Former ASADA chief Richard Ings’ condemnation of Essendon’s recruitment of former Docker Ryan Crowley says there can be no absolution for past sins.

For non-Twitterati, Ings’ tweet yesterday was :“Coming right out of a doping ban, Ryan Crowley signed by EFC as replacement for one of 12 banned for doping offenses. I do give up.” and a little later: “ IMO time served is of course the end of a ban. But my view relates to EFC distancing itself from all things ADRV related. The first signing.” (ADRV stands for anti-doping rule violation)

AussieRulesBlog accepts that EssendonFC will, for the foreseeable future, be known for the WADA bans, as will the thirty-four past and present Essendon players, and indeed Ryan Crowley.

But we wonder what length of time Ings has in mind for the Bombers to ‘distance [themselves]’ from such matters. Will they be pilloried if they accept the twelve banned players back into their ranks for the 2017 season? Crowley has served his time out of the game, as has Ahmed Saad. When would it be acceptable for the Bombers to consider them? How long is long enough? What about Justin Charles? Has enough time passed?

AussieRulesBlog didn’t break out the bubbly when Crowley’s signing was mooted, but he, Saad and Essendon have paid their penalties. Notwithstanding their inevitable long-term association with their particular doping issues, they're now fully entitled to get on with it.

AussieRulesBlog wonders how much disincentive the $5,000 suspended fine imposed on Dustin Martin by Richmond is to the young man. The fine was imposed after Victoria Police announced there would be no criminal prosecution out of Martin’s altercation with another restaurant patron. The suspended fine apparently relates to him drinking to excess, and thus contravening the [internal?] player code of conduct.

Let’s say Martin is on $500,000 per year — yes, it's probably more, but stay with us. After tax, $5,000 is around one week’s take-home pay.

For the person on around average male weekly earnings, a $5,000 fine is roughly five weeks’ take-home pay.

We leave readers to make up their own minds about the disincentive effects of the Tigers’ decision.

Whereas the AFL Drug Tribunal focused on whether Essendon players had been administered thymosin-beta 4 or not, the Court of Arbitration for Sport focused on what the players hadn't done. The difference between comission and omission — that pesky c — is the difference that saw the thirty-four past and present Essendon players banned today.

In the absence of positive drug testing results, the AFL Drug Tribunal’s hearing looked at what substances Steven Dank may have obtained, where he may have obtained them and who may have transmuted them into a useable form. It’s not too strong to say that Dank and his associates operated at the margins, so there were more holes in the chain of custody than a pair of fishnets.

WADA, on the other hand, had a telling precedent where no positive had been recorded — Lance Armstrong. They knew that circumstantial evidence could get them their desired result. And it wasn't hard to find.

The failure of the players to list the supplements that Dank was providing on their ASADA drug testing forms was the golden bullet. Anyone who is mystified or bemused about this decision need only read the CAS report to understand that.

Had the supplements been WADA-compliant, they could have been, and should have been, listed on the drug-tested players’ reports of supplements they'd used. It’s a red flag that no players filling out those forms listed the Dank-supplied supplements. And these players had all received the yearly AFL education about anti-doping testing and how to stay ‘clean’.

WADA and CAS inferred from the failure to list the Dank-supplied supplements that the substances weren’t WADA-compliant, and further, that the non-listing was an organised activity.

While the administration of non-compliant substances was very difficult to prove, proving the failure to list supplements was as easy as falling from a slippery log. Difficult-to-prove commission versus easy to prove omission.

There are further questions to be answered.

How complicit were club staff in the attempt to evade ASADA detection? That one might be answered in civil proceedings.

How were ASADA so woefully inept in their handling of this entire episode? That’s one for the politicians.

And will Andrew Demetriou’s fingerprints ever be erased from this whole saga? That one is for history.

The decision of the Court of Arbitration for Sport to suspend thirty-four past and present Essendon players over the 2012 supplements program is a decision with a world sport perspective. The anti-doping regime could not afford a no-fault defence to succeed.

Morally, the suspension of the players for an entire season is indefensible, but this decision has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the players’ position.

Had CAS found in favour of the players, very clever dopers all over the world would have quickly concocted means to deliver their chemical boosts to their targets under cover of the no-fault defence.

That is the essence of this decision. The players are collateral damage.

The Australian media coverage of Jarryd Hayne’s quest to win a place in America’s National Football League has, mostly, displayed an alarming lack of knowledge of the American game.

AussieRulesBlog isn’t suggesting that all Australian sports writers have to become experts in the NFL. Rather, we contend that only those who have a more than passing knowledge of the game be tasked with writing on Hayne’s quest.

When Hayne’s quest began, it seemed like anyone with an Australian media platform was happy to step up and declare Hayne misguided and deluded. Of course, it’s ‘Australian’ to cut down tall poppies. By choosing to pursue his quest before he’d burned himself out in the NRL, Hayne elevated himself into the sights of the poppy cutters.

When, during the first six games of the NFL season, Hayne played roles as running back and punt returner, the poppy cutters damned his efforts for, according to them, not gaining many yards for his team. In fact his average gains compared favourably with the majority of running backs in the competition.

Finally, when Hayne was ‘waived’ at the end of October, the poppy cutters celebrated the end of his quest — failing to understand the almost constant movement of players off and onto active player rosters in the NFL. That the San Francisco 49ers retained Hayne on their practice squad emphasised their belief in Hayne’s potential.

It’s worth comparing Hayne with some other code-hoppers.

