Football still gets a free pass on drugs after Mykhailo Mudryk’s failed test, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI – these are the two key questions Enzo Maresca must ask his Chelsea star to get to the bottom of bombshell finding

There’s a tattoo on Mykhailo Mudryk’s throat that has been turning heads over the past week. It says: ‘Talent is not enough.’ Now that that same neck is on the line, we really need to know if talent had a little help.

We will say right away that Mudryk’s provisional suspension for a failed drug test is not the same as being found guilty of a misdemeanor, which in turn is not the same as deliberate cheating. We are nowhere near these conclusions; no charges have even been laid by the Football Association at this stage.

But Mudryk denies that he deliberately used a banned substance. And of course he said that.

If he’s true to his words that he “did nothing wrong,” then you’re not going to admit what you didn’t do. But, and this is the tricky part: when an athlete cheats, how many times do his hands go up?

You’ll know what I mean: denials can mean something or nothing. The same goes for the support of a club, which Mudryk has, because Chelsea support their man.

His manager, Enzo Maresca, says he believes in Mudryk’s innocence, that he trusts him, and it’s safe to assume he has more information than the rest of us. I am not thinking so much about observations about character and decency, because that is often not relevant in doping conversations. Thank God, Justin Gatlin is one of the most gracious men I’ve met in sports. But what about real information? The information that would make Maresca’s trust valid?

If he’s an industrious man, and all indications this season point to Maresca being one, then he’s looked up the data to back up his confidence.

We understand that the substance in question is meldonium, which can improve endurance, but Mudryk has not confirmed that, nor publicly said whether it came from something he may have eaten, or whether there is any suspicion of faulty testing. This is usually shrouded in the confidentiality of the process. And fair enough. But Maresca may also want to know what the concentration levels are in his player’s urine and how close the tests are to the negative finding.

Because these are big details that usually constitute a defense in these cases.

Knowing them gives Maresca a fuller picture to study. Perhaps he has indeed built that level of understanding, and perhaps he hasn’t, but my suspicions about the latter were given room to breathe on Wednesday when he said he did not know whether the test had been administered while on international duty with Ukraine or here in Great Britain. Britain. On Thursday, he added that he did not know the status of Mudryk’s B sample.

Again, that could be the tap dance of public speaking about private matters. Or, alternatively, he doesn’t actually know much and is just a trusting person.

But we can be sure that it is not for Maresca to pass judgment. That falls elsewhere, in this case the FA in collaboration with UK Anti-Doping, who will follow the path of testing his B sample, in the likelihood that Mudryk requests it, before the FA decides on what charges, if any, will follow. Then it goes to the lawyers.

It is a depressing and complicated story. There are always doping cases. They are messy, full of loopholes, and difficult to prove for absolute outcomes. And for football they are more common than most people are still willing to accept. For example, Maresca believes that football does not have a problematic relationship with drugs, which is interesting.

He joined Juventus in 2000 and stayed there for four years. At that time, Edgar Davids, his teammate, tested positive for the steroid nandrolone, denied that it had been taken deliberately and was handed a four-month suspension. Serie A was littered with similar cases in the same period and Juventus in particular were not far removed from the allegations surrounding the 1996 Champions League final. Ajax players and staff have expressed their suspicions that they had been duped by dopers.

When asked on Wednesday for a comparison between then and now, Maresca said the following: “I was waiting for this question. I think football was clean at that time and it is clean now. So I don’t think there is a big difference between my time at Juventus and now.’

It always surprises me how the game is perceived in these discussions, compared to, for example, athletics, cycling and boxing. But here’s a little thought exercise: choose a starting XI for footballers who have returned a positive sample. The choices are so plentiful that you can select a star side and use it in the right positions most of the time.

For example, we could put Andre Onana in goal (Furosemide, 2020), with Frank de Boer (nandrolone, 2001), Jaap Stam (nandrolone, 2001), Kolo Toure (Bendroflumethiazide, 2011) and Abel Xavier (dianabol, 2004) at the back. . I’d give Davids (nandrosterone, 2001) a run in midfield with Pep Guardiola (nandrolone, 2001), Paul Pogba (dehydroepiandrosterone, 2023), Fred (hydrochlorothiazide, 2015) and Mudryk, with Diego Maradona (ephedrine, 1994) top only .

Each of them denied knowingly committing any wrongdoing and none of them appeared to have deliberately manipulated the system. Guardiola, for his part, was acquitted after a six-year legal battle in which he was initially given a suspended prison sentence. But it’s a striking list, right?

Perhaps they were all truly unhappy, or at worst negligent in scrutinizing their supplements and meals. And we can also add that cases of infection are often a legitimate accident – as was made clear to me this week by one of the most prominent figures in the anti-doping fight.

But people also laughed at the idea that football is very different from other sports when it comes to corner kicks. Because we’ve long since left behind the myth that a skill-based game doesn’t have to take such dark paths: it’s a recovery game. It’s about being ready to go every few days. It’s about playing for contracts under suffocating pressure.

And yet somehow there is no curiosity about the number and nature of the cases that arise. The reputational death of a positive test in some sports simply does not exist when the circumstances are similar in football.

Currently we appear to be offering a free pass. And isn’t that strange?

Time will tell where Mudryk travels from and what specifics emerge. But if Maresca was on to one thing this week, it was when he said, “Things like this have happened in the past, they are happening now and they will happen in the future.”

They will. And we can all decide whether that amounts to a long series of accidents or a problem. He doesn’t think so, but I’d say the logic is tainted.

Amorim’s brash language

Ruben Amorim has been praised for the determination with which he tackled the Marcus Rashford situation, but were the misses committed solely by the player?

It was fine to drop him from Manchester United’s derby win over City; it was earned by the form and justified by the result. But the number of times Amorim has spoken critically about Rashford, about his application, his lifestyle, is excessive.

No doubt they were all honest answers to questions. And yet it is easy enough to see why Rashford would eventually drop out, as he did this week by publicly saying he wants a new challenge.

We might instinctively think he should have shut up and kept his mouth shut, but now that the paste is out of the tube, United could soon expect a weakened negotiating position for any sale.

That is mainly about the attacker and his reaction. But he wasn’t the only brash figure involved in creating this situation.

Don’t keep Coe out

I went to see Sebastian Coe this week as he presented his manifesto for the presidential elections at the International Olympic Committee.

He has aggressively positioned himself as a reform candidate and the status quo, led by the ridiculous Thomas Bach, will not like what he implies about the state of a dictatorial organization.

That’s a problem; they are the ones who will vote on it in March. It would be a travesty for the best man for the job to be disregarded for the crime of being right.