Ghost Dog

------- Use of caffeine tablets and sleeping pills comes to light after England postponement by RORY SMITH (THE TIMES 19-10-2012) Nobody is saying that England’s players have done anything wrong. No one is accusing them of breaking the rules, of breaching their moral code, of seeking to gain an unfair advantage, of transgressing those shifting boundaries that define what is acceptable, what is sport, and what is not. But that elite footballers should be so familiar with what appears to be a regular diet of uppers and downers, caffeine tablets and sleeping pills, is unquestionably a cause for concern. Make no mistake: this was no one-off. Roy Hodgson’s squad did not arbitrarily choose to experiment with an extra energy boost before a testing, but hardly unique, World Cup qualifier in Poland. This is something players do as a matter of course. It is something that they find entirely normal. That much is clear from the way they discuss the matter. “A lot of the lads take ProPlus tablets before the game,” Glen Johnson said, as though he might be describing carbo-loading pasta, drinking Lucozade, eating a banana or devouring a packet of Jaffa Cakes before a game, and refuelling on pizza. Caffeine pills are just another part of the players’ game-day routine. England’s medical staff travel with a selection of pills at all times. So, too, do their counterparts at most other national sides, and probably the majority of club teams, too. They have probably included caffeine supplements since 2004, when it was removed from the list of prohibited substances published every year by Wada, the World Anti-Doping Authority. The reason the issue has come to light is the failure of the authorities to close the roof at Warsaw’s National Stadium on Tuesday. “We all took [caffeine pills] for the [game,” Johnson confirmed to BBC Radio 5 Live. “When the game is off, no one can sleep.” This is where the downers kick in: those players who could not drift off on Tuesday night were then issued with sleeping pills; this, too, is common. Most team doctors prefer a herbal variety, so as to avoid any problems with any chemical substances on the Wada list. Hodgson and his coaching staff do not believe that those tablets might have influenced England’s sluggish performance when the game was eventually played on Wednesday. Medically, though, there is evidence to suggest that they may be wrong. “Sleeping pills can remain in the system for anything from seven to 14 hours, and most cause daytime lethargy,” said Professor Colin Espie, an expert in sleep and behavioural medicine. England’s players returned to the Warsaw Hilton at midnight and kicked off 17 hours later. “With a sleeping tablet, you don’t get normal sleep,” Espie said. “If it is artificial sleep, you do not get the restorative effects of sleep. In the UK we distribute 15 million sleeping tablet prescriptions a year. It is tragic to know we are doing this to our elite athletes.” It is one thing, though, to inhibit your team’s performance, albeit unintentionally. The regular use of caffeine, according to Dr Neil Chester, a researcher into doping at Liverpool John Moores University, is a rather more pressing matter. Its deployment to improve focus, energy and aerobic capacity, he says, “raises a moral and ethical issue about its misuse in sport”. Caffeine is now on Wada’s monitoring list, which includes substances the authority suspects could be used by athletes to gain an advantage. Wada, according to Chester, has never “fully explained” why it was downgraded, although it is felt that the practical difficulties of testing for something common in food and drink was key; so, too, the fact that caffeine is metabolised at different rates by different people, making it very hard to establish how much athletes are benefiting. Regardless, a decade before the caffeine decision, Diego Maradona was sent home from the 1994 World Cup after he tested positive for ephedrine. “Caffeine is one of the few substances where the scientific literature backs up the idea that it is a performanceenhancer,” Chester said. “It certainly seems to be more effective than ephedrine. Since 2004 we have seen a significant increase in sports scientists and nutritionists recommending its use. There is a moral and ethical issue about caffeine’s misuse in sport.” It is not the only issue in dispute. Matías Almeyda, the Argentina midfielder, revealed in his autobiography that Parma players were given unidentified injections before games in the 1990s. Afterwards, he said, he felt like he could “jump to the ceiling”. Given the context — Juventus were alleged to be doping, too — it is easy to cry foul. Injections containing proteins are still common. So, too, is creatine, which builds muscle mass, first brought to these shores by Arsène Wenger. Nandrolone is banned. Removing oxygen-rich blood and transfusing it at a later point to aid performance is illegal; altitude training, which boosts red-blood cell counts, is encouraged. There is no question that England’s players were innocent when they took those little brown pills. They are, though, in a grey area: neither up nor down, but somewhere in between.