News of the arrest today of Chad Fletcher - for cocaine possession in Sydney - has again raised questions about the performance of West Coast's premiership-winning team of 2006.

For Fletcher is now the fourth player from that team publicly linked with drug use. He joins Ben Cousins - who tonight will be the subject of a much-publicised TV documentary about his addiction - Daniel Chick and Daniel Kerr as Eagles who have had their names associated with drugs.

Not performance-enhancing drugs necessarily, because the public association with three of the four has been with recreational drugs, but one is compelled to ask: just what was going on at West Coast in that dominant period of the mid-2000s?

The Eagles won the flag by a point from Sydney in 2006 and all four of those players had influential games: Cousins with 18 possessions and two goals, Fletcher 25 possessions, Kerr 20 and Chick 10 although he was listed as the Eagles' second best player behind Norm Smith Medallist Andrew Embley.

And it was Chick who made a smother and laid the game-winning shepherd in the dying moments.

In February this year, Chick was fined $8000 after pleading guilty to importing performance- and image-enhancing steroids from Thailand. He had been caught with nine vials and a number of pills of anabolic steroids concealed in his luggage after landing at Perth Airport in October last year. His lawyer said when Chick arrived at the airport and completed his Customs form, which failed to declare the drugs, he had been ``groggy'' because of a potent sleeping pill he had taken during the flight. ``He ticked the green one instead of the red one - he accepts that,'' he said.

For his part, Kerr was caught on tape in 2003 talking to a convicted drug dealer. Police had tapped the drug dealer's phone and in the hundreds of hours of recorded conversations, they heard the voices of several sportsmen including Kerr.

The tapes, obtained by the ABC, suggest Kerr had bought Ketamine, a powerful horse sedative also referred to as 'Special K', from the dealer the night after an away game in August 2003.

Kerr was recorded discussing his use of the drug which he said turned everything "weird" and made him forget where he was. "I'm just recovering, I just feel good today, I was struggling the other day, it turned all pear-shaped, swear to God, couldn't even sleep it was that bad," Kerr was recorded as saying.

But the most famous of all these good-time boys was the prince of party animals himself, Cousins, and he has admitted to taking drugs - cocaine and 'ice' among them - during his playing days at West Coast.

In his documentary tonight, Such is Life which will be aired on Channel Seven, Cousins says he took drugs as his "ultimate reward" for all the hard work he did training and playing for West Coast as a teenager until his sacking and 12-month AFL ban in 2007. But, it should be noted, he denies ever taking drugs on game day or the day before.

And now we have Fletcher, the midfielder who attracted a measure of attention to himself in 2006 when he almost died in a Las Vegas hotel, on the West Coast players' end-of-season trip in the week after their premiership triumph. He reportedly ‘flatlined' before being rushed to the emergency section of a Nevada hospital.

Neither he, nor the Eagles, nor the AFL have ever given a satisfactory explanation for that dramatic turn of events. The Eagles initially claimed that Fletcher had collapsed as a result of an allergic reaction to a yellow fever injection, but the club said later that alcohol had been involved. A toxicology report from US police was going to be produced as proof there were no drugs in Fletcher's system but, as far as I know, never was. (The picture, incidentally, shows Cousins and Fletcher at an autograph signing session in Geraldton four months later, in February 2007.)

West Coast coach John Worsfold did address the issue at a media conference some months later, saying he had asked Fletcher whether he had learned anything from that experience.

"He said that he learnt it was a life-changing experience, and I am confident whether it was alcohol abuse or whatever it was that he had learned a massive lesson,'' Worsfold said. "That was back in October and I am very confident Chad has not put himself in that situation again."

Well, in light of today's developments, Woosha's faith in his one-time charge has been misplaced.

For Fletcher was charged with drug possession after allegedly being caught on Saturday night with cocaine in a nightclub toilet in Kings Cross, Sydney.

A police operation netted Fletcher, who is playing for Balmain Football Club, and he will appear in court on September 9.

New South Police issued a statement today, confirming a 30-year-old Western Australian man had been charged with possession of a prohibited drug. "Police from Redfern Region Enforcement Squad and the Dog Unit conducted an operation targeting drug supply and possession in the Kings Cross area on Saturday night.

"Just after 11.30pm, officers conducted a patrol of the toilets inside a nightclub on Bayswater Rd, Potts Point, when they allegedly found a 30-year-old man in possession of a substance - believed to be cocaine.''

So that's the Eagles Four and their chequered past. 

And today the Fletcher news will have some fair-minded followers of the code asking themselves questions about the 2006 grand final result and its legitimacy. How widespread was the problem of drug use at the Perth club during that season? And were performance-enhancing drugs being taken as well as recreational drugs? They're uncomfortable questions to ask, because we all want to believe the premiership was won fairly and by the best team, but the evidence demands they be raised.

After Chick made his court appearance this year, and his case received only scant coverage, my BPL colleague, Tim Lane, wrote here in May that he couldn't understand why more wasn't made of the incident.

Chick arrived at Hawthorn in 1996 as a lightly built 20-year-old. Within a few years he had developed himself physically to the point that he was generally regarded as a mini-powerhouse. In the dying minutes of the 2006 grand final, he applied a smother and shepherd that enabled Adam Hunter to kick what proved to be the winning goal for West Coast. These selectively chosen aspects of Chick's career are cited not for gratuitous reasons but to make a point.
Over the last few years, as the Ben Cousins story has been incessantly spotlighted, some have claimed the West Coast Eagles' 2006 flag is tainted. Yet scarcely has Chick's name been mentioned. We will never know for certain whether Chick was involved in anything untoward, but the episode does raise questions that need to be examined.

The Eagles, and AFL, were slow to move on this issue initially, even though rumours of Cousins' drug-taking had swirled around Perth for years.

They're unlikely to move any faster when it comes to opening this Pandora's Box and examining the bona fides of a match played four years ago. But that flag has a whiff about it, and the pong only gets stronger with each episode like today's.