Ben Cousins‘ long and public descent from the pinnacle of Australian sport took another dive on Saturday evening, as the former AFL star was caught inside the secure barrier surrounding the Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment in Perth.

The incident follows Cousins’ arrest just last week, for which he was charged with reckless driving, failing to provide a breath test and failing to stop for police.

In the wake of his capture on Saturday night, the 36-year-old was reportedly taken to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital for assessment in the mental health ward.

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Despite the bizarre nature of the weekend’s apprehension, these incidents provoke little surprise in a public so used to seeing Cousins’ name in headlines for all the wrong reasons.

After claiming the AFL’s highest individual honour in 2005, the first signs of Cousins’ fall from grace started to emerge as he relinquished the Eagles captaincy in February 2006 after fleeing his car to avoid a booze bus.

Despite the shaky start to the season, his career re-peaked in 2006 as the West Coast Eagles claimed a famous one-point win in the Grand Final against the Sydney Swans.

Come 2007 and Cousins would manage just seven games, starting the season with a club enforced suspension after failing to attend consecutive training sessions. It would quickly become public knowledge that a substance abuse issue was to blame, the treatment of which saw Cousins jetted to a facility in Malibu for four weeks.

Upon his return, Cousins’ freakish footballing skills were well and truly back on display as he averaged 27 touches for the remainder of the season. All was well.

But by October that year, Cousins’ regeneration would come to a screeching halt after being pulled over by police in Perth and arrested for drug possession. A subsequent one year suspension was handed down by the AFL for bringing the game into disrepute, and Cousins’ career at West Coast was over.



After serving his suspension, the Brownlow medallist returned to the AFL in 2009 after the Richmond Tigers threw him a lifeline. However, the former superstar would play just 32 more games across two seasons, before retiring at the end of 2010.

Looking back on the stages of Cousins’ descent, it is sometimes difficult to show sympathy for a man who was clearly given his fair share of opportunities to turn his life around, yet continued to repeat his mistakes in frustratingly similar circumstances.

But for a man struggling with a substance abuse problem, magnified by the weight of public opinion and expectation, perhaps greater sympathy needs to be afforded.

Perhaps there was a better way to manage Cousins, that would have seen him achieve genuine rehabilitation.

In light of the recent scandals engulfing Karmichael Hunt and Gold Coast Titans, sports fans would not be alone in wondering who’ll be the next sportsperson whose stumble quickly becomes a fall.

Perhaps it is time to try and join some dots and see what we can learn from how struggling players, such as Cousins, were handled in the past.

High profile sports people will inevitably continue to make mistakes and clubs and fans will continue to be frustrated and find it hard to forgive.

Cousins’ descent was driven by decisions he made, and his punishment will reflect that. But what we need to learn from the Cousins experience is that a sportsman’s well-being was not handled by anyone as well as it could have been, and now his spiral has remained out of control well beyond the completion of his career.



A truly unacceptable legacy.

So while his personal battles might now be far from impacting results in the AFL this weekend, the public eye appears destined to continue to impact Cousins, and a positive end to the story seems a distant dream in light of the events of the past week.

Perhaps there was no saving Cousins. But perhaps the we can learn enough to help the next person who struggles with the issues Cousins has.