AFL greats Nathan Buckley and Kane Cornes have discussed Collingwood young gun Jack Ginnivan’s suspension for taking an illicit substance during the club’s training camp in Lorne last month.
The Magpies and the AFL over the weekend confirmed Ginnivan has been handed a two-match ban after vision reportedly surfaced of the 20-year old taking an illicit substance at a Torquay hotel.
The forward has been suspended for Collingwood’s first two pre-season matches as well as its first two games of the regular season and has been hit with a $5000 suspended fine while copping a strike under the league’s illicit drugs policy.
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Speaking on SEN on Monday, Cornes took issue with the public response, suggesting AFL players taking drugs is becoming normalised by society and that it should be more denounced.
“I feel like there is a belief that all players are using drugs,” he said.
“That’s not my experience – I never once saw it. Granted I was so naive with stuff like that and I’m still so naive to this day. People would laugh at me for how naive I am, but I never once saw it in 15 years – and that was a long time ago now and perhaps things have changed.
“But why is it just accepted that perception of AFL players and why are we not doing anything about it? We just accept it and we move in.
“Bailey Smith was taking drugs and we moved on two weeks later and the same will happen with Jack Ginnivan. I’m not even critical of Jack Ginnivan because I can’t be, because the industry seems to accept this and we’re not hard enough on it.”
Meanwhile Buckley, who coached Ginnivan in his final season at Collingwood, “absolutely believes” players taking drugs is still condemned, however thinks the education process is critical.
“When is it enough to let it go and to see it as a learning opportunity for a 20-year old boy really who is trying to learn how to become a man and an AFL footballer?” Buckley posed.
“Sometimes they’re going to pop through the surface and sometimes they don’t, but they are learning opportunities and growth opportunities.”
Moore: ‘No issue’ with drugs at Pies | 07:25
The Collingwood legend believes the “cautionary tale” comes back to when two former Magpies – Lachlan Keefe and Josh Thomas – in 2015 copped two-year bans after testing positive to a banned substance clenbuterol, which was laced with a recreational drug they’d taken.
Buckley thinks it’s a greater to lesson to AFL players as opposed to Bailey Smith’s incident last year – that saw the Bulldogs star also get hit with a two-game suspension after a video emerged of him with a white powder substance – given the ex-Collingwood duo lost two seasons of their careers.
“They missed out on plying their trade for two years because they got brought into the ASADA code instead of the illicit drugs policy, if you do the same thing now it’s four years – if you do four years now it’s your career over – that’s the real cautionary tale for any player,” he said.
“You don’t know what you’re putting in your body.”
For Buckley, it’s important Collingwood’s senior leaders now wrap their arms around Ginnivan like he was their “child” and support him as best as possible.
“Society tells us that it happens more regularly than we believe, but for a young player that’s made a blue like that, he’s going to need more support than he is a kick up the arse because he’s already judging himself harshly and accepting a whole heap of criticism as a result,” he said.
Ginnivan on Monday morning returned to the club and pledged to work harder than ever to regain “trust” while apologising again for his blunder when briefly speaking to media.
Ginnivan suspended over drug use | 00:33
New Magpies skipper Darcy Moore also spoke to media upon his arrival at Olympic Park and said he was “pretty disappointed” with Ginnivan’s actions but and that the club would wrap its arms around the young player.
“It’s pretty disappointing for everyone, and in this instance Jack has fallen short of the standards we expect for ourselves,” Moore said.
“But we’re eager to support him going forward to make some better decisions. “We’ve got to make sure from now we support him and safeguard his welfare.”
Moore added that there was “no issue” with drugs at Collingwood despite Ginnivan’s slip up.
“We have over 90 male and female athletes at this club, the large majority of whom take their jobs really seriously and make great decisions,” he said.
“But having said that, we don’t operate in a vacuum. We’re human beings and people make errors of judgment and that’s something that Jack’s done in this instance. We get a lot of education and the community knows that, so it’s disappointing.”
Moore said of the AFL reviewing the Illicit Drugs Policy: “I think it clearly plays an important role in minimising harm around the league, in terms of flagging players who are at risk of making mistakes around drug use.
“It provides invaluable unidentified data around the prevalence of drug use to the league and to the medical experts in order to keep tabs on how big of an issue this is. I think the challenging part of it is when things become public because around a welfare and a harm minimisation model, not everything is going to be public and when it does it can create a little bit of grey area.
“Players obviously don’t operate in a vacuum and are human beings and make mistakes. “We know with the consumption of alcohol, that impairs judgment, so you’d be crazy to think there’s no players around the league who use drugs from time to time. It certainly exists. In terms of how widespread it is, I’m really not in a position to say considering I don’t have all the data.”
