Did Australian sport's darkest day come too soon?

Brilliant sleep last night! Any other Football fans have a great one?!

Blind man Cam I suppose when their are 300 million people involved in playing, watching, officiating and administering the game of Football around the world their is bound to be a few rotten eggs....now which is your sport and how many are involved in it around the world? BTW there is no evidence , forget about hard evidence, that any HAL matches have been subject to match fixing...however if you have some new information that you would like to share? From the HS below; "“International surveillance agency Sportradar alerted Football Federation Australia at the time but found nothing untoward in its investigations. And Sportradar again gave the match in question the green light after FFA sought assurances yesterday following reports that law enforcement agencies were investigating. “Sportradar’s Fraud Detection System (FDS) identifies betting-related manipulation in sport to all the major organisations in world football, including UEFA and English, French, German, Scottish, Italian and Asian federations. “My understanding is that our surveillance agency reviewed that game at the time and found nothing untoward and they confirmed to us last night that in their view there were no integrity concerns around that match or any other A-League match,” Gallop told the Herald Sun.”

AFL club, Essendon - who are at the centre of current drug abuse allegations - have released a detailed statement: http://www.essendonfc.com.au/news/2013-02-10/investigation-statement I'm sure all AFL fans will sleep a lot easier tonight.

Correct weight.

Don't worry, he's just regrouping. Tomorrow I fully expect him to counter attack with claims that the whole report is a cover up instigated by the AFL at the behest of Julia Gillard etc. etc. etc.

Did anyone else here a sigh of disappointment through their computer this afternoon as poor old Fuss realised he might have to moderate his hyperbole. The irony here is that I find myself NOT wishing bad upon any of the leagues/codes.

That's right - 12 months of investigations to uncover two potential instances of using banned substances. What a bombshell. Anyone else now think that this was nothing more than political grandstanding?

It's interesting that the distribution of some of these substance is not an illegal act. That being the case, rather than all this political grandstanding, the two Ministers concerned should be passing legislation, i.e. doing their jobs!!

i reckon that there is more to come. lets wait and see before we jump to conclusions. LLB (Hons) fuss i am impressed :)

And the full shocking extent of the revelations impacting the AFL have now been revealed. Several Essendon players may have taken banned substances which we already knew. And ONE other player at ONE club is also under investigation. I honestly wonder how the competition will survive such a bombshell.

“It’s incredibly unfair for every athlete to be painted with the same brush.” Oh how funny this is......when one incident of anti-social behavior occurs at a Football game, every Football fan gets unfairly painted with the same 'hooligan' brush, 14 evictions? 15,000 blamed. On Saturday SAPoliceNews followed the dodgy twitter example of their Victorian colleagues by proudly trumpeting on Facebook what a great job they'd done in evicting 'x' amount of people(from memory 11? out of 12,000) from Hindmarsh the night before eliciting the usual gang of idiotic responses on Facebook.." why do soccer fans always have to riot?" being my favourite of the day. I hope in the fullness of time the guilty parties(clubs&players) in this slimy scandal are named and then I imagine that the condemnation of all Australian Sports athletes will take on a more pointed focus to only target those that have actually transgressed. Already it appears there are 6 NRL clubs under investigation(this morning's Sydney papers) I'm not holding my breath, after-all, the sports media haven't exactly got form for being even-minded, fair and balanced in their coverage of anything they deem controversial have they?

BREAKING NEWS: After discussions with the ACC over the past few days, the AFL Deputy CEO, Gillon McLachlan will hold a media conference at 12:30 p.m. Sunday briefing the media seems highly unusual & I'm sure we'll all be tuned in to watch and listen. Interesting time ahead for AUS sport.

I have formal legal qualifications - i.e. LLB (Hons) - and, early in my career, was working closely with Australia's 2 biggest corporate regulators: ACCC & ASIC. I'm not at all familiar with the relevant legislation relating to "Drugs in Sport", hence I'm trying to read as much as I can from intelligent & informed sources: e.g. Minister for Sport, Justice Minister, experts in sports medicine, etc. If anyone on "The Roar" is an expert in the field of "Drugs in Sport - as a player, administrator, law enforcement, legislator etc. - I hope they post their comments .. I'm keen to devour as much info as I possibly can.

Assuming your fascination with criminal law is not the same as my fascination with particle physics (I.e. unaccompanied by any actual formal learning on the topic) perhaps you could help answer a question. If I'm a professional sportsperson pumping myself full of substances that, whilst banned by sporting authorities are perfectly legal when prescribed by a doctor (e.g. Testosterone, some forms of steroids, HGH) on what basis could the police come knocking on my door. Sure, if caught i will be banned from playing sport, but have I actually committed any crimes? This is a purely hypothetical question by the way, the only performance enhancing drug I use is a strong cup of coffee before dragging myself out of the house for a jog.

It seems to me that you've missed the point of all of this. The point is that you wouldn't know. The ASADA testing will tell you pretty well nothing. The ACC admitted to a more specific focus on two codes in particular - and a reasonable starting point - the NRL and AFL where - the vast majority of two large pools of players are domestic based all year around and any focus of investigation would be more likely to return results and also resonate within the Australian context. "Based on intelligence provided to the ACC, Project Aperio primarily considered two major sporting codes in Australia and collected incidental intelligence relating to other sporting codes." "This report does not provide a comprehensive summary of all relevant activity of concern in all sports, or all sporting clubs and franchises in Australia. Rather it represents a snapshot of the activity," But Mr Fuss - whoever you are - I'm very glad that you feel so confident that what you're interpreting as 'no news' is what you determine to be 'good news'. It still occurs to me that you've entirely missed the point. And you're repeated ranting and anti AFL baiting does you a disservice.

I'm deeply interested in Criminal Law. I cannot imagine anyone, who has a pasing interest in any sport, would not find this issue absolutely fascinating.

Ooooh AFL, mmmmm AFL, Fussy can't stop thinking about, obsessing about, caressng every last detail of those AFL players, the size of their needles, the strength of their TV ratings, mmmmm soo good..

You're a comedian. A few days after hundreds of soccer matches were exposed as fixed you're laying the boot into other sports. Do you really want people to dredge through the inglorious history of soccer in this country and overseas? It goes without saying the crimes associated with soccer make everything else pale into insignificance. Just yesterday Arsene Wenger said soccer was full of cheats and drug abusers. Bosnich revealed he was subject to a bribery attempt as well, and admitted many would not be able to refuse. Then there's the $50 million bet which a blind man can see was match fixing, even if the authorities don't have hard evidence. This local "scandal" is turning out be be smaller and smaller every day. Yesterday it was everyone, today it's half a dozen NRL clubs, tomorrow it will be half a dozen players. I bet after it's all said and done they might uncover a handful of people at a couple of clubs, hardly the national catastrophe it was made out to be. So get off your high horse.

@eaglejack What are you on about? We're talking about Drug Abuse in AFL & NRL and you're off on a tangent about players moving overseas. The way people, who aren't primarily football fans on The Roar, tell us 'yes I watch a lot of SOCKAH & A-League', Foxtel ratings for A-League should be close to matching NRL & AFL! So, excuse me if I'm sceptical whey you say Yep I do watch the A-League".

Yep I do watch the A-League. But I am not naive in thinking the standard of play is anything special. But it is getting better. The trouble is as soon as any player shows a bit of talent he is shipped off to Europe. Keep stars and attract stars (in their prime) and this will no doubt change. I enjoy a myriad of sports and find someone who spends an inordinate amount of time on forums bagging other sports to be extremely narrow minded.