Chris

Just tried to have a look at Bomberblitz to see what sort of delusion was going on over there, it appears the site has crashed, not surprising really, hopefully we are no where near the same provider because they are likely to explode when the findings are given no matter which way they go.

I have a bad feeling it will be not guilty but my guess is guilty and banned for 12 months minus time served, so 8 months or so. I say 12 months due to discounting from 2 years for the delays not directly attributable to the players, I don't think they will get the no significant fault discount. That means mid August return so all but a season on the sidelines and start fresh in the preseason next year. I wouldn't be unhappy with that.

I prefer to think they are below us, especially the Vast majority of Hun reporters.

The players are very low in the list of potential heroes in this, I put the staff at ASADA and WADA as close as anyone, the have toiled away in the face of political influences and interference from all and sundry and yet are still there fighting for what is right. Win or lose you can't fault their determination and want to uphold the standards we have agreed to play to.

Will have to agree to disagree, my take is that having more supporters of a sport and more participants is the only real measure you can use as a lack of money among supporters, and subsequent lack of sponsorship dollars due to less dollars to make cant be used as a measure. At a guess I would say there are more crickey supporters in India alone than the entire population of North America, where these sports have the vast majority of their supporters. I agree about most Aussies attitudes to PED's. We love being strong in them when it isn't us and if it is us then they are poor victims of a harsh code. Bloody hypocrisy that drives me nuts. As far as I am concerned if you get caught you are a cheat, and there are very few rules in sport which when broken can you be called a cheat, but this is one.

I think you are forgetting the mass appeal of cricket through the more than 1 billion people in India, not to mention the rest of the sub continent and Africa. In terms of support and participation it is second only to Soccer on a global scale. You are right about the individual dollars for the clubs but the ones you list are very geographically limited which limits numbers of supporters. The only reason they get more dollars is due to the demographics of the country they are in, not the sheer number of supporters.

A couple of points. I am fairly sure four of those five haven't signed up to the WADA code, most likely so they can hide things and not get caught out like the AFL have. The second thing is that cricket is the second biggest sport in the world so would be one of the big five as you put it, not sure they do much on drugs either though.

Athletes the world over will be telling their coach to inject when what ever they like but will make sure no one tells them what it is or keeps records. Unfortunately the precedent will have been set

Every coach who takes the good codral cold and flu takes a WADA banned drug. I don't care what the coach takes, as long as it is legal, as long as they don't ask the players to cheat.

The Good stuff Goodwin was referring to in this was for his own use, not the players so there is no issue.

I think it was in the AFL charge sheet that was linked to here a few pages ago.

How about the 'potentially harmless, maybe amino acid, but in reality completely unknown substance uncontrolled injection regime saga, made worse by an inept and compromised Afl saga'?

I do like Dank's last statement about the club knowing what was injected into the players. Poses a few questions, is Dank delusional in what he thinks are records? Did the club destroy the records and go down the 'we don't know line'? We did the club just plead guilty to essentially poor record keeping if they have these great records? None of these are new questions but it just reinforces them in my head and no matter how I answer them it doesn't look good.

The AFL tribunal had the spectrometer reading as well, but they got stuck on it not being an a exact match. Just one of the points of concern they had with bits of evidence.

Essendon faithful: 'but but but but we were told it was fine, ASADA said so in a letter we can't produce, and Dank called them and asked and they said it was fine (even though they actually said to check further), and everyone else was using it, and it's ASADA's fault as they are completely incompetent. HIRD RULES!!!!!!!!!'.

Apparently it was driven by the players who wanted some protection and surety that it was all above board. The players then just trusted what was listed and didn't do any checks of there own, if they had they would never have signed with 'thymosin' being on the form as it is too ambiguous.

I don't think they know what they took, that would make it hard to make a deal for anything other than 'they injected me with stuff I didn't know about', which is being covered by Workcover as we speak. Unless the players come forward and say 'he injected us all with x, y, and z and they told us not to say anything then there really is little value. I will be very surprised if in the case of being found guilty there isn't a queue outside the EFC office of lawyers and players baying for blood and suing left right and centre.

May have thought they would get closer to the truth if the players in question had little/less to lose.

In a text Dank said Thymosin would form the base of the program so I would be comfortable to presume they all got it in their individual programs. Although thinking about it Dank doesn't seem the be the most reliable of people.

I wonder if Tanner was behind the scenes before the players went to CAS teaching them his best political 'i don't recall' routine?

Correct me anytime, I certainly don't think I know all the answers and only ever post my understanding of the situation, happy for that understanding to be improved. Almost makes it look worse if it was the year before!

Here is the link: http://www.theage.com.au/afl/essendon-bombers/cas-concern-over-why-bombers-omitted-to-mention-thymosin-injections-20151204-glfnbm.html The article says several players failed to mention using Thymosin even though they were convinced it was legal. You are right that it may be an innocent omission due to them not getting thymosin injections but given Dank said Thymosin would be the base of the whole program I would suggest they were. They may also have forgotten about it, who knows. It certainly doesn't look good. You are also right that it doesn't give us the admission of unequivocal guilt that we hoped or, but I never said it would, it is just one more brick in the wall.

'z' may well by thymosin, or thymomodulin, not just TB4, my take from the report I read was that in their interviews there was no mention of any of the variations.

I think it was around matters where Young had said there is evidence the players took x,y, and z. Here is the evidence, yet during the interviews the players on mass only mentioned x and y, why did none of them mention z when it was clearly given to them. The players were called in to explain why they had not mentioned z as the panel found it very disturbing that they had not mentioned it. Sounds like instructions were given to players on what to admit to and what to not admit to given they all failed to mention one substance. That is not a good look when uncovered.

Once he has reached his goal of Carlton playing every Friday night!