da bet7k：
da fazobetai： Anybody who watched Monday night’s Dispatches would have been left shrugging their shoulders when it was revealed that the ‘multi-million pound footballer’ who had failed a secret test for cocaine was a player who has been recently implicated for using the drug and was not even playing in England anymore. Hibernian’s Garry O’Connor is now probably more famous for his actions off the field for anything he has ever done on it.
Other revelations in the ‘shocking’ programme included the fact that four players, who are either not in the game at a professional level or whom the public had already heard about, had also failed tests for recreational drugs. It wasn’t so much of a revelation that a repetition of what we already knew but despite the lack of real insight and poor journalism in the programme it did indeed raise some important issues that need addressing in the beautiful game.
The first point to make is that the programme mentioned that some players are not tested for up to three years and the case study they used was the former Milwall striker Richard Sadlier, who said he was not tested once during his seven-year career. Examples like this show the testing procedures currently in use are obviously flawed and that footballers seem to have ways around getting tested. The FA has insisted that it does more tests for doping than any other governing body, but these increased numbers are not necessarily indicative of a higher percentage of athletes being tested when compared to other sports. The number of abandoned tests is also worrying – how many times do players simply slip out of training before they can be found out?
Whereas other sports take a hard line to drugs with automatic 2-year bans, football seems to take a soft approach and the maximum ban has only been one year. Furthermore, the information of failed tests is still being kept out of the public domain.
By keeping the information secret and not disclosing the names of the players, are the FA really showing a tough side to combating the use of drugs in the game? I am not so sure this is the right approach to take. In other sports a 2 year mandatory ban acts as a major deterrent to taking a banned substance as not only are you banned but your reputation in the game is destroyed. Take England rugby union international Matt Stevens, or in rugby league, young Wigan Warriors player Gareth Hock, who each received a 2 year bans for taking a recreational drug.
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The FA has defended its policy by saying that the players deserve a chance to face up to their problems in secret and claimed that support is more effective than publicly shaming them. If the reputation of football were to be tarnished by drugs, then the amount of loss through sponsorship deals, advertising and other third party endorsements would be incalculable. This is before the loss of revenue from disappointed fans and also from potential financial punishments. These players are role models and as paying supporters shouldn’t we know if they are dabbling in recreational drugs.
One of the worrying parts of the programme was the reluctance to find a player guilty of taking banned performance enhancing substances. There have only been 15 secret investigations into suspected use of testosterone – and all were found not guilty.
It seems ridiculous to think that this may be the case with the best players in the country, who represent England at international level. With the amount of money that these young players have at their disposal it is almost inevitable that they will at least be offered recreational drugs.
There are obvious flaws in this system, especially when added to the transparency and potential cover-up actions mentioned above. Dispatches highlighted the updated Italian system, where after much recent controversy two players from each team are now tested after every league game. This makes sense and if a similar system was introduced into English football would definitely be a more effective method of testing against doping of any kind.
Drug taking is probably not as endemic in professional football as the overhyped programme suggested but there are still major questions that the FA need to answer before we can believe that the top players in the game are not regularly taking recreational or performance enhancing drugs.
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