Another AFL Scandal?
There’s a football rumour starting to spread around Melbourne that if true would be one of the biggest scandals the AFL has ever faced. And for once it is not a sex scandal. And it does not involve St. Kilda.
[Although St. Kilda players and fans will be mightily interested in it.]
I’ve been fed tips about it for the past couple of weeks.
It has started to ‘grow legs’, as they say in the business, on several Internet chat sites and the Sunday Age had a nibble at it yesterday. In The Heckler column, which is anonymous, and under the regular segment called The Dirt, it said: ‘Which prominent football club is facing persistent allegations that top players have been using human growth hormone, a banned substance?’
One of my informants has named the club and has claimed that six Australian athletes ‘tested positive to a new hard to detect illegal performance enhancing substance’. This supposedly included two AFL footballers around Finals time.
One source emphatically told me that AFL ‘powerheads’ have held recent secret crisis meetings about it all with reports of sanctions against the club and bans on the players. Even claims that there have been attempts to supress it all – which would be impossible if all, or any, of it is true.
That doesn’t quite gel, because AFL Supremo Andrew Demetriou has been on leave. And something this serous would not be talked about, or decided on, without him being there. Without him taking control.
I don’t plan to take this any further, or say any more about it, until I talk to him personally, because if true a bomb will go off that will make the Melbourne Storm sanctions look like Play School.
As I told one informant: ‘You hear some weird rumours in this business and then they turn out to be rubbish. But then look at all the rumours about St. Kilda and photos and see how that turned out’.
The Corporate Affairs Manager for the AFL, Brian Walsh, told us a short time ago that they have been fielding these rumours for three and a half weeks. And in his words ‘they are rubbish’ and ‘ incorrect’. Another AFL rep said the club named was Collingwood.
Just to stress: We know what a breeding ground the Internet and Facebook and iPhones can be. The St. Kilda photo scandal proved that. But Facebook and Twitter often can’t –or deliberately don’t -- separate fact from fiction.
So it is a case of Proceed with Caution. It sounds corny but…. Watch this space.
http://www.hinch.net/hinch-says-2011/January/31-01-11.1.html
