Thread by @TraceyLeeHolmes

Ok, friends…I wrote a story that might interest some of you regarding the blackest day in Australian sport and a decade on, whether it is time for absolution/redemption for those involved. This time the story is not on ABC, it is here as a @twitter only LONG thread😁

Remember the blackest day in Australian sport? Two federal government ministers, with the bosses of Australia’s major professional codes lined up behind them, told the Australian public they would be ‘shocked’ and ‘disgusted’ by a Crime Commission report.

📸 in @smh Alex Ellinghausen

The #Essendon football club had become the focus of the drama and its coach, James Hird, under the spotlight. Now, 10 years after he was drowning in headlines, he’s trending again.

Any discussion about the former champion player and coach returning to heal a shattered club represents far more than just another episode spinning off sport’s never-ending coaches-merry-go-round.

Not since that day has the club faced such a challenge – in recent weeks the chairman, other board members, the CEO and coach have all exited one way or another.

But current events have their roots in the biggest scandal in Australian sports history, it goes to the highest office in the land, intergenerational family ties torn apart, thirty-four players labelled ‘drug cheats’ who a decade on still protest their innocence.

And their coach, who having reached the deepest levels of despair, tried to end it all.

It’s about an 88,000 strong community built around a football team that for ten years has being trying to re-find its soul after the trauma of the blackest day in Australian sport.

In friendly circles Hird is referred to as the prodigal son, in less friendly environments he’s described as the man with a messiah complex.

One thing is certain, the pressure being piled on him from every direction is of a magnitude few outside the Melbourne cauldron that is AFL heartland could ever understand.

But he knows what he’s in for should he be handed the reigns again, that pressure almost broke him previously, now it’s an opportunity for redemption.

Australia’s blackest day in Australian sport, as it was dubbed, made headlines around the world in early February 2013.

An Australian Crime Commission report alleged crime gangs had infiltrated sport, widespread doping amongst professional athletes was occurring, and other findings that were ‘shocking’ and would ‘disgust Australian sports fans’, according to then Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare.

In a press conference from the nation’s capital the CEOs of Australia’s major professional sports stood in line looking mostly bewildered behind the justice minister, the sports minister and the head of the Crime Commission.

Australia’s sporting reputation was in tatters. Every closet in town was being searched for skeletons.

More than a year later, players from the NRL’s Cronulla Sharks pleaded guilty to using performance enhancing drugs, accepting a back dated suspension, and returned to the game weeks later.

The AFL saga was much more prolonged and AFL HQ much more involved in trying to control the narrative and outcome of a lengthy investigation conducted by what was then known as ASADA - the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Agency.

Ultimately, despite being cleared by an independent tribunal in Australia, the players found themselves being retried in the Swiss based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

Unlike the Australian verdict which could not find a link in the chain of evidence connecting the importation of a banned substance and its inclusion in recovery injections given to the Essendon players, the CAS tribunal accepted there were enough ‘strands in the cable’.

All 34 players were guilty of doping, according to @ArbitralduSport, even those who were afraid of needles and had never received one.

That guilty verdict came in January 2016, three long years after the blackest day press conference.

(This is where it gets even more interesting, next up, on thread two…the AFL’s involvement in controlling the narrative, the fallout, and James Hird’s version of what went on in his first full interview after being silenced for three years)