Wasn't aware of the absence of the deal. I still maintain ASADA's credibility is on the line here. If they lose, Essendon will have a field day, and people who wanted the sport cleaned up will regard ASADA as incompetent. 2 years on there has to be a conclusive result in ASADA's favour. I'm not referring to 'rock solid evidence' in a standard of proof sense, referring to the fact that unless they are about 95% sure of winning, they are likely to offer a deal to make it 100%. The fact that Essendon have pretty much given a big **** you to everyone around them makes that harder, but if ASADA lose, everyone in senior management may as well resign and never enter public life again, and that makes me think there will be a deal. I don't know precisely what that deal will be. Clearly it won't be as generous as the one Cronulla got, but it would have to be juicy enough to induce Essendon players to take it. So again unless there is a lot we don't know and the evidence is pretty damning, I doubt 2 years is on the cards.
I'll repeat it - ASADA can't offer deals as they are not the ones to issue a penalty. They can
advise what a penalty should be to the sporing body who is the one who issues the penalty once an infraction notice is given. In the case of the NRL, ASADA stated that the penalties should be backdated due to circumstances beyond the players control. WADA looked over that with a fine tooth comb and the wording they used in accepting the backdated penalties was very strong that they weren't happy with ASADA's delay. The penalty in the case of the NRL players, who only received 30 pages of evidence with their SCNs btw, was one year. They only have a couple of months of Dank's involvement at their club. Essendon had a systematic supplements program in place involving Dank for over a year. If you consider that then 1 year for NRL with only 30 pages of evidence as opposed to 350 pages per athlete in the case of Essendon, tells you it's a completely different story with Essendon on a much larger scale.
McDevitt has stated that there might only be a case for a reduced penalty for the Essendon players if they provide new 'substantial evidence'. Considering that the majority of the players have no idea what went on, and happily participated in the program and Essendon still say they have no records, it's highly unlikely that there is any option of a deal for the Essendon players.
It took ten years to get Lance Armstrong and that was a case of circumstantial evidence and no positive tests. He was eventually hung out to dry because his teammates and other support staff did dob the program in to provide further evidence to the investigation. Two years is nothing in a case as complex as this. ASADA would be close to 100% that there was a doping offence that occured. That is what a SCN is. If they didn't have enough proof to satisfy themselves, they would not create and serve a SCN. ASADA had one of Australia's top administrative law judges who has recently retired look over the evidence and they also had two other people as well who are involved in investigating and prosecuting drug offences look over the evidence. All three reported back to ASADA that there was enough there to satisfy them. They did all this as a double check before issuing the first lot of SCNs which then made Essendon throw the hail mary pass that failed miserably.
What is very clear to me is that Essendon did use substances that were on the prohibited list, the players initially didn't question this at all, against all the training they receive from the AFL and the AFLPA, and as such there will be some strong penalties issued because of it and even stronger repercussions for support staff.