Juve Hope For New Davids Reprieve
Monday 3rd September 2001
Juventus president Vittorio Chiusano is confident the club will win an appeal to further reduce the drugs ban imposed on midfield star Edgar Davids.
Davids heard last week that his ban had been cut by three months on appeal.
The Dutch midfielder argued that the abnormally high levels of nandrolone detected in his blood in a routine dope test were caused by a homeopathic medicine he had been using to recover from a fever.
Public prosecutor Giacomo Aiello still called for Davids to be banned for eight months, while Juventus were hoping for a three-and-a-half month suspension - which the midfielder has already served. The disciplinary committee settled on five months and a �30,000 fine.
But Chiusano, a lawyer, who normally takes a back seat role at Juventus behind the Agnellis and general manager Luciano Moggi, believes the ban will be cut again.
"We have a serious chance," he told Radio Radio, a Rome-based broadcaster. "It depends on some circumstances that we hope to see confirmed during the hearing."
He added: "Being a Juventus representative I can't accept the idea that the size of punishments could depend on the name of the club involved.
"What's important (in doping cases) is the reasoning we had and the way we expressed it. Otherwise we wouldn't need to work so hard.
"It's not right to say that nothing new came up. Davids took a homeopathic medicine that anybody can find in the pharmacy not only in Holland.
"It's a dietetic product on which the Florence laboratory, at the attorney's request, completed some tests. These tests demonstrated that there is the chance of a connection between the product and a positive result of the doping test.
"That's a real and well founded possibility. And judge Aiello remembered during the trial that only Juventus presented this kind of evidences of the clubs that had players involved in doping cases."
