AFL clubs in report to be told next week
Updated: 01:01, Wednesday February 13, 2013
AFL clubs will find out from the league during briefings next week which of them have been identified in an investigation as vulnerable to prohibited drugs.
Six NRL clubs identified in the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) report into drugs in professional sport and corruption links were advised of that fact by their league on Monday night.
But despite the AFL also being granted permission by the ACC on Monday to inform their clubs, they will wait until individual meetings with officials from each club next week to do so.
There are only two AFL clubs identified in relation to suspected performance-enhancing drug use.
One of them, Essendon, have already outed themselves, with the Bombers under investigation to determine whether several of their players took performance-enhancing drugs, possibly without knowledge they were doing so.
The other club, whose identity is known to the AFL, has just one player suspected of performance-enhancing drug use, although the league doesn't know the name of the player.
Several other AFL clubs - reportedly as many as nine - have been identified in the investigation as being vulnerable to illicit drug use.
The AFL say while they can tell all of those clubs they were identified in the investigation, they can not tell them the specific details of why they were mentioned.
That means they won't tell the club with one player suspected of performance-enhancing drug use that that is the case, only that that club was identified in the investigation for some reason.
The AFL meetings with four key staff members in each club - the president, chief executive, general manager of football and senior coach - will begin next Tuesday and continue over the following days.
Those meetings - announced by AFL chairman Mike Fitzpatrick last Thursday, hours after the ACC report was released - will be used by the league to brief club officials on the report and what actions the league is taking in response.
AFL corporate affairs manager James Tonkin said the league didn't feel the need to ring clubs immediately, as all AFL clubs had been warned at a drugs summit in late January that they were vulnerable to illicit drugs.
'We're not doing a ring-around,' Tonkin told AAP.
'We're calling every club in over the coming days to give them a briefing about the report.
'So in that briefing we will notify clubs that have been mentioned.
'We don't feel there's a need to notify specific clubs immediately because the issue of vulnerabilities to illicit drug use is already high on the agenda of the AFL clubs.'
Earlier on Tuesday, Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley said the AFL should give clubs as much information as possible on their vulnerability to illicit and performance-enhancing drugs.
'The performance-enhancing (issue) has pushed illicit drugs off the agenda,' Buckley told reporters.
'But I think in both instances clubs are wanting as much information as they possibly can get so that you can make better decisions.'
