Murky policy leaves football in the dark
‘ Support the player, ignore the behaviour ’
‘ If you break the regulations you will be penalised ’
The AFL’s illicit drug policy could hardly be any murkier. The official AFL line is that it is designed to make player welfare a priority.
Elite footballers, no matter how highly-skilled, paid or professional, are still vulnerable to the same societal pressures that beset run-of-the-mill humans, the league argues.
So it is of primary importance to look after the small drugusing fraction of the 0.00001% of society that actually makes it to the big league.
Support the player, ignore the behaviour appears to be the theme.
Yet plenty of reasonable observers might suspect the AFL’s focus is actually brand protection through a cover-up of criminal activity.
After all, obtaining, distributing and using illicit substances are still prohibited and it would never do to have people know, not just speculate, that the stars who drive massive corporate dollars might be artificially stimulated.
Funnily enough, no AFL or club official has ever gone public to argue that criminal activity in the league should be rooted out and punished. Too close to home, perhaps?
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie dropped a bomb in federal parliament last week when he read allegations provided by former Melbourne doctor Zeeshan Arain about the AFL drug regime.
The Arain document revealed under parliamentary privilege claimed club doctors were advising players to feign injury so they could avoid matches in which they might test positive and therefore cop a suspension and inevitable public scrutiny and humiliation.
Arain, whose Melbourne tenure ended badly and with an unfair dismissal settlement, also claimed two-thirds of Melbourne players in his time were either regular or occasional drug-users.
That appears a high number – but hardly impossible.
Recently-appointed AFL CEO Andrew Dillon then got on the front foot to defend the “clinical intervention” model as being in the best interests of players and football.
“If there’s a chance they might have an (illicit) substance in their system, we don’t want them training, and we don’t want them taking part in matches,” he said.
In Dillon’s eyes, it appears to be acceptable to mislead and obfuscate to evade an officiallysanctioned drug testing process designed to give credibility to the league he runs.
This is the same Dillon who, in 2019, said Collingwood player Jaiden Stephenson’s “actions have compromised the integrity of the game” and that “if you break the regulations you will be penalised”.
Stephenson’s crime was to lay three bets totalling $36 to back himself to perform well and his team to win AFL matches, a transgression that earned him a 10-game ban and $20,000 fine.
Yes, that was an integrity breach that deserved punishment but there is more than whiff of hypocrisy over Dillon’s choice of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour with a legal, but unauthorised, bet considered far worse than illegal, but sanctioned, drug-taking.
Wilkie’s revelations have also led to the bizarre circumstances in which Sydney player Sam Wicks, who missed the weekend’s match against Richmond for team harmony because there was tension between him and a team-mate over a former girlfriend, now drags suspicion as a shadow.
Was the Wicks absence legitimate, though baffling, or did he have something else to hide?
Under the AFL’s confidentiality protocols, it is anyone’s guess.
The other query over this matter is the breadth of knowledge of the AFL cover-up.
It is not feasible that
senior members of the football media have not been aware of it, particularly given that so many recent and current players are involved in commentating and reporting on the game.
Whether it is self-censorship or company policy to not bite the hand that provides such lucra
tive feed, scrutiny of this – and other – matters has mostly been allowed to fade from sight.
I’ve had my own experience in confronting a brick wall when reporting on a legitimate and controversial AFL issue.
In 2016, while working for another news organisation, I won the Gilmour-Christian Prize as WA’s best sport journalist for a front-page story that revealed West Coast players had been importing supplements riddled with banned substances.
The danger for the players was obvious.
Not only were they using products that could do significant harm to their health but t they were at risk of returning a positive test that could have led to a long suspension.
At least three Eagles were identifiied as importing the potentially career-ending supplements, with high perform mance manager Glenn Stewart revealing that the prohibitive cost of laboratory tests meant n not every supplement could be analysed.
“Three players brought me supplements that I had tested at a lab at Curtin University,” Stewart revealed in the story.
“They had come from the US and the lab found they contained banned substances.”
The story ran under the headline “Eagles dodge drugs bullet” and was subsequently judged as the most significant sport story in WA during that Olympic year. But that was as far as it went. Apart from a nondescript mention from a press conference that day, there was no other coverage of the matter.
No television news, no radio story and certainly nothing more from my organisation.
Despite the story generating immediate responses from people with precise knowledge of that and related matters, and my obvious follow-up questions to West Coast and the AFL – How many players have been importing the illegal supplements? Have others used the substances? Are you aware of Eagles playing matches with illegal substances in their systems? Was the club or league aware or involved in the importation? Were banned supplements a factor in West Coast reaching the 2015 grand final? Will sanctions be applied to the players and/ or officials involved? Are other clubs doing the same thing? – it appeared that the story had run
its course and did not need to be pursued any further.
After one day. After running on the front page. About a massive potential controversy involving one of the most prominent organisations in the state.
It was probably the most intriguing Page 1 story of my experience to emerge without warning and disappear without trace.
I’m sure there are other people in the media with their own experiences that suggest their colleagues or outlets are not as vigorous in their news gathering as they might have you believe.
Maybe cover-ups are just an everyday part of football and the AFL is no different to any other interested party.