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Western Bulldog Stewart Crameri opens up on emotion-charged AFL grand final weekend

Emma Quayle

Stewart Crameri watched last year's grand final at his home in Windsor, the barbecue cranked up outside and 30 of his friends and relatives crammed into his living room, leftovers from his wedding the night before. They seemed unsure what to think or say at times, and for the first few minutes after the Bulldogs won Crameri felt the same way. He had missed out on the one thing every footballer wants most to do, the thing his club has only ever won twice. But it was a moment. It washed itself away. Before he had time to feel too sorry for himself he was overcome by other emotions. "I felt happiness," he said. "It was hard, for sure. I definitely had that time of thinking 'what would that have felt like?' But after those five minutes, all I could feel was happy for the boys."

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Crameri was back with the Bulldogs by then. Sort of, at least. The conditions of his season-long suspension allowed him to train with his teammates throughout September and he finds it funny to think back on now, how he went from running around a school oval at St Bernards with a handful of his former Essendon teammates to training in front of a big crowd, then a bigger one, then more than 10,000 people two days before the grand final. "I felt like I'd won a competition, like I'd won a lotto ticket to train with the boys for a few weeks," he said. "It was like I was the mascot."

Returning after nine months – time spent wondering what had happened and what he was meant to do, finding some direction and coming to terms with the fact he was now a registered drug cheat – Crameri felt a little anxious. He wasn't sure he would remember what to do in all the drills and and felt a strange mix of rusty but fresh, like he was getting started while his teammates were caught in the middle of something that kept becoming more important.

Even now, some things are still making their way back to him. "We've had a couple of praccy matches and I've been OK. I feel good and I haven't had any injuries but I'm still a bit scratchy on some of the set-ups," said Crameri. "The coach says 'you're meant to be here' and as soon as that happens I remember and I'm fine. My teammates help me, too. Bits of it have changed and some I've just forgotten. But it's coming back. It's not taking me too long to pick things up again."

It's a little over a year since Crameri found out, while sitting in a room with Luke Beveridge, Peter Gordon and a couple of other people, that he would not be able to play for so long. Enough time has passed for him to stop feeling angry at other people for the part they played in putting him in such position, and he never saw too much point in that anyway. "I'm a forgiving kind of guy," he says, "because feeling bitter doesn't make it any better." He has also accepted that there are some things he might never know about what happened at his old club.

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Is he a drug cheat? He answers the question pragmatically. "I don't know the answer. Did I do something wrong? I might have. Not intentionally, I would never do that. I may have, but I might not have and only Stephen Dank can answer that. But on paper, we're guilty, and on paper is what goes down in history and what matters in the end. That's always going to be there and that's how it is. But you have to live with it so the question I ask myself is, 'did you do anything intentionally?' and the answer to that is no.

"Some things there aren't any answers for, and it's probably not even the injections that have affected us the most. It's the emotional stuff that comes with all of it. You think about that more often; are there any long-term effects mentally? It's like a bad nightmare that happened, but physically I feel fine. My body feels healthy. I don't have any ill effects. I can say I'm happy with what I definitely know they gave us. I have no worries with that. But other than that, I don't know."

Crameri kept training through last season, hoping the players' appeal against the Court of Arbitration for Sport finding would be successful and that he would be able to make his way back into the team. As weird as it was to train alongside the Essendon teammates he had left two years earlier to play with the Bulldogs, it helped to be with people who were experiencing the same sorts of frustrations he was. "It helped me, that they invited me to train," he said. "And hopefully I helped them a bit. too."

Other things got him through, too. Crameri felt many things when he got suspended, but was confused more than anything, and extremely stressed at times. Things felt better once the training group started up, though, and he broke his year off up with a couple of trips overseas with his parents. He also signed up for a meditation or "sound healing" course, promising his (then) fiancee Jess that he would see the weekly classes all the way through his ban.

"I never wanted to sit on the couch and do nothing. If you end up on the couch, that's OK, but you can't start the day that way. I wanted to be productive, so I did this two-hour class every week and the guy would play sounds and music and you'd just have to lie there and listen. At first I was stiff as a board and worrying about whatever, but after a while he said to me, 'you can tell you're starting to relax'," Crameri said.

"At that time when we got suspended I was really confused, and that took a good two months to unravel. I didn't know if I was coming or going and I kept thinking 'has this really happened?' So I wanted to [do] something that would help me get rid of that stress and I tried my best to help myself with it because I didn't want it to affect the people around me like it had been for four years.

Did I do something wrong? I might have. Not intentionally, I would never do that.

"They were the ones watching it every day and supporting me. Sometimes I would turn my back on them and do my own thing and I got a bit selfish at times. That was the biggest thing for me. I would try not to be selfish, but sometimes I was, so I had to be more conscious of my wife and other people. If I dwelled on it, I would just be wasting more time. And I'd wasted enough already."

His wedding made him feel better, too. "I copped a bit for that!" said Crameri, who set the date after he was suspended in January so that he and Jess and their families had something to look forward to. He has no idea what he would have done had the appeal been successful and resolved earlier, giving him time to get into the team – "I would have played. I would have tried to do both. Maybe. I might be lucky it didn't happen ..." – but is glad with how things turned out. "It was almost like my grand final. It was a nice distraction, it was something to feel excited about. I had that and I got caught up with the lead-up to the grand final, so it ended up being one of the biggest weeks I've had in my life. I didn't get to play footy but I got the wedding and I got to get married. That was like my grand final."

Now he has both things. Crameri hasn't forgotten all the other little parts of playing football: his pasta meal the night before each game, his pre-game walk, what he needs to pack in his bag. He is hoping and planning to play for the Bulldogs in their first pre-season game next week – it will be his first match in almost 18 months – and looking forward to finding out what he can do from there. "It's a weird feeling, to go away for a while and come back and you're trying to get into the premiership team, the best team," he said. "It's a different place than it was, in a good way, so I'm looking forward to all of it. I haven't forgotten how much I love it. I can't wait to do it again."