• WADA announces appeal of Essendon's 'not guilty' verdict
• 'Shocked' Bombers set for another season of stress: Hird
• AFL CEO hopes for only 'a couple of days of noise'
• Ten things you need to know about WADA's appeal

IT SEEMS both endless and futile.

Already 27 months in duration, the search for the truth in Essendon’s experiments with drugs in 2012 will last at least another six months, probably a whole lot longer.

There’s already been lies, counter-claims upon counter-claims, conflicting agendas and egos. There’s already been a well-established deep hatred between the key parties.

And now there’s a whole lot more of that to come, as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) sets out to do what its little franchise operation in Australia could not – prove to a panel of legal experts that Essendon players were given a banned substance.

The AFL has been shut out of what lies ahead.

This is its worst nightmare. It is not used to having no input into decisions. It likes to know everything in advance, likes to crunch deals, likes – and often needs - to control outcomes.

Which maybe why Gillon McLachlan made a strange observation on Tuesday, just hours after WADA had announced it would appeal the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal decision which failed to find sufficient evidence against the players.

“There’s going to be a couple of days of this noise and then in all likelihood it’s a long way away, this appeal, and people will hopefully be focused on a very competitive and exciting and tight football season,” he said.

There’s going to be a whole lot more than a mere couple of days of noise, Gill, and don’t be so sure that quality matches on a weekend will remedy the ASADA-WADA-Bombers-driven fatigue that has descended on many football followers.

McLachlan wasn’t the only one making eyebrow-raising comments in the hours after the WADA announcement.

James Hird, somehow still standing while nearly everyone else who held an off-field position of authority at the time the Essendon drugs program was in full swing has either resigned or been pushed, said stranger things.

Maybe he has taken so much legal advice in the past 27 months he no longer is capable of forming his own opinions and then articulating them to the public.

He said the AFL Tribunal had found Essendon players “innocent” in a “very comprehensive” decision. He went on to say it had been an “emphatic not guilty” decision.

Except that the Tribunal did not rule in such a manner. The Tribunal said in its findings that it could not find “sufficient evidence to establish to the comfortable satisfaction of a hearing panel that specific players were in fact administered Thymosin Beta-4”.

WADA and other sports bodies have, from the outset of the ASADA investigation into the Bombers in February 2013, watched with great interest as the AFL went about its business.

One very interested outsider was John Coates, boss of the Australian Olympic Committee and also president of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which will hear the WADA appeal.

Sports which fall under the AOC banner have long felt they were subjected to far greater and more stringent drug testing than the AFL. There is no sympathy from people in those sports for what the AFL and Essendon are enduring.

Such is the highly stressful and brutal demands inflicted on players and administrators of high-level sport that everyone is forced to use hindsight as a means to tackle the next inevitable problem.

Which, in Essendon’s case as it now prepares for another wave of scrutiny over what it did in 2012, means asking itself, among dozens of questions:

- Should we have attempted to so publicly smash the credibility of ASADA in the Federal Court, given we knew WADA was monitoring all events and always had the CAS card to play?

- Should we have held Hird to his word on day one of this saga when he said he took “full responsibility for what happens in our football department”?

- Should we have encouraged our players to take the deals that were offered by ASADA to stand out of the game for two matches in order for everything to go away?

Maybe answering those questions would prove as futile as the search by the authorities for the truth of what happened at the Bombers in 2012.

But as unpalatable as it clearly was for the club at the time it rejected the two-game deal, had it accepted the offer, ASADA’s and WADA’s searches would have ended then and there.

That is the truth. And right now that particular truth looks a whole lot better than the continued lies, counter-claims and hatred which is ahead, no matter the outcome of the CAS hearing.