Stan Hey: Not just the wrong guy, but the wrong sport

As a Scouse-born, Liverpool Football Club supporter of over 40 years standing - well, just the occasional seat now that I'm over 50 - I'm sure I would be expected to join in the secret chorus of glee among rival fans over the eight-month suspension of Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand. Not so. I'll readily join the clamour created by any defeats the Mancunian team suffers, especially in the Champions' League, and I'm a long-term fan of full-back Gary Neville's intellectual struggle with the offside law. But as far as Ferdinand is concerned, I will be supporting his appeal procedure all the way.

As a Scouse-born, Liverpool Football Club supporter of over 40 years standing - well, just the occasional seat now that I'm over 50 - I'm sure I would be expected to join in the secret chorus of glee among rival fans over the eight-month suspension of Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand. Not so. I'll readily join the clamour created by any defeats the Mancunian team suffers, especially in the Champions' League, and I'm a long-term fan of full-back Gary Neville's intellectual struggle with the offside law. But as far as Ferdinand is concerned, I will be supporting his appeal procedure all the way.

You might think this perverse, given that Ferdinand clearly did not submit himself to a pre-arranged, official drugs test at the club's training centre and is therefore punishable no matter the reason for his absence. Here's a professional footballer on roughly £80,000 a week, who knows that if he's late for training or if he misses the team bus or plane, he'll be fined by his manager and possibly dropped from the team. So, you say, "How come he can abide by these disciplines but show apparent contempt for the testing procedures?"

The defence, mine rather than Ferdinand's, is that football as a game does not take the issue of performance-enhancing drugs, and therefore their prohibition, seriously enough because it doesn't believe it has the abuse problem that afflicts athletics, cycling and swimming. Nor does football enshrine the private, individual obsession with the clock or the measurement of records that so tempts performers to drug abuse in these sports.

Those who pointed out that had Ferdinand been an athlete who missed a drugs test he'd have received an automatic two-year ban are trying to drag football into their own mire by creating a problem where, relatively speaking, there isn't one. The systematic abuse of drugs and sports science that has dominated track, field, road and swimming-pool over the past 20 years, and which is rightly a cause for alarm and cynicism, simply doesn't apply to football. Pre-emptive action to prevent football succumbing to the same darkness is well-meaning but wrong-headed. These "Pitch-Finder Generals" are in danger of making all sports seem as depraved as the very worst examples, rounding up all suspects rather than the necessary ones.

Of course nobody would be naive enough to assert that there are no drugs in football. In the early 1960s several Everton players were caught with one of the early recreational drugs of the Mod era, "purple hearts", and from the early 1980s "Charlie" became not just a well-known user's first name but a popular Saturday night, post-game refreshment. I've been on hand, as it were, to witness a group of high-profile former international footballers cheerfully pass a joint around as though it was sherry before a dinner party.

But of all the performance-enhancing drugs that have corrupted the Olympic Games and the Tour de France into sick jokes, only nandrolone, a steroid often disguised in food supplements and EPO, which enriches the oxygen levels in the bloodstream, would seem suitable for the demands of football. There have been half a dozen or so cases of positive nandrolone tests in the Italian Serie A, the most recent of which caught out none other than the son of the newly sainted Colonel Gaddafi - well, nobody's perfect! But I can't recall a positive EPO test in the game.

Football's main source of abuse has been alcohol, partly to do with the drinking culture that was accepted at most professional clubs as a necessary component of "team spirit", partly to do with basic working-class habits. Arsenal's Tony Adams and Paul Merson became celebrity victims of this behaviour, though there are a hundreds of lesser known casualties for whom rehabilitation never came.

But at most of the leading clubs, especially Manchester United and Arsenal, the booze culture has been eliminated by disciplinarian managers, and fitness and diet regimes are taken seriously. Rio Ferdinand's only addiction appears to be to the buying of expensive sports cars, while his post-training trips to Harvey Nichols are surely a cultural ascent from the old days of the afternoon "lock-in" at a local pub.

So why is Rio in the dock, apart from the key fact of missing a test? Not because football is endemically corrupted by drugs or in danger of becoming so. No, he's there because he made a mistake and because he's a high-profile player for one of the most powerful clubs in the world.

The zealots who want to cleanse sport cite the nobility that springs from the Olympic ideal, in the hope that this trickles down through the governing bodies of other sports. They won't admit that this is a long-lost illusion and they are now looking for a notable name in football on which to unload an exemplary sentence. It's my belief that they've picked not just the wrong guy but also the wrong sport.

Stanhey@aol.com