As the football doping scandal weaves on like a long, thick, muddy river, I think I speak for all sporting fans who agree with me when I say: for God’s sake just get it over with.
I want to be clear: it’s not that I condone drug use. It’s not that I want players going around pumped to the eyeballs with peptides and pig brains and eye of newt.
And it’s certainly not that I condone the use of the substances reported to have been involved in this case, which are weight loss drugs and tanning agents, making anyone who took them look like a bit of a sissy.
No, I don’t want any under-rug-sweeping going on. It’s just that this is taking so long, and we still don’t really know what happened. I just want some closure here, you know?
I want someone to say, yep, you did drugs, you’re gone, bye bye, let’s get back to business. Or nope, you’re clean, all’s well.
Either way, I just want to sign off on this.
Remember Ben Johnson? He was great. He just took the steroids, got caught, got disqualified, and that was that. Quick, easy, convenient, over in a jiffy.
Man I miss steroids. You knew where you were with steroids. Not so with all these weird supplements and dragon-liver extracts.
The point is that if you’re going to subject a fan-base to lengthy inquiries and complex evidence-gathering and due process, sports fans are the absolute worst people to force to sit through all that.
If we enjoyed complications and grey areas, we wouldn’t be sports fans. We follow sport for the nice, clean-cut results it provides.
Either a man runs faster than another, or he doesn’t. Either a team scores more points than the opposition, or it doesn’t. Either Australian wins a Test match, or it loses, or it draws, which is basically a win, let’s say.
Sporting fans rage against ambiguity and uncertainty so fiercely that some of them actually think golden point is a good idea.
So please, let’s just get this over with. If Essendon loses a bunch of players and premiership points, fine. We’ll enjoy that.
It’ll add a bit of colour to the season and we’ll feel ourselves blessed to live in interesting times. We can tell our grandkids about it.
Or if Essendon is completely cleared and everyone in the media has to make grovelling apologies to them, that’s fine too. We’ll all have a lot of fun calling each other maggots.
But either way, let’s end it. There’s actual football to be played, and Supercoach teams to pick, and Melbourne teams to laugh at, and it’s hard to concentrate when this is hanging over our heads.
It’s an epidemic, really, this business of obsessing about off-field scandals to the detriment of the on-field action. Just look at all the fuss over John Singleton’s spat with Gai Waterhouse and her enterprising son Tom ‘Father of Lies’ Waterhouse.
The whole country seems in a kerfuffle over the matter, but does anyone really care? I mean, yes, obviously whenever a Waterhouse cries, an angel gets its wings, but it’s only fun to watch for so long.
It’s getting boring. Do we really have to know all the details about what rich people talk about to each other when their horses have hot necks?
Can’t we stop worrying about who said what to whom and refocus on what the great sport of horse racing is all about: gambling ourselves into despair and penury?
The whole thing is a bit unseemly, and it’s dragging on for way too long and nobody is certain about anything. And now Andrew Johns is involved, which in any affair is always the point at which everybody needs to shut up and back away slowly.
Let’s end this obsession with the extraneous ephemera surrounding our beloved sports.
When it comes down to it, does it really matter what our stars inject or drink or urinate on or beat up or say racist things at?
Surely what matters is that once on the field, whether doped to their eyeballs with buffalo hormones, or simply high on the knowledge they’re better than us, these men and, I suppose occasionally, women provide the wonderful athleticism and entertainment they’re paid for.
As the old saying goes, peptides are but a passing fancy, but slow-motion footage of a broken leg lasts forever.
A few weeks ago, I dubbed Carlton and Geelong as the premiership frontrunners - at a time when they sat, respectively, fourth and first…
An innocuous incident - but any trouble for the Chad?
Safe to say Hodgey was fighting a lone battle with this take!
Surely this had to be recalled!
Brian Taylor was adamant Harry McKay should have been paid a 50m penalty after marking near goal - and he definitely could have used…
West Coast coach Adam Simpson has rubbish a bizarre claim that the Eagles and Fremantle are at 'no disadvantage' by having to regularly travel…
