Graham Kelly: FA is right to resist media frenzy over League's 'drug cheat'

The Football Association is under pressure. So what's new? On this occasion, however, one might be tempted to sympathise with the governing body's lack of transparency, after it came under criticism from the thought police in sections of the media who believe the "drug cheat" in the Nationwide League recently found to have had traces of the banned substance nandrolone in his system should be "named and shamed".

This is a highly unusual case. The FA has let the anonymous player off with a warning that he will be subject to a permanent suspension if he is found to have broken the rules again. The player will be the target of further tests (at random of course to make it legal) for the next two years.

A permanent suspension would be a far greater setback to a player's livelihood than, say, being convicted in open court of attacking someone inside a stadium or injuring someone in a street brawl and being sentenced to community service. Yet the absence of any immediate penalty contrasts sharply with the precedent set by the game's world governing body, Fifa, which increased a Uefa suspension on the Barcelona defender Frank de Boer in 2000 to 12 months.

The Minister for Sport, Richard Caborn, was among those who criticised the FA for refusing, on the grounds of medical confidentiality, to release the player's name, after news of the disciplinary action became known following the publication of the quarterly anti-doping report from the government quango UK Sport. Caborn found a ready ally in the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound, who said: "I think they should always be named. There is a deterrent in catching cheats, and exposing them as such."

Fair enough. Cheating in all its forms is abhorrent. But what are we talking about in this confusing case? With doping in sport, analysis of the issues involved is not as scientific as the equipment deployed to check the samples.

No one wants to see a witch-hunt and, with the highly emotive subject of drugs, a player's career, particularly in today's precarious financial climate, could so easily be destroyed.

In the area of nandrolone, the anti-doping protocols of world sport are discredited in any case, because they fail to distinguish between nandrolone, the hormone which is produced naturally in the body and nandrolone, the anabolic steroid. Many sports people have controversially been labelled drug cheats after nandrolone positives, some involving long-running disputes between their domestic and international governing bodies.

In stark contrast to the IAAF and Fifa, the FA apparently accepted the player's explanation in this instance that he had innocently used a so-called nutritional supplement which was freely available. There was a complicating factor in that he was also receiving medical treatment by way of legitimate prescription longer term. The FA was prepared to accept this, whereas in other sports there has been less understanding shown.

The dilemma for the sporting authorities lies in the very inclusion of nandrolone on the banned lists because only the steroid is, not the natural hormone. The British National Formulary, the doctors' prescribing bible, states that even a full dose of 50 million nanograms would not enhance performance: "Their protein-building property led to the hope that they might be widely useful in medicine but this hope has not been realised. Their use as body builders and tonics is quite unjustified." So why all the high-level hand-wringing?

Maybe it was felt that an English footballer, even one from the less rarefied atmosphere of the Nationwide League, would be ideal for boosting the profile of the drugs police. If so, the FA disciplinary commission and the Professional Footballers' Association are to be commended for battening down the player's identity with more security than a D notice.

Attempts to ascertain from Soho Square whether the food supplement in question was purchased independently by the player or provided by the club's advertised suppliers, who do not list all the ingredients on the labels, were met with the stoniest of brick walls.

The World Anti-Doping Agency was set up following the International Olympic Commission's special conference on doping in Lausanne in 1999.It is currently preparing proposals for its first Anti-Doping Code, to be approved at a conference in Gothenburg in March when the UK Government will be expected to sign a memorandum of understanding to implement the code. The agency seeks co-operation from governments, but is still funded 50 per cent by the IOC and cannot in any way claim to have yet shaken off the IOC's years of totalitarian presumption of athletes' guilt in matters of doping.

However, if UK Sport's sorry record on nandrolone is any guide, our politicians will probably sign up to something which jeopardises performers.

grahamkelly@btinternet.com