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To the relief of most open-minded football fans, the Essendon players have been found not guilty after more than two years of the now infamous drugs saga.
The Bomber diehards will take this as a day of celebration, and a vindication of their Kool-Aid drinking. It shouldn’t be. Their club failed their players, and by extensions their fans.
READ MORE:
DAN LONERGAN: Ignorance isn’t innocence, but Bombers deserve benefit of the doubt
GLENN MITCHELL: Will we ever know what happened at Essendon?
CAM ROSE: Everyone failed in the drug saga, now it’s time to play some footy
The anti-Essendon members of the general public, just as passionate in their desire to see the Bomber players hung, drawn and quartered, and the club brought to its knees, will scream conspiracy, and will forever label the players drug cheats. They too are unedifying.
How many people among the general public could possibly have a comprehensive understanding of the many and various ins and outs that have encompassed this entire saga from start to finish?
If we take it as a general acceptance that the players were innocently, and yes naively, duped by a club experimenting pharmaceutically with rogue elements acting within, then we should be grateful that 34 people who just love football and want to have a kick on the weekend are now free to do so for the first time in over two years.
The main thing that we should be celebrating is that we now get an uncompromised season of footy on the field. No fielding of a VFL team. No top-up players.
A large number of Essendon players that will take the field on Saturday at ANZ Stadium against Sydney will have done so with no match practice in the form of NAB Challenge games.
It’s certainly not an ideal build-up, but it’s far better than the alternative.
This lack of match conditioning will be overcome by a surge of adrenalin and relief the likes of which are impossible to imagine for those not affected. The Bomber players will be charging around like cut cats, energy levels and arousal at an all time high for a Round 1 match, when those feelings are usually amplified anyway.
Sydney would do well to prepare for a grand final intensity from their opponents. Let’s face it, they didn’t handle it that well the last time we saw them confronted with that kind of pressure.
If anything, Essendon may well have an advantage, with many of their younger generation able to press their claims with more game time than they would usually have seen. Perhaps they’ve unearthed a diamond in the rough like Orazio Fantasia, Lauchlan Dalgleish, Shaun Edwards or Elliot Kavanagh?
The experienced players can be relied upon to fulfil their roles. I dare anyone to think Jobe Watson and Dyson Heppell, current and future captains, won’t deliver the goods after the herculean efforts we’ve seen from them over the last two seasons.
Essendon failed initially. ASADA, the AFL and the broad media then failed spectacularly in the elongated aftermath. There are no winners today, only losers.
But the players get a chance to be winners on the weekend, and Essendon versus Sydney now becomes a must-watch affair.
The footy’s back, and it will be pure and uncompromised. Let’s have at it.