A cricket match was to start in one hour's time and a big feller I imagined to be a fast bowler was striding up and down the wicket, loosening his shoulders, sniffing the atmosphere of the ground where he would shortly be absorbed in a sporting drama which would ask everything of him as a cricketer because that was exactly what he wanted to give.

I know that feeling, the excitement before a game, walking out on to some humble venue and being transported by it as a sporting theatre. I found myself walking out on to the ground to inspect the wicket.

That was sport, pure and simple. Sunday night, by contrast, was the James Hird interview on ABC 24 and once more the Essendon nightmare enveloped us. Unfortunately, there is a sense that the longer it goes, the more intriguing the puzzle becomes. Everyone has their favourite question. Mine is – who advised the Essendon players not to take the Cronulla option?

The revelation that the players who left Essendon, like the Dogs' Stewart Crameri and Port's Paddy Ryder and Angus Monfries, hung solid with their former Bomber teammates against the advice of their new clubs provided the drama with yet another poignant aside. If you want to record a moment when an old Australian ethos was struck a major blow, this is one of them. Overnight, as a result of the Court of Arbitration for Sport decision, an idea of friendship - put roughly, that you stand by your mates through whatever – was made redundant, at least in AFL football. All their loyalty earned them was a more severe penalty and the dissatisfaction of their new employers.

In the aftermath of the Hird interview, there were more opinions than pigeons in Saint Peter's Square. The one that took my eye was from WA Today columnist Karalee Katsambanis whose article ran on Fairfax websites under the heading "Essendon's punishment is not enough". Katsambanis called for Essendon to be "suspended for the 2016 season at the very least, and potentially even disbanded". All we need now is for some columnist to propose the re-introduction of the stocks so that the leading actors in the drama can be pilloried in Federation Square and pelted with refuse and rotten vegetables as was done in 18th century Britain.

The one opinion I retweeted was from a woman called Linda Connolly: "Jesus. if only people had as many questions for (& were as hard on) our politicians as they are on #hird, democracy might even work! (sic)"

Before noon on Monday, however, another scandal had hit with allegations of match-fixing in tennis. One newspaper headline read: "Tennis! Who can we trust?!" Professional sports cannot ally themselves with the gambling industry and then act innocent in these matters. This week, while driving, I tuned in to the radio to get a cricket score. What I got were the odds for that precise moment in the game. From them, I guessed what the scores might be.

Should we be shocked by these developments? Not really, The history of sport is as much about human weakness and folly as triumph. There are well-recorded instances of cheating at the ancient Olympics. They dealt with it by making the offender, and the city he was representing, pay for the erection of a statue of Zeus at the Olympic site which was inscribed with their crime; future competitors were thereby reminded that, should they be caught offending, their shame would live forever. Imagine approaching the MCG and seeing it ringed with statues of the great cheats of all time.

Monday also saw an old-fashioned footy scandal with the news that Collingwood's Dane Swan and Travis Cloke had sent nude photos and videos of themselves to an unnamed party on Instagram who then sold them to (of all places) Woman's Day. When I asked a woman friend of mine, Penny Mackieson, author of an unpublished novel about Tom Wills' lover and a serious footy person, what she thought of the affair, she replied, "Another dumb footballer story". She wasn't offended but she certainly wasn't impressed.

Monday night, I watched Chris Gayle score 50 off 12 balls. At least three of them were full tosses but Twenty20 cricket is not about nuance. It is about momentum. Gayle then left Australia with a proclamation of self-love that, if it were converted to another form of energy, could light a country town at night for a year.

My week in sport finally came into focus on Tuesday night when I saw Lleyton Hewitt play. I like Lleyton, particularly after I heard him tell a very funny story about him and Boris Becker bowing to an empty royal box at Wimbledon. But there has always been something about him that's a bit too much, over the top, hovering on parody. There he was in a T-shirt replicating the Australian flag.

But, by the same token, there has always been something transparently honest about Lleyton, about the manic zest with which he played. And here he was, in what might have been his final outing, blue eyes blazing. He scrapped for every point in a way which seemed ridiculously out of proportion to the occasion. But what Hewitt achieved in his career was ridiculously out of proportion to what might have been expected of him.

Something about Lleyton has never changed. You can see him as a kid getting to the court early, eager to play.