It's a week since the Sunday Independent's John Greene reported that an inter-county footballer had failed a drugs test last year. The player went unnamed in the article, though it was mentioned he was from a 'prominent county'.
It soon emerged that the player involved was Kerry's Brendan O'Sullivan. That revelation came when the Kerry County Board published a statement on its website saying that the Valentia man had failed the test following last year's National League final defeat to Dublin. It was also stated that O'Sullivan's failed test had been inadvertent, it had occurred due to a supplement being contaminated with a prohibited substance. Later in the week, MHA was revealed to be the substance in question.
In an interview with Radio Kerry's Gary O'Sullivan on Saturday, Kerry chairman Tim Murphy explained why the county board felt it necessary to identify the player. Speaking on Off The Ball this week, Sport Ireland CEO John Treacy said that they would not have named the player until the publication of the considered report of the violation.
Murphy said that the County Board did not want to risk a situation where the player's identity was revealed by a third party.
The whole sequence of events arose from a request from a Sunday Independent journalist last Friday, the 26th of May, where we got an email requesting a comment about an inter-county footballer, who was on the Kerry panel, that had failed a test.
We were confronted with a difficult situation, to say the least, because if we commented we ran the risk of a story being published in national Sunday newspaper and Brendan not even being aware of it.
Aidan O'Mahony wrote a very good article on Thursday where he mentioned his own personal experience [he tested positive for high levels of salbutamol in 2008] where the issue he had was where the story was leaked before he was even phoned and told about it, so we were not going to allow that to happen in Brendan's case.
We sat down last Saturday, a number of us, and we involved Brendan in the whole process.
He was fully briefed and fully aware of what we did and then based on that we issued the statement that we put out on Saturday evening in advance of Sunday.
We wanted to stay in control of the situation as far as we could because it was such a sensitive one.
Everything we did was with Brendan's consent from start to finish.
We weren't in a position to second guess what they [The Sunday Independent] were going to do and then put Brendan in a position where we as a group, and Brendan, would be reading about it on a Sunday morning as opposed to him having an opportunity to tell whatever few people he needed to tell before it actually went public. We owed the man that much.
It's one of those situations that arises in life where you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. We felt it was the correct decision at the time and we still feel it was the right decision. In doing so, we remained in control and we weren't giving an opportunity to a third party to name Brendan in public. I'm not saying that was going to happen but we weren't going to take that chance to be honest.
Murphy also revealed that he first found out about O'Sullivan's positive test when he took over as Kerry chairman in December and added that the player had experienced extensive 'emotional trauma' over the last 12 months.
Picture credit: Stephen McCarthy / SPORTSFILE
