MELBOURNE – Australian Rules football’s hopes of moving on from the sport’s biggest doping scandal will be tested on a weekly basis this season as the club at the centre of the crisis hobbles through its campaign with a roster ravaged by drug bans.

The Melbourne-based Essendon Bombers play their first match of the top-flight Australian Football League (AFL) competition against the Gold Coast Suns on Saturday, having lost 12 players for the year for taking banned supplements.

The 12 were among 34 Essendon players who participated in a systematic and highly dubious regime of supplements injections in 2012, which saw the club booted out of the following year’s playoffs and slapped with a record fine.

The AFL had hoped a scandal that had already overshadowed three consecutive championships might have disappeared during the off-season, especially after its own anti-doping tribunal cleared the players of wrongdoing last March.

But the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) took the case to the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS) and the international tribunal came down hard on the players in its January decision.

Another five of the 34 who moved on to other franchises in the 18-team league have also been forced to sit out the season.

However, Essendon are the ones bearing the brunt of what Australia’s anti-doping chief Ben McDevitt branded “the most devastating self-inflicted injury by a sporting club in Australian history”.

The AFL gave Essendon a number of concessions to try to cushion the blow, including allowing the club to recruit undrafted players to pad out a roster of raw rookies.

But pundits expect little joy for the team’s fans, who have already endured three gloomy seasons as the scandal lingered.

“I can’t see them beating a side,” former championship-winning player and media pundit Campbell Brown said this week.

In their first-round match, Essendon play a team which grappled with its own drugs crisis last year, with one of Gold Coast’s top young players fined and given a suspended ban in July after photographs of him snorting a white substance were plastered on the front pages of national newspapers.

As one of the league’s oldest and most popular clubs, Essendon’s struggles are bad business for the country’s richest sporting competition.

Legal action by the 34 players, who claim to be victims of club negligence, could yet add another sting in the tail.

The AFL has offered sympathy for the players sidelined for the year but had precious little for the club whose motto was ‘whatever it takes’ when the supplements scandal broke in 2013.

“They have been through something they shouldn’t have been through,” AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan said this week.

“They have a legitimate right to talk to the club about being compensated for that.”

– Reuters