• Darren Bennett and Saverio Rocca carved out successful NFL careers — as punters. Not to belittle their efforts, but they were using their AFL-based skills and not getting involved in the tough stuff at the NFL line of scrimmage.
• Jim Stynes, Sean Wight, Tadgh Kenelly, Zach Tuohy, Marty Clark and Pearce Hanley have all made more-or-less successful transitions from Gaelic football. As evidenced by the International Rules series, there’s not a gaping chasm between Gaelic and Australian football.
• Karmichael Hunt and Israel Folau attempted the transition from the rugby codes to Australian Rules. Hunt genuinely won his place in a young Suns team and clearly enjoyed the game. Folau looked like a fish out of water for his entire stint with the Giants.

Well, our cup will runneth over if the reports in the mainstream media prove to be  reasonably accurate.

"... while the PA system will be used to relay umpiring and score review explanations." says The Age reporting on revamps to the "fan experience" at the Docklands stadium.

We're keeping our powder dry — to mix metaphors wildly — until our eyes or ears prove that this is a meaningful addition.

One of AussieRulesBlog's long-held bugbears has been the free kick paid by a non-controlling umpire. Those of us at the game who are watching the ball — admittedly a smallish number it seems — are left wondering what in the blazes has gone wrong when a completely unexpected free kick is paid. Often it's an out-of-zone umpire making the decision, but we fare-paying passengers have been left uninformed.

Hopefully, a scoreboard display or announcement will tell us that a free kick has been awarded to Team A Number X  after Team B's Number Y gave him a swift uppercut in the midst of a rolling maul on the outer half-back flank.

We're not hanging by our thumbs waiting for too much information. Some detail will be better than what we've had.

We haven't watched a great deal of the meaningless pre-season practice games, but one incident from the weekend's games has struck a chord for AussieRulesBlog.

Carlton's Chris Yarran was tackled, in the third quarter if we recollect properly, was spun in the tackle and managed to get a handball off. Yarran and the TV prognosticators were bemused when one of the four field umpires paid a free kick against him for incorrect disposal. It was clear, from the direction the umpire ran in, that his view of the handball would have been obscured by Yarran's body.

This means that, despite Mark Evans' announcement of the extra umpire for the pre-season games as a way to improve the accuracy of decision making, the umpire concerned guessed or assumed.

Umpires guessing or assuming is nothing new. It's been happening for years. But in an age where the AFL and others have set the bar at approaching 100% accuracy, guessing or assuming doesn't fit the bill.

It's time for Wayne Campbell to read the riot act to his umpires and firmly instruct them that they must only pay free kicks where they see the infraction take place.

This is a bit like the principle of British justice that it is better for nine guilty people to go free than that one innocent person is incorrectly punished.

Umpires can, do and will miss free kicks because their view is obscured. Crowds, players and coaches will wail and howl, but it's better that those free kicks go unpaid than that umpires award free kicks for infractions they think probably happened.

Of course, umpiring is a difficult job requiring instantaneous decisions, and most of us criticising the umpires couldn't do even half as well as they do. But an act of omission is, in this case, much more desirable than an unjustified act of commission.

Two reports in recent days lead AussieRulesBlog to reflect on sportspeople and the expectations that seem to automatically attach to them.

We were a strong supporter of Karmichael Hunt in his code-crossing venture to the Gold Coast Suns in the AFL. On-field, you couldn't have asked more of a man whose body was clearly not suited to a 360-degree running game. There can be no doubt that he gave his stint in the AFL a real shot at success. Had the youngsters on the Suns' list not come on — and that was never going to happen — it's not too far-fetched to believe that Hunt would still be contracted. And time will tell whether AFL has dodged a bullet there.

So, reports that "Special K", as he was beautifully nicknamed, has been charged with offences related to cocaine saddened AussieRulesBlog. We couldn't avoid thinking that he was now not-so-special-K.

But, on reflection, we realised we knew next-to-nothing about the man. He was a high-profile rugby (both) player enticed by the AFL to join the fledgling Suns as a marketing headline. We were impressed with what we saw of his determination to achieve — so much more than the seemingly half-hearted efforts of the other big cross-code signing, Israel "The Promised Land" Folau. And Hunt seemed to bring to the young Suns a sense of the level of commitment required to succeed athletically. That after-the-siren goal Hunt kicked to win a game and the obvious joy — directed at him — of his teammates remains a golden football memory for us.

There's no reason for us to have assumed, from what we'd seen, that Hunt was anything more than a superb athlete and athletic role model, and a good interviewee. But we did make assumptions. And cocaine is hardly a hanging offence in 2015, but it doesn't fit the squeaky clean image we create for our sports icons.

Fast-forward a few days and images appear of cricket legend Glenn McGrath posing before an African elephant he'd shot. AussieRulesBlog wasn't as taken aback by this as some, but it was clearly not a great look.

Expectations of McGrath changed with the very public dying of his wife, Jane, and his championing of the search for solutions to breast cancer through the foundation established in his wife's name. Really, after embracing all that pink, anything that couldn't pass the white glove test was going to be a PR difficulty for McGrath.

The background is that McGrath is a Wagga boy and it's pretty hard to imagine there'd be too many young blokes up that way who haven't indulged in a bit of pig shooting. It's not too big a stretch to imagine them enthusiastically shooting something bigger.

Somehow though, having become an ambassador for breast cancer has transformed expectations of McGrath so that the community is disappointed when it emerges he's not as pure as the driven snow.

It would, of course, be better for everyone if the community, AussieRulesBlog included, confined our expectations of our sporting heroes to what we know. But that's not likely to happen any time soon.