THE ESSENDON 34: ON TRIAL

[Bluey's Dad 3,419]

Also, if the Bombers we so sure this would happen, why the hell did they obfuscate so much?

Why the federal court case to try to invalidate the process?

I. Just. Don't. Get. It.

[Ungarie boy 233]

a mates email -

What the? So poor Lachie Keefe and the other bloke have one lousy steak and they are done. Essendon players inject bottles marked with Arnie’s bicept and they are not responsible.

My response

If it looks like a duck, quack likes a duck and sh#ts like a duck, then it’s probably a duck, unless someone draws a picture of it and call’s it a cow! Unfortunately for Lachie Keefe and friend, they ate said cow!

[Bluey's Dad 3,419]

They were injected with something! TB4 or was it just some "stuff"?

So, as long as it's not found in your system and the bottle it came in doesn't have a label you are in the clear!!

The day of unbridled chemical enhancement has arrived! Let's hope Roosey and the ex Bomber bloke jump right in.

Yeah apparently you can have thousands of injections, not know what was in them, and get off.

Staggering.

[Seraph 1,824]

I'm going to laugh if WADA come in and ban them using the same evidence that was collected by ASADA.

How corrupt and self serving will the AFL look then?

[Bluey's Dad 3,419]

I'm going to laugh if WADA come in and ban them using the same evidence that was collected by ASADA.

How corrupt and self serving will the AFL look then?

To people like you and I, yeah they'll look completely compromised.

To Bombers supporters, CAS will look like a joke as they will say "the players were already cleared".

[What 18,810]

http://www.asada.gov.au/media/organised_crime_and_drugs_in_sport.html

Benny Boy has come out swinging

The AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal found that it was not comfortably satisfied that 34 former and current Essendon players committed the anti-doping rule violation of use of the prohibited substance, Thymosin Beta 4, during the 2012 season.

ASADA CEO, Ben McDevitt, said: “What happened at Essendon in 2012 was, in my opinion, absolutely and utterly disgraceful. It was not a supplements programme but an injection regime and the players and the fans were so poorly let down by the club.

[ManDee 7,348]

They were injected with something! TB4 or was it just some "stuff"?

So, as long as it's not found in your system and the bottle it came in doesn't have a label you are in the clear!!

The day of unbridled chemical enhancement has arrived! Let's hope Roosey and the ex Bomber bloke jump right in.

No,

Also, if the Bombers we so sure this would happen, why the hell did they obfuscate so much?

Why the federal court case to try to invalidate the process?

I. Just. Don't. Get. It.

The EFC are now in the gun. Illegal PED's ordered and paid for. Intent clear. The EFC are worried for their future.

[deefrag 277]

a mates email -

What the? So poor Lachie Keefe and the other bloke have one lousy steak and they are done. Essendon players inject bottles marked with Arnie’s bicept and they are not responsible.

My response

If it looks like a duck, quack likes a duck and sh#ts like a duck, then it’s probably a duck, unless someone draws a picture of it and call’s it a cow! Unfortunately for Lachie Keefe and friend, they ate said cow!

"marked with Arnie's bicept" "ducks and cows" . . some light on an otherwise dark day!

[iv'a worn smith 1,979]

Me too ... Looks like all you have to do to get off a doping charge is to make sure there's no record at your club of what you took.

If the not guilty verdict is allowed to stand, the entire regime of world anti-doping is in grave jeopardy.

Do you know what evidence was led WJ? What is in grave jeopardy is the efficacy of the very watchdog charged with overseeing doping in sport. In my view, this was doomed from day one

[Bluey's Dad 3,419]

No,

The EFC are now in the gun. Illegal PED's ordered and paid for. Intent clear. The EFC are worried for their future.

Yeah, I guess now any Essedon player can basically point to the Tribunal finding and say "well, it wasn't TB4, what was it? How dangerous was it? What are the side effects?"

[hemingway 7,633]

This is actually the worst result possible for Essendon

They possibly could have gotten away with a guilty verdict and a short-medium ban but theres zero chance WADA are going to cop a not guilty.

This is just the start of things.

possible HH but nothing is certain.

[Satan 2,915]

As long as there are no deformed babies born whose fathers were injected at Essendon then we move on

[Wrecker45 3,378]

_{I'm not often right (except on the general discussions board) so I will claim this one. As I have said all along Essendon will get smashed by the workcover authority worse than ASADA, the AFL or WADA could ever do to them.}

[ManDee 7,348]

_{I'm not often right (except on the general discussions board) so I will claim this one. As I have said all along Essendon will get smashed by the workcover authority worse than ASADA, the AFL or WADA could ever do to them.}

We live in hope.

[binman 44,717]

As long as there are no deformed babies born whose fathers were injected at Essendon then we move on

Father-mutant rule?

[rjay 25,355]

Can some one tell me this; can WADA come in and appeal this and take it to the CAS or does it need to go through the ASADA local appeal first, one which I believe ASADA have no hope of winning.

[Lucifers Hero 40,564]

I for one will never again go to EFC Home games!! To do so would be to contribute to the financial coffers of that despicable club.

Maybe all supporters of the other 17 clubs should boycott EFC Home games!!!

[John Crow Batty 8,886]

Can some one tell me this; can WADA come in and appeal this and take it to the CAS or does it need to go through the ASADA local appeal first, one which I believe ASADA have no hope of winning.

