On the back of the interminable Essendon supplements saga, Lachlan Keeffe and Josh Thomas were always going to be back markers in the sympathy stakes. As Collingwood footballers, they didn’t stand a chance.
Stupid and dumb was the common response on the web – and that’s coming from side-by-side Magpie fans.
‘Just kick them out now’ said the outraged torch wielders.
Meanwhile, one eminent football writer dredged up past events as to infer the episode was another example of a club culture more rank than a tub of Yoplait left out in the sun. Another heavyweight of diametric views on recent events was ready to close the book (in the absence of any statement actually being made by the players), positive ‘they will go down’.
While understandable the New Zealand meat industry was up in arms about ‘desperate’ enquiries regarding their practices, it’s just as understandable the club and players would seek to check out a feasible lifeline. Keeffe and Thomas’ reputed efforts to retrace their steps elsewhere have also met with derision – the widespread assumption being that they are liars, cheats, or, at best, snorted coke or dropped an E cut with Clenbuterol.
Collingwood’s straight up response went to a club prepared for its own D-Day eventuating. It came sooner than imagined. Rightly, the Pies made it clear the exit door awaits any player proved cheating the PED code, while at the same time proffering support to Keeffe and Thomas at least until more facts are known.
At this stage the only known fact, singular, is that Keeffe and Thomas recorded a positive A sample to Clenbuterol.
I believe the Magpies’ hierarchy is genuinely shocked Keeffe (part of the club’s leadership group last year) and Thomas have been nabbed by ASADA. The players themselves – until their lawyers allow them to speak and/or the facts become clear about the likely source of the drug – may very well be just as gobsmacked.
Not that this possibility is winning much consideration or acceptance. It would seem a large collective, who willingly signed waivers making their bodies available as pin cushions to satisfy an impatient football department, managed to garner more sympathy as an ‘innocent’ party. And fortunately for Ryan Crowley, any news concerning Fremantle players tends to dissipate into the ether somewhere across the Nullabor.
Of course the Bomber class of 2012 do warrant sympathy for possibly never knowing what nasties entered their bloodstreams. On the flipside, Keeffe and Thomas may know the ‘what’ but never know the ‘how’. Both scenarios would mess with your head.
There appears only the slimmest hope either the B sample turns up negative or that Keeffe and Thomas find a satisfactory explanation. Even the latter outcome will probably, at best, only mitigate their penalty to a level where it’s conceivable they might be relisted at some stage, as per Ahmed Saad (suspended 18 months for an over-the-counter energy drink).
For now the illicit drug explanation seems most plausible, and oddly, most palatable. In which case the players can count themselves incredibly foolish, yet at the same time, extremely unlucky. Should their AFL careers effectively be over seems a draconian price for partaking in the same practice as a worrying percentage of footballers, and by an even greater cohort outside of sport.
Perhaps if any good arises from the latest AFL disaster it is that footballers might reconsider their recreational habits. Many bullets must have been dodged until now. Though chances are players living in the unhealthy bubble of professional football will continue to roll the dice and divert to other junk or ‘better’ junk.
The quest for clean sport is a noble and essential cause. As it stands, Keeffe (approaching an unhappy 25th birthday the day the B sample is tested) and Thomas (23) can only dare to dream of a swift conclusion befitting whatever transgression they may have committed.
I, for one, hope the AFL and ASADA’s recent flailings and failings don’t render these two young men as sacrificial lambs to the slaughter.
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