As it stands today, the Melbourne Football Club does not have access to the identities, nor the number of players, who are in potentially incriminating text messages sent from the phone of Joel Smith.
Unofficially, the Demons say they don’t know how many texts were sent by Smith, nor – most crucial of all – the contents of those messages, which, if the worst came to pass, could put another player or two in the crosshairs of Sport Integrity Australia.
The question of what Smith allegedly sent to teammates is the major risk factor for the Demons, who say they are not allowed to run their own investigation into the Smith imbroglio, which threatens to become another major hurdle for a club that is already dealing with the delicate matter of Clayton Oliver’s wellbeing.
Smith knows what he did or didn’t, and so does his legal team. The AFL’s head lawyer, Stephen Meade, is privy to what’s alleged, and the new AFL CEO Andrew Dillon, clearly, must be in the loop.
Typically, such incendiary material does not remain private for long and the players, doubtless, will talk among each other. As in any workplace, they will want to know what the hell has happened.
But if it’s possible that this extended investigation by Sport Integrity Australia may discover that others have run foul of the WADA code, the outcome would be further embarrassment to the club, player(s) and competition if those names reach the public domain.
Joel Smith.Credit: Getty Images
For another player to get nailed by Sport Integrity Australia would require a pretty explicit message that demonstrated drug use and/or distribution, and it might need to be shown that cocaine or another illicit drug-as-stimulant had been ingested close to game day. Smith, we shouldn’t forget, is only in the dock because he tested positive to cocaine after a late-season game. It is an SIA, not a police matter.
Smith should understand that he is long odds to wear the red and blue again. He’s 27, and under the anti-doping code there’s a four-year minimum ban for “trafficking” or attempting to traffic, so if the latest charges were proven by SIA, it would end his league career. It would be a shock if the Demons retained him even for a shorter ban, given the collective damage.
Melbourne do not even have a clue as to how long this investigation will last. Smith has the opportunity to put his version of events to Sport Integrity Australia by a date in March, and then the matter is largely in the hands of the outfit formerly known as ASADA, who have had vexed dealings with the AFL over the years, not least during the Essendon saga when there was a degree of distrust on both sides, despite the uneasy alliance of the “joint investigation”.
As then Eagle Willie Rioli, Collingwood’s Lachie Keeffe and Josh Thomas and Sam Murray, the Essendon 34 and a few others can attest, it is rare that Sport Integrity Australia/ASADA has taken a lenient view of AFL footballers who cross the WADA line.
AFL players have been afforded little clemency even when the charge is one of using an illicit drug that surfaces on game day via testing (or not complying with the test process in Rioli’s case), rather than the use of performance-enhancing substances.
When Smith’s case first surfaced in October, the hot-take view of many was that he would well-positioned to plead himself into a three-month or six-month ban, because he’d be able to show that the cocaine wasn’t ingested in a way that enhanced performance. WADA had changed the code in 2021 to reduce the sentences for athletes who tested positive to illicit drugs, so long as they could show that they weren’t trying to gain an edge (and didn’t gain one).
Melbourne’s senior officials will discuss this latest turn of events with the players, who’ve already been discussing Smith and the ramifications of this episode.
The Demons reckon that hair testing by the league, some details of which gets passed on to select club officials, suggests that they are nothing out of the ordinary in terms of drug use, compared with the rest of the competition; that no red flag has ever been raised.
The problem here, though, is that they are flying blind to an extent. It is Sport Integrity Australia, not the AFL nor the Demons, who have control of this situation, have all the relevant information and hold Smith’s fate – and potentially the good names, at the least, of others – in their often unforgiving hands.
This is in contrast to the Oliver scenario, in which Melbourne have been proactive in trying to get Oliver on track, having floated the champion midfielder as a potential trade, in part, as a kind of intervention. The Demons claim that Oliver and the Smith scandal are separate incidents, with Oliver’s issues multi-layered and longstanding, the club having been on the record about his health challenges.
But this is not how Smith’s dismal new chapter is being received in the media or by large sections of the footy public, many of whom also recall the Entrecote punch-up between an intoxicated Steven May and the fed-up Jake Melksham. Senior coach Simon Goodwin has also denied accusations he personally used illict drugs, saying an allegation was fully investigated by CEO Gary Pert and the club and there was “nothing in it”. Despite this, the claims have haunted the Demons like Banquo’s ghost.
If all these issues of the past two years are indeed isolated, there also have been too many to assert that all is well.
Effectively barred from a formal investigation of their own culture and behaviours, still in the dark about what’s contained in the phone of Joel Smith, Melbourne can still ask the leaders of their playing group, headed by Max Gawn, Jack Viney, Christian Petracca and Angus Brayshaw, to ensure that the muck stops.
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