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When the Essendon drugs scandal story broke two months ago and the club, the AFL and ASADA announced a comprehensive investigation into allegations that Essendon players had been injected with banned substances.
There was much interest as to how the Bombers would cope on the on field as the investigation progressed.
Would it affect their performance at the start of the season or have an adverse effect the longer the season went on, depending on when the findings were handed down?
We all now know that their start on the field has been nothing short of perfect.
They sit on top of the ladder undefeated and with a massive percentage after their 25-goal drubbing of Melbourne.
But with revelations during the week made by former club employee Stephen Dank that James Hird actually injected himself with banned substances and knew exactly what the players were getting, the club will get an early test of how the players will be affected when they take on the undefeated Fremantle in Dockers this weekend.
Hird denied any knowledge that his players were injected with supplements and substances at the initial press conference called by the club back in February, when this story first took off.
Again and again he has denied any knowledge regarding the players, and has also stated that he never injected any substances himself and looked forward to clearing his name.
This story is fast becoming a case of ‘he says, she says’ referring to Dank and Hird.
Dank claims that Hird texted him saying that Dank was part of the club’s coaching inner sanctum when he was employed at Windy Hill.
Eventually everyone in the footy world and media will be asked to make their mind up who they believe, although some in the media are conducting a witch hunt on the Essendon coach and believe Hird should stand down until the investigation is complete.
I am not one of those. Let the investigation run its course and then deal with the consequences.
There had been talk today that Hird may stand down ahead of their big match against the Dockers in the west, but as expected chairman David Evans stood by him in a statement read-only press conference.
AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou also spoke to the media on the issue but didn’t add anything new.
Demetriou kept reiterating that he was comfortable with the way the league and Essendon had handled the issue so far and was confident the investigation would produce the right outcome.
He felt that Hird shouldn’t stand down and as most of us have praised his contribution to the game and the Bombers.
But when asked about Stephen Dank, Demetriou simply said, “I have nothing to say about Mr Dank.”
That probably says much about Stephen Dank’s credibility at the moment compared to James Hird, but as has been mentioned many times, James Hird and everyone else at Essendon shrouded in this controversy are only being investigated.
They are innocent until proven guilty and that has to be the case.
The status quo should remain as is with Hird continuing as coach and again as outlined in a previous column, members of the AFL Media, many of whom have the job of finding the big exclusive shouldn’t get too delirious too early as the findings are only weeks away.
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