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There are no winners here. Essendon’s systemic, widespread and illegal doping program has been called as such by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and those 34 players who were the subject of the experiment have been banned from professional sport for 12 months.
CAS, as the final, global authority, did what the Australian Sports Anti-doping Authority and the AFL, seemingly, could not: confound that a secretive program of supplement injections was outside of the rules that govern Australian rules football.
More:
» Essendon players found guilty, will miss 2016 season
» Essendon doping saga: Full list of players to miss 2016 AFL season
» Read CAS’s statement regarding the Essendon finding
» Potential top-up Bombers: Could Kelly, Stokes or Lake return?
» Essendon players guilty: Social media reaction
» Hey WADA, you got the wrong man
For the wowsers saying the AFL doesn’t report to a global body, please stop being ignorant. WADA would see a domestic football league like the AFL as an ant in the fight against doping in sports.
WADA: "If the AFL Tribunal prevailed, it would have set a damaging precedent .. and been detrimental for anti-doping efforts worldwide".
— Sam Landsberger (@SamLandsberger) January 11, 2016
But there are no winners here, only losers.
The 34 players – a dozen of whom remain on Essendon’s list, a further five who have made their way to other clubs, and Mark McVeigh, a coach as Greater Western Sydney – who are ultimately the guilty party in WADA’s eyes, will not be able to do what they are paid to do until November this year. Another season gone.
From the time the supplements regime was in effect to the end of their 12-month bans, nearly five years will have elapsed. That is an AFL lifetime.
Their next course of action will, most certainly in my view, be to sue the Essendon Football Club for professional damages. The actions of the club and its management have now directly led to loss.
On the field, Essendon will field a team that resembles an expansion club in 2016. Just 11 players on the list have 40 games of AFL experience, and while the top-up players the Bombers will be allowed to sign will add maturity, it will not make up for the loss of Jobe Watson, Cale Hooker, Dyson Heppell and the others. Theirs is surely another season lost.
Although, this may end up accelerating the rebuild that the club has said it needs – a top two or three-pick is almost assured, and they will no doubt be a seller when it comes to playing talent in the year or two ahead.
For St Kilda, Port Adelaide, Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs – who have former ‘Essendon 34’ players in their starting 22s for this season – the impact will be there, but more muted. I would be amazed if there weren’t contingencies baked into contracts for these players, that state Essendon pays some or all of their salary in the event of a ban. Otherwise, why would they have taken the risk on them?
The strains on the Essendon Football Club itself, already financially decimated as a result of this affair, will only grow. Should the players decide to sue, they may run out of money altogether – in fact almost certainly would. Will their sponsors stand by the club, now categorically deemed as an organisation that sought to cheat their way to success?
What of the chief protagonists of this tale? James Hird will now almost certainly go down as one of the most disgraced figures in the history of the game: a man who chose to put his own interests ahead of the club at every available opportunity.
The board, most of which are no longer at the club, will be known as those who oversaw an organisation that did its utmost to cheat the system. Under Lindsay Tanner, who was elected to the board after most of this saga had run its course, Essendon simply must focus on renewal.
What happens to the AFL, and more particularly, chairman Mike Fitzpatrick and the rest of the commission? There are serious questions that must be answered. It is clear the game’s anti-doping code is not up to scratch, that its approach to investigating the matter was flawed. A press conference, scheduled for this afternoon, is immeasurably important.
Person I'm most looking forward to hearing from: Mike Fitzpatrick. The AFL Commission are custodians of the game. They failed #AFL #Essendon
— Ryan Buckland (@RyanBuckland7) January 11, 2016
The biggest losers, as has been the case for the entire episode, are the paying fans of not just the Essendon Football Club (the members, in particular, should feel like they have been stolen from), but Australian rules football.
We now sit here, in January 2016, dealing with the aftermath of the decisions of no more than half a dozen people that tried to cheat the system more than five years ago. At every level of governance – the players themselves, the Essendon Football Club, the league, and the regulator – everyone failed in their duty.
There are no winners here.
Or are there? Can we, as fans, now look forward to the return of a clean competition? For the focus of the media to return to who is going to win on the weekend? Perhaps. But you’d be a dope to think this ends here.