WHEN SIR ALEX FERGUSON objected to football's induction into the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA), his intervention looked like good old-fashioned common sense. After all, the concept of dopey young footballers being forced to reveal their whereabouts for an hour a day, five days a week was surely an onerous and unwarranted restriction on young men in a game which already has enough pressures.
More to the point, said Ferguson, it would be a disaster waiting to happen. He clearly had Rio Ferdinand in mind. The Manchester United defender served an eight-month suspension for missing a drugs test, missing half the season and Euro 2004. Were th
at to happen under the WADA regime that applies to other sports, Ferdinand would be banned for two years.
Ferguson's argument is that it is unreasonable to ask football players to guarantee to be in one place for an hour each day, and that the penalties for what may be an innocent transgression are far too severe. Besides, football, he suggested, has no serious problem with doping. Recreational drugs may intrude from time to time, but doping? No way.
It's a line that has been echoed by several other managers and commentators. But is it right? There's ample evidence to suggest that it isn't, and while much of it may be historical it's only now coming to light.
The most damning evidence has come, predictably enough, from Italy. This week Corrado Ferlaino, the former president of Napoli, laid bare the extraordinary lengths that the club went to dupe testers when Diego Maradona was the club's hot property, including the use of borrowed urine dispensed via a tube shoved down the Argentine's trousers. "If a player was at risk of testing positive, they were given a small bottle with a dripper on the end, containing someone else's urine," he said. "The player would hide the small pump or dripper down his tracksuit bottoms and once he was in the room where he was supposed to provide a sample, instead of peeing into the sample bottle, he filled it with the clean urine from the container he had been given."
Worse still, for six years Napoli gave Maradona a green light to take cocaine with the club's young players from Sunday to Wednesday, giving his system the 48 hours it needed to cleanse itself. As a belt and braces measure, Ferlaino admits that if Maradona's No.10 was drawn out of the hat during random tests, the club would simply choose another number.
The weight of anecdotal evidence coming out of Italy, in particular, gives a lie to the assertion that football is free of performance-enhancing drugs.
In the mid-90s, Juventus club doctor Riccardo Agricola was found guilty of administering drugs to players after Turin prosecutors tapped the phones of players and doctors. In 1998, a spot check found that an incredible 24 players from Parma had high red blood cell counts, six of them at a level that, had they been Tour de France cyclists, would have seen them immediately banned. EPO, the synthetic hormone banned in sport, was widely fingered as the cause.
Nor do you have to delve quite so far back. In 2001, Juve's Edgar Davids failed a second test for the banned steroid nandrolone, making him the eighth Italian-based player caught that season. Nor was it just in Serie A; Harald Schumacher's autobiography Kick-Off saw him kicked out of German football after he alleged widespread drug use in the Bundesliga, while across in La Liga, Barcelona's Frank de Boer submitted a positive sample containing traces of nandrolone. Only last year AC Milan striker Marco Borriello was banned for three months for testing positive for the corticosteriods prednisone and prednisolone.
Positive tests are becoming less frequent. Whether this is because fewer players are doping, or whether it's because they are becoming more sophisticated we will only know if and when WADA begins testing footballers in earnest.
Even if we accept the dubious argument that British players would not follow their continental counterparts, and dismiss the idea that drugs, like diving, have found their way here with an influx of foreign players, there is still good reason for British football to accept WADA's intrusion.
Consider this. After the last two World Cups each team doctor was asked to list every medicine and supplement given to players in the three days before each game. The results were staggering. The average player took 0.8 doses of legal pharmaceuticals such as corticosteroids and painkillers and one dose of nutritional supplements before every game. For players who started games that figure was far higher. One national doctor gave each of his players an average of 7.4 nutritional supplements a match in 2006, plus enough legal pharmaceuticals – up to five doses of the painkillers that are linked to dehydration, kidney problems and various other long-term side-effects – to bring into serious question his players' future well-being.
Which begs an obvious question: if a team's doctor is prepared to administer that many legal drugs in full view of the testers while knowing that they will harm his players' long-term health, do you think they would have any reluctance to provide equally toxic but performance-enhancing drugs in midweek when there are no drug testers present?
Even if we ourselves are clean – and with so much money and prestige at stake there are always likely to be transgressors – do we want Scotland striving to qualify for European Championships and World Cups against sides which have an unfair advantage? Thought not.
Bob deserves the nodI NORMALLY ignore the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year on several points of principle, the main one being the principle that the Beeb's self-congratulatory, self-hyping gongfest always makes me feel faintly nauseous.
This year, however, we should all make an exception to see whether the panel which chooses the coach of the year (which was chosen this week) will plump for one of the great figures in Scottish sport: Bob Torrance.
The coach to multi-major-winning golfer Padraig Harrington, the man who has dominated golf in 2008, not to mention Lee Westwood, Paul McGinley, Darren Clarke, Thomas Bjorn, Ian Woosnam, son Sam, grandson Daniel, Uncle Tom Cobley and half of Ayrshire, still labours away in exactly the same way as he always has.
Golfers come to him as he'll rarely leave his Largs home, and his motto is that there are no short cuts, no concessions to celebrity: Westwood may have turned up in a helicopter but he still had to go and pick up his own balls.
If Bob doesn't need to get his best bib and tucker dry-cleaned in preparation for the ceremony in Liverpool in three weeks' time, questions will need to be asked.
