General Rugby Discussion 3

I kind of agree to be fair, (wasn’t having a go at you by the way, just bustin your balls a bit). However I think it may have just been honest ignorance, he got injured and his career was over, took a dose to help with recovery and didn’t realise that the rules also applied to amateur coaching! Absolutely stupid mistake but let’s not end a career before it’s even started because he was a bit of a gobshite! and I’m affiliated with a rival AIL club, I should be calling for his head haha!

Yeah, he's really getting away with this narrative that he was retired. He took the drugs for four months, and got tested a week after his official retirement. That means he'd been taking it for 17 weeks while still a contracted player, and started taking it just a few weeks after the injury. He clearly took it in the hopes of returning to rugby and if that is his attitude to injury recovery he shouldn't be coaching.

I think there’s a lot of filling in the blanks that people are doing. It’s likely that he got desperate to return from injury to play some rugby before retiring. However he did say that the injury meant that he couldn’t even hold a drink in his hand so it was affecting his day to day life. While I’d be inclined to believe that this was a cynical thing on his part to get back playing before he retired, there is a possibility that he knew he wasn’t going to get back playing regardless and took this stuff for personal reasons.

He had been taking it for 4 months before announcing his retirement. But the decision to retire generally comes a while before the announcement. We just don’t know the timelines behind that decision and the drugs etc. And we were never going to get that kind of balance from a Kimmage article. When there are big holes in the story like there are we need to be careful not to condemn him off the bat. It was probably a stupid and desperate decision made to allow him some rugby before he retired. But it may not have been that.

BTW, the finding of the French anti-doping agency is publicly available;

Le Secrétaire général (afld.fr)

Very explicitly prohibits him from coaching.

A lot of players take the opportunity to "bulk up" while out injured.

Looking at the jawlines of some Irish internationals, I'd be surprised if they haven't used HGH at some point.

It has expired now, but the ban was in effect when he took the job at Malone.

Grobler is different in that he had served his ban and it was widely known when he was signed up. You could at least say he'd served his time and deserved a fresh start. Tuohy though...

He was still a contracted employee when the testers arrived. He had made an announcement that he wouldn't be playing again but he was still a Vannes player and thus still subject to testing.