AFL ‘integrity’ laid bare in summer of discontent
The AFL did its best last week to make its pre-season launch and advertising campaign about its fans.
Sadly, off the field, the build-up to the 2015 season has been more like something smelly hitting the fan.
If 2013 was the AFL’s annus horribilis as Essendon’s supplement scandal hit the spotlight, this has been the AFL’s summer of scandal.
It has reopened old sores from the past and touched sensitive spots in the present.
And while the AFL would have hoped to have put a full stop on drug dramas with the handing down of verdicts on 34 past and present Essendon players at an anti-doping tribunal today, recent news about Docker Ryan Crowley and yesterday’s shocking revelations about Magpies Josh Thomas and Lachie Keeffe assure us that the drug issue will loom large over the immediate future.
The AFL is about to discover there is more to winning back the hearts, minds and trust of fans than selling cheaper pies at the footy.
Gillon McLachlan’s biggest test as AFL chief executive has come early in his tenure. The AFL needs to make a stand on integrity. This should be stating the obvious but at league headquarters, sadly, this is not the case.
In the recent past, when the AFL has needed to take a stand, it has preferred to take a seat. “Let’s do a deal” has taken precedence over “let’s get this right”.
While the league can hardly be blamed for all the off-field misadventures of some of its many players during and after their careers, there are too many incidents now for it to claim its message is getting through, specifically on the issues of drugs — performance enhancing and illicit — and community responsibilities.
Consider the summer debris.
Former Hawthorn and Richmond player Billy Nicholls jailed for 11 years over the drug-related shootings of two men several years ago, ex-Port Adelaide and Carlton star Nick Stevens jailed for eight months on serious domestic violence charges and former West Coast rookie Ben Sharp in custody facing court on charges relating to a $287,000 armed robbery, again drug related. Two players, Western Bulldog Lachie Hunter and Brisbane-cum-Collingwood player Jack Crisp, have been embroiled in gambling furores. Crisp was yesterday fined $5000.
Crowley faces an anti-doping tribunal on May 1 after testing positive last year to a yet-to-be identified painkiller that is on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s “specified” list, meaning a substance that can’t be in your system on a match day. If he is found guilty of taking the substance without a good enough reason, he faces a ban of 12 to 18 months.
Given it has already been revealed the substance was given to the 12-season veteran by someone other than the club doctor, a “good enough reason” is going to be damn hard for Crowley to come up with.
Thomas and Keeffe could be in even deeper trouble. The substance they tested positive to on February 10 is the prohibited clenbuterol which requires an automatic provisional suspension even before the B sample is tested because it is deemed performance enhancing.
Given the minor nature of Greater Western Sydney’s breach of the drugs code — they failed to keep adequate paperwork for the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority — the Giants might be in line for a league citizenship award. If you will pardon the pun, this has been a particularly “dopey” summer for the AFL, its clubs and its players.
Meanwhile, in the background former Eagles champion and Brownlow medallist Ben Cousins continues his sad, downward spiral from drug addiction with a series of bizarre arrests, while former teammate and runner-up to Cousins in the 2005 Brownlow, Daniel Kerr, has pleaded not guilty to charges of endangering the life, health or safety of a person which arose from an incident in Glendalough last November.
And finally, we get to Essendon’s players, who will learn their fate at 11am today when tribunal chairman David Jones hands down the verdict that will hopefully bring closure to a saga that has cast a two-year-long cloud over the club and the league. Though the Essendon players’ fates will have been decided one way or the other already, it wasn’t helpful for them in the court of public opinion that the architect of their ill-fated supplements program, Stephen Dank, claimed on Sunday, not for the first time, that the drug they were accused of taking, thymosin beta-4, wasn’t on the ASADA/WADA banned list.
It’s ASADA’s list, Stephen. They get to decide what is and isn’t on it.
