IF you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, then you haven’t been following the footy this year.

The cant, the hypocrisy, the pomposity, the outsized egos ... and the Essendon Football Club.

Put it all together and you have the AFL.

The AFL got something right this year: Tom Jones opening for Mike Brady at the Grand Final was a nice touch.

But for an organisation that invests so much on massaging and managing its image, some of its constituents parts appeared to be reading from witless scripts prepared for another show.

Essendon’s delusional president, Paul Little, has been getting some of the best lines.

When he announced midyear that his club was filing an application in the Federal Court challenging the legality of the AFL-ASADA investigation into alleged drug use at Essendon, he added that “I would like to express the gratitude of the club towards the broader AFL community, who have been incredibly supportive ... ”

The broader AFL community didn’t agree. Geelong president Colin Carter responded huffily: “When Paul Little says he has the support of the AFL community, he shouldn’t assume he’s talking about us. This is going to have a damaging effect on the reputation of the competition, and every time the AFL pays a legal bill, every one of us is paying one-eighteenth of that amount.”

Ouch! That’s some falling out.

Not long before, Carter launched a daft campaign to have moth-eaten, 19th century VFA flags added to present-day clubs’ AFL Premiership tallies. That would have delivered his then great mates at Essendon another four trophies for an unbeaten total of 20. Using Carter’s logic, Port Adelaide could add its 36 SANFL premierships to its sole AFL flag and top the lot.

Who writes this stuff?

Speaking of Port Adelaide, its chairman, David Koch, regularly, and quite rightly, refers to the clubs’ responsibilities to their players. Regarding the Bomber circus, Koch said: “We have a duty of care to our players, like all employers do.”

That sense of a duty of care at Port Adelaide must have been introduced to the South Australian club by Koch when he took over shortly after the death of star recruit John McCarthy.

McCarthy’s teammates showed a distinct lack of either duty or care when he wandered off from them in Las Vegas after a night of heavy drinking. He had been in the city for a few hours with a dozen fellow players when he left to navigate his way home. Jet-lagged and disorientated, he called his girlfriend back in Adelaide to say he was lost.

Concerned, she called one of his mates on the trip, but “the overall sense of it was that he was OK”, Port’s boss Keith Thomas said later.

Really? McCarthy had less than an hour to live.

Hawthorn president Andrew Newbold is another apparently very grumpy with Little and Little’s shamed club.

He was particularly annoyed Essendon types suggested that Hawthorn might also have been cheating with performance-enhancing drugs.

Newbold thundered on radio that “I think there comes a time when clubs need to concentrate on getting their own house in order rather than commenting on other clubs, so that’s pretty disappointing from our point of view”.

Many footy fans thought that a bit rich. You don’t need a particularly long memory to recall that it was Hawthorn’s Travis Tuck who notably blotted the Hawks’ book — and did more than a little damage to the code along the way — becoming the first footballer to receive three strikes under the AFL’s illicit drug policy.

He still holds that unique distinction.

Stones. Glass houses. This game has everything.

I WOULDN’T know a peptide if I found one in my soup; neither would I take them given Essendon’s performances. In 2012, the year their players are alleged to have been medicated, it lost 10 of its last 13 games, missing the finals.

But one of the biggest stories this year has been the AFL’s most awarded drug addict, Ben Cousins, missing out on the Hall of Fame.

The six-time All Australian was assumed to be a walk-up start with his premiership and Brownlow medals. But with the death of drug buddy Chris Mainwaring and endless skirmishes with the law — remember when he tried to swim away from the cops? — Cousins was blackballed by the AFL.

It’s a temporary measure. If nothing else, footy is endlessly forgiving. Wayne Carey made the Hall of Fame, which would be amusing were it not such an indictment of a sport trying to broaden its appeal among women.

In between attacking women and police and needing to be subdued by capsicum spray, Carey wallows in his character flaws.

“I’d always been told and taught to deny, deny, deny, unless you have been caught red-handed. And even if you have been caught red-handed, you still deny, deny, deny,” he said in his biography.

Step forward, Ben Cousins: 2015 could be your year.

ALAN HOWE IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST