COMMENT

The Essendon players' drugs tribunal has become more a referendum on whether the club was guilty rather than a test of the players' guilt.

If the players are cleared the question naturally flows: why was the club punished? What was all the fuss about?

If the players get convicted, well, things plainly get a whole lot messier for everyone.

The assumption that, by the players getting off, Essendon is also exonerated of wrongdoing is wrong-headed. Or at least at odds with strong elements of the case the players themselves have put in their defence.

Although the tribunal was closed to the public, several facts remain undisputed. First, Essendon could provide no detailed record of the treatments their players had received in the relevant period in 2012.

This was fundamentally why the AFL chose to charge and then convict the club's senior football figures and sanction the club as they did, but not to pursue the players. That was the governance case.

The existence of any such document could potentially have saved – or further incriminated – Essendon and most of its senior staff back then, but the absence of those documents has been argued to save the players now.

Without documentation of who took what, when and how much, how can anyone have a sufficient degree of certainty to convict anyone? This has been the players' argument.

There is no dispute that each of the players who received infraction notices also received injections as part of the supplements program. The question is what was in them – and the players do not know.

That is where the idea of Essendon culpability starts and ends and why the players being cleared does nothing to clear Essendon, but only further incriminates them.

The club has said they did not authorise Shane Charter to fly to China and source any drugs. Stephen Dank might have had conversations or text messages with him, but the club says they did not knowingly sanction the sourcing of those drugs.

It was unclear then, that if Charter did not source the drugs that they admit the players were injected with, who did? And what were those drugs?

An argument strenuously put by David Grace, QC, for the players was this: we dispute the suggestion that the club sought and obtained thymosin beta 4. There was some contention that the club instead sought thymomodulin but, he said, if the drug that was administered to the players came untested out of a Chinese factory, who could be sure what it was? What was in it?

The fact the players were then injected with this substance regardless of the fact that no one could authoritatively say what it was is the awful truth that the players have themselves presented to the tribunal about their club.

Essentially a key plank of their defence was that if their club tried to get them a legal substance to help improve their performance, then no one knows for sure that they got it but they were injected anyway.

That this can be the case either suggests the club did know what was in the drug and are not telling or they did not know what was in it and injected them anyway.

That was not an AFL argument. That was not an ASADA argument. That was the argument of the Essendon players about their own club's behaviour.

The decision of David Jones on Tuesday might clear the players. But clearing the players and clearing the club are two vastly different things.