Essendon players given legal training ahead of ASADA interviews Essendon players have been given legal training ahead of their ASADA interviews. ESSENDON players are being given detailed legal briefings ahead of next week's crucial interviews with the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority. Lawyers for the AFL Players' Association have held several one-on-one sessions with players to prepare them for the ASADA grilling. Players will attend the interviews in the company of AFLPA legal counsels Brett Murphy and Bernie Shinners and have the option of bringing their own manager or lawyer. Essendon will not have a representative at the hearing and has not been involved in coaching its players on what to say. AFL investigators Brett Clothier and Abraham Haddad will sit in on the interviews as part of their joint investigation with ASADA. Captain Jobe Watson and the club's leadership group will be among the first to answer questions about the controversial supplements regime used at Windy Hill last year. Coach James Hird and several Essendon assistant coaches and officials have already fronted ASADA to explain their roles. The man who ran the program, sacked sports scientist Stephen Dank, has not yet agreed to be interviewed. But his testimony to the Australian Crime Commission will help form part of the questioning. Essendon's players have been told they can freely answer questions from ASADA. They are expected rely heavily on consent forms, which they believed listed the substances they took as WADA-approved, to back their claims they have done nothing wrong. There is no suggestion any Essendon players will give evidence against a teammate, but it is expected every player on the club's list in 2012 will be given the opportunity to provide evidence. A group of players who have since left the club have engaged their own legal team. Lawyers from both sides were unable to agree to what constituted "reasonable assistance" by players. AFL players are expected to be more cooperative. Documents handed to ASADA - and seen by the Herald Sun - reveal a group of Essendon players had weekly injections of the banned drug AOD-9604 last season, plus regular injections of Thymosin. Variants of Thymosin are banned by ASADA.