Your significant other decides the relationship is not working and ends the relationship.
You spend 6 months without your significant other and make positive changes in your life that leave you feeling better than when you were with your significant other.
Your significant other's new relationship does not work out. Your significant other wishes to try and make things work. Welcoming your significant other back into your life may involve reversing some of the changes you have made that have improved your life. Tempering that, you will also have some of the great features you loved about your significant other back in your life.
On balanced, you are unsure what will happen if you rekindle the relationship. All you know if that you are doing better now than you were when you were in the relationship, and that rekindling the relationship may cause harm that will require you to start the emotional rebuilding process all over again.
What do you do?
I think the best decisionf or a person who had moved on emotionally would be to ignore for the undeniable allure of precious memories passed and let bygones be bygones. If you are in a better position than you were before the relationship, why would you start it again and risk what you have built up?
And so I see it with Benji. We are doing better without Benji. It may be we are doing better DESPITE the fact we lost him, or it might be BECAUSE we lost him. Given this is an unknown and given we are more than coping, why would we take that risk? No bitterness, no hypocrisy, just fact.
I recognise that's a rather crude analogy, and I did stretch it, but I think it works to a certain extent.
For what it's worth I suspect Benji's presence might have been a bit of a cancer in the club. His departure has coincided with unprecedented committment, determination, and above all cohesion amongst the team. That's not to suggest that he was necessarily some Machiavellian, conniving, loathsome or malevolent spirit skulking the dressing rooms of Concord. Rather that his influence at the club was too big for his ability. A systemic failing of the club perhaps.
Plainly speaking, I think accusations of hypocrisy and spite are unfounded. It's a decision that is being made in the best interests of the club.