It sounded to us like a bloke who didn’t mind being the centre of attention for a few minutes. But he offered nothing, from where we sit, that investigators could proceed on.

Most of the controversy seems to surround the level of communication and interaction he had with Stephen Dank, the sports scientist who appears to be at the centre of ASADA’s investigations through his connections to some football clubs.

The truth will eventually emerge, we hope, but it must be said: Stephen Dank has not yet had a glove laid on him. He vigorously protests his innocence – that he has played everything by the book. A book that even the Crime Commission got confused when they released their report on the “blackest day in Australian sport”. The latest substance confirmed yesterday by WADA as on the black list, an anti-obesity drug, allegedly administered to some players last year, is referred to in that report in two places – once as not banned, in another as possibly banned . . . Dank claims to have checked everything with ASADA before administration … Why wouldn’t he?

If all this seems like splitting hairs, it’s because it has now come to this. It is a million miles away from the picture painted by the Crime Commission and ASADA at that press conference. Debate now seems to surround what level of co-operation is required of players about to be (supposedly) interviewed by ASADA investigators. Still, not one player has been interviewed.

From this distance, this is looking like a debacle. The press conference appears to have been ludicrously premature. The Crime Commission report appeared vague from the start – we reserved the right to change our minds about that because we hadn’t had the benefit of the private ACC briefings. But the proof of that pudding was going to be in the roll call of convictions that we might have expected to pile up by now.

That hasn’t happened. If it continues to not happen, we are going to be left with one conclusion: that on the basis of their increased seizures of peptides in recent years, our top crime fighters in the land have been almost naïve in the way they have swallowed the bodybuilder/pseudo scientific guff about their performance-enhancing benefits. As you may have already read in our latest issue: they don’t work anyway.

The image of any footballer being spiked with syringes is an ugly one loaded with symbolism and inferences. But could it be that this whole situation has arisen from our general syringe phobia? Who likes getting a needle?

Footballers have been ingesting supplements forever. But as soon as they start injecting them, everyone gets nervous. Fair enough. But the ball is now squarely in ASADA’s and the ACC’s report to come up with some results.