Wiping out drug-test strikes only advantages players that play longer.

SPORT has always given latitude to ability. The greater the talent on the field the wider the allowance made for inadequacies away from it. It has ever been thus and, despite protestations of getting tough with miscreants, for every bad boy threatened with being cut, 15 other clubs reinforce the behaviour by queueing to draft them.

Curiously, the AFL has enshrined this double standard in its Illicit Drugs Policy. A surprising insertion in the recent update to the IDP is the change to allow a failed drug test — a strike — against a player's name to lapse after four years. This four-year period begins from the moment of the strike occurring and is not overtaken by a subsequent strike. Thus, a player can drop back from two strikes to one four years on from the first strike.

The reason for the four-year cap is that four years is the average life span of an AFL footballer. The better players are the ones who play longer, beyond the average four years, so once more it is the better player who is granted greater latitude.

The logic of a strike being able to be removed from a player's record while a second strike remains seems flawed. Surely a second strike creates the appearance of a pattern of behaviour that should extinguish the right to a return to a clean record.

Bear in mind that once a player has failed one drug test he becomes subject to more intensive scrutiny from the testers. It is always then more likely that a player who has a drug problem and continues to use despite a failed first test, would be further tested and detected. True, the player who drops from two strikes to one continues to be target tested but the question is why they should be granted the additional comfort of failing a further test without sanction?

While the AFL has retained a three-strikes policy, in practice this is misleading. A player now could fail three drug tests in five years and remain in the game unpunished, though treated. That could in fact extend to four or five failed tests over a long career. Thus the better players get that bit of extra comfort.

Doubtless, the inclusion of the four-year cap on a drug test is a sop to the AFL Players Association for its consent to introduce a trial of hair testing. The players deserved to get something for their further co-operation in this voluntary policy, but this should not have been it.

If there is to be a drug testing policy such as this — and it is arguable whether it should be as this is a policy that exists in tandem with the testing for match-day performance-enhancing drugs — then the four years the test sits on a player's record should be clean years.

The key difference, given a player on one strike would be treated and counselled the same as a player on two, is the timing of the trigger point at which a player would be removed from the game — if it's a better-than-average player they get a better-than-average chance.