Doping-Australia watchdog mulling appeal of Essendon verdict

April 1 (Reuters) - Australia's national anti-doping agency is considering whether to appeal a sports tribunal's decision to acquit 34 professional Australian Rules footballers of drugs charges. The Australian Football League's (AFL) anti-doping tribunal on Tuesday found the 34 former and current players of the Melbourne-based Essendon Bombers club not guilty of charges of taking Thymosin beta-4, a banned supplement believed to aid in tissue repair and regeneration. The Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) has been under fire in the wake of the verdict, which came over two years after the agency and the AFL launched a widely criticised joint investigation into the club's supplements regime. The AFL urged ASADA on Tuesday to let the tribunal's decision rest but ASADA chief Ben McDevitt remained defiant and defended his agency's conduct of the protracted and costly probe. "An appeal option is a very live option for ASADA," McDevitt told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday. "In fairness to the tribunal we need to carefully examine the report. "And then we need to come to a reasoned dispassionate decision as to what we might do next." The saga has overshadowed Australia's richest and most well-attended football competition for over two seasons, with allegations of impropriety thrown at all sides. An independent review in 2013 commissioned by Essendon, one of the AFL's oldest and most successful teams, castigated the club's management for governance failures that produced a "disturbing picture of a pharmacologically experimental environment" during their 2012 season. Essendon were subsequently barred from the AFL's 2013 playoffs, slapped with a record fine and their head coach James Hird banned for 12 months for bringing the league into disrepute. With no positive drug tests recorded and having failed to compel key witnesses to sign sworn statements, ASADA brought a case to the tribunal it admitted was circumstantial but believed strong enough to lead to convictions. "It would have been a gross dereliction of my duty as CEO to not go ahead and issue the 'show cause' notices," McDevitt, a former top police official, said, referring to the charges issued against the players. He said ASADA would conduct an internal review of its procedures but rejected Essendon boss Paul Little's comments that the players had never taken anything "harmful or illegal". "They've been used as pin cushions and we don't know what was injected in them," McDevitt said of the players. ASADA will wait on an AFL anti-doping tribunal ruling on Stephen Dank, the controversial sports scientist at the heart of Essendon's supplements programme in 2012, before making a decision to appeal. The verdict is expected next week. (Editing by Greg Stutchbury)