end of innocence.

this week a story came out about the Essendon (Australian rules) football club and use of 'vitamin supplements' on its players. Some of the supplements were administered without the permission of the players they were administered to. Some of the players blindly went ahead with the supplements because they trusted the club doctors. Some claims have come out though that the 'supplements' included bovine colostrum, which though not entirely illegal, it is very much on the borderline.

The use of these substances are not just in AFL, but also in NRL (the other major football code). it has also been insinuated that organised crime has infiltrated sport and that matches are being fixed so that gambling outcomes can be reached. Unusual better has been highlighted in one game last year in A-league (soccer) against Adelaide united and Melbourne Victory.

Organised crime around football is not a new thing anywhere in the world. Even in AFL, from a point blank slaying at an Auskick match to the colourful figures that hang around Carlton games to the friends kept by West Coast players, these people are always around and are not a new thing. The AFL hasn't really discouraged their involvement because, lets face it, they have money.

In the end thats part of what this issue comes down to, money. who's got it, who controls it and who wants it.

the other part though comes back to who's the boss of the players

As a kid coming up through the ranks, you think your boss is the coaches and support staff. it is what you have in juniors, so why is it not the same when you reach AFL level. So when someone who is your boss takes you aside and tells you you need to take supplements to reach a level where you can play AFL, you do it because they are the boss. this is the same in every work environment. a young kid is not going to argue with their boss lest they lose their job. If they are taken aside in a small room and are there face to face with the boss and the boss tells them to do something, having a leadership group is useless to them. The leadership group is awesome in any other situation, but when you are one on one will bosses telling you what to do, you do what the boss says. You wouldn't have enough understanding about approaching a union (in this case the AFL Players Association - AFLPA), that is the furthest from your mind.

The teams want more control over their players, but the AFL wants to run the teams, the players and the competition and they think they are the boss. The three strikes your out policy highlighted this in that there is no transparency. only the AFL knows who has tested positive for an illicit (not performance enhancing) substance. If the AFL were acting as the police and letting the clubs run their own game, Ok this would have all still happened, but the AFL would have found out about it and acted upon it before an ACC investigation was required to clean this mess up.

but it is all about the money and the AFL wants it, has it and wants to control it all.

Other people have money too, and that is organised crime. You cannot remove organised crime from sport, that is the job of the real police, but you can make it less appealing to the criminals. the first step to doing this is not to get involved in gambling. the more you encourage gambling, the more money bookmakers have and the more the payouts can be. discouraging gambling means that there is less money for payouts so bookmakers have to tighten their odds to ensure that they can make a living. Yes there will always be gambling in sport but normalising it by promoting it is not helping the sport, it has always been a danger.

You cant control every person who a player interacts with, so if they choose to get involved in underworld figures, there is not much that can be done, but then in policing these people may be seen, by association with the player, as bringing the game into disrepute, and that is a punishable offense for a player. underworld figures like to be seen with famous people because it gives them more power, so inhibiting this could discourage underworld involvement in AFL.

In the end though, the big issue is the drugs and sofar there has been little connection with players who use drugs and any underworld figure and so we have to assume that the bad guys are innocent thus far. But who is at fault?

the call has been for Essendon coach James Hird to go down because of this. James Hird is a young coach and plausibly due to his inexperience he was lead astray by influential people within his club and within the AFL. I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt until it is proven that he instigated the supplement program in Essendon. He should be punished yes regardless of the findings, he should have been a better leader to his young players, but it should not be the end of his career. removed as coach yes, but removed from football no. where he would go would likely be administration though with no player influence.

there are people who need to be brought to justice and removed from the game, as yet we don't know exactly who they are however, little is known. the name Dank has been thrown around but he could not have acted alone and if he is the only person in power who is removed from the AFL out of all of this, then the AFL is shirking its responsibility for policing.

who else is involved and how far back it goes will hopefully come out soon. whether claims of a tainted 1998 final are true or even if Jobe watson loses his brownlow from this, we hopefully will soon know. Handing back these two trophies though may not be the worst case senario, yet worse may still come out. It may hurt Australian sport and it will smart for a long time, but in the long term, we can only hope out of all this, we end up with a clean game.