in rehab for 50 weeks (with a calf injury) at some stage … Looking at it now, probably his preparation in that rehab wasn’t great either.”

Former North Melbourne and St Kilda midfielder Nick Dal Santo said Bennell looked like someone that needed help and that a football club was the best place for him to receive assistance.

But Dal Santo added that Fremantle’s playing group had every right to be livid with Bennell.

“If it is Harley Bennell (in the video), why a player would be out at that time of night — the night before a training session — I’d be really disappointed about as a player, if I was in that leadership group, as a teammate, as a coaching staff. I don’t know where they go from here,” Dal Santo told SEN.

“I know Ross Lyon really well and he’d be ultra-disappointed, because he loves him. I’ve spoken to Ross about him, not personal stuff, but he says ‘you’ve got to see this kid train, no one works harder than Harley when the balls are out — he just goes for it’.”