The appeal is from ASADA back to the AFL tribunal in the first stage.

[rjay 25,355]

The appeal is from ASADA back to the AFL tribunal in the first stage.

Thanks, I thought I had seen somewhere that WADA could come over the top and take it straight to the International court but if not I guess the process needs to be followed and we're looking at another 12 months disruption at least.

[Guest]

This is just staggering. It makes one questions one faith in the AFL and it makes you wonder if our system (I don't mean the AFL, I mean the capitalist system we live under) is fair.
How can a club that:
1) Self reported due to an off site injection program.
2) Had a review of it's internal practices by the former director of Telstra which concluded that it was running a 'pharmacologically experimental environment'.
3) Had it's senior coach stood down for 12 months, it's assistant fined $30,000, it's football boss suspended for 6 months,
4) Was fined 2.1 million for said off site injection program.
5) Has fought the ASADA and the AFL tooth and nail to make sure the case wasn't even heard with a lot of their arguments not being about whether said events ever happened but more about the legality of and technicalities surrounding the investigation.
6) Had two of the main architects of the regime not even take the stand due to fears they would incriminate themselves (or in Charter's case, get bashed)
now be found to have not done anything wrong, period.
When it says this decision makes you lose your faith in the AFL and society in general it is for two reasons. The first is that a certain person, who can only be described as a sociopath and a narcissist, has gotten his way. If St. James had come out and said that the injecting regime never happened at all and that was what he was basing his case on then I have no problem with him. However, he has never said that, doesn't have the documentation to prove otherwise and has continued to obfuscate and pettifog the issue which today has made him look the way he always has wanted to be perceived (without sin). All the while, a CEO, a club president and a premiership winning coach have all been forced to fall on their swords for the good of the club. Why hasn't the Golden Boy been forced to take any culpability at all? Oh that's right! He was suspended for a year! All the while taking a paid vacation in bloody France with his job waiting for him when he got back. In the meantime as well, the Essendon board has been superseded by the James Hird fan club. This is not to mention the players in this. We still have no idea what they have been injected with? What might happen to them 20 years down the track? After this trial is over, I can see James Hird and Essendon suing the AFL to retrieve costs and using this trial as the basis of their litigation.
The above example just goes to show that if you have enough money and profile and you completely lack a sense of shame (though this can be compensated for by the size of your ego), justice is irrelevant. Just shout, spin and dig into your wallet deep enough and the truth can walk in and out of a court without being recognized.
The second thing that annoys me is that this shows that the AFL needs to do an in depth review of itself and not just into how this fiasco took place. How can it fine a club 2 million dollars on one occasion for running a hazardous injecting program then 1 year later run another trial (conducted under the umbrella of the AFL yet again) on whether the players took a prohibited substance and come up with a duck egg? Can anyone see my confusion here? So they ran a hazardous and experimental injecting regime that no one was harmed by and the results are all tiggety boo? I get the first trial was about how the club was run and the second was about if the players had injected prohibited substances but there is a huge discrepancy in the punishments between the first hearing (multi-million dollar fines and suspensions) and the second (everyone walks away scot free). Remember as well that the AFL tipped off Essendon that they were going to be investigated by ASADA which shows the depth of their incompetence.
For years and years, up until the time of Ross Oakley, we have been force fed back slapping AFL propaganda. We have constantly heard about how the standards our game abides by is so much higher than that of those no-necks up in NSW and Queensland who play that heathen code of bum sniffing and then we see that it's biggest club has been involved in a co-ordinated injecting program in which the paperwork cannot be located and Gary Pert warns the code that there is an ongoing drugs problem in the AFL and the off field behavior of some players becomes volcanic in the off-season . We were told about how closing stadiums in the suburbs where there was a genuine sense of camaraderie amongst those who attended was necessary in order to 'grow the game' and then we wonder why most games are mostly sterile affairs where supporter engagement is close to nil and why certain clubs get financially hosed on their stadium deals. We get told that a club in Western Sydney is required and then see 5000 people turn up to their games, 3/4s of their off field staff leave in the space of 3 years and all this despite the AFL being told by a senate committee that establishing a team there would never work. It's time for the head wobblers in the AFL to have a bloody good hard at look at themselves.

[DemonFrog 1,359]

So correct me if I am wrong, but illegal drugs went into the DrugsLords Den but they vanished without anyone taking them?

[nutbean 8,838]

_{I'm not often right (except on the general discussions board) so I will claim this one. As I have said all along Essendon will get smashed by the workcover authority worse than ASADA, the AFL or WADA could ever do to them.}

You gave me a good laugh wrecker !

[Wrecker45 3,378]

This is just staggering. It makes one questions one faith in the AFL and it makes you wonder if our system (I don't mean the AFL, I mean the capitalist system we live under) is fair.

This is no capitalist problem. Demetriou was a left wing dictator. The AFL is not free market there are salary cap restrictions, draft concessions etc... Me thinks you are just anti capitalist and find reason to hate capitalism wherever you look.

[hardtack 10,983]

_{I'm not often right (except on the general discussions board) so I will claim this one. As I have said all along Essendon will get smashed by the workcover authority worse than ASADA, the AFL or WADA could ever do to them.}

Yes, but in this case we are talking about "right" in the context of being "correct"

[Wrecker45 3,378]

Yes, but in this case we are talking about "right" in the context of being "correct"

Haha I was ambiguous on purpose.