Euroscene: You are on the (court) record as having declared - "That year in May, 20 days before the (1998) Champions Cup final, the team doctor advised us to take pills, I think they were Enervit pills, containing vitamins, carbohydrates and maybe amino acids.

"They were a little packet of 10 pills that we had to take in the morning. The pills were all different, one from the other.

"We were told to take them every second day, according to the doctor's instructions, although each of us dealt with them according to his own physical condition. The doctor also told us that in the last few days we were not to take two particular pills that we could tell from the others because of their colour, one of them was yellow, I don't remember what colour the other was." Do you confirm that you said this?

Del Piero: "Yes."

The above extract of testimony was given by Juventus player Alessandro Del Piero during the so-called Processo Juve - or Juventus Trial - in Turin. In November 2004, at the end of a bitterly controversial trial that had lasted nearly three years, the Juventus team doctor Riccardo Agricola was given a 22-month suspended sentence for sporting fraud, the court finding he had administered banned substances, including erythropoietin (EPO), to Juventus players over a (highly successful) four-year period between 1994 and 1998.

Tomorrow, Juventus, Dr Agricola and the club's managing director, Antonio Giraudo, are again on trial, with a Turin Appeals Court due to rule on that November 2004 sentence.

Throughout an investigation and trial that started in August 1998, Dr Agricola and the Juventus defence lawyers consistently claimed the doctor acted in the best interests of his players. They conceded he had resorted to a vast variety of medicinal products but said he had done so only to help the players through a 70-match season that stretched their physical strength and powers of recovery to the limit. Everything had been done above board, all of the contested "substances" had been declared prior to routine, post-match dope tests and, what is more, such practices were commonplace in professional sport, said the defence.

At the heart of the prosecution's case against Giraudo, Agricola and Juventus were two fundamental accusations: the use of performance-enhancing drugs such as EPO and the "off-label" use of other drugs to make them, de facto, performance enhancing.

"Off-label" use refers to the dispensing of specialised medical products such as Samyr (an anti-depressant), Neoton (used for heart patients) and Liposom Forte (used among other things for those recovering from brain surgery).

Why give such medicines to the Juventus players who, presumably, were not depressed and had not undergone recent heart or brain surgery? Were they not administered in order to have a performance-enhancing effect? Was it really necessary for Juventus to maintain a well stocked arsenal of no fewer than 281 medicinal products, enough for a small-sized hospital?

In the conclusions to his motivazioni (explanation for the original verdict, released last February) presiding Judge Giuseppe Casalbore gave his own very clear answers to the above questions: "With regard to EPO and to all the other medicines and substances already mentioned, there is the proof in the judicial acts that the defendant (Dr Agricola) used them in a fraudulent way in order to modify the players' athletic performance and consequently the result of the sporting competition.

"Dr Agricola has dispensed medicines and substances - some of them, as we have seen, freely usable, others to be used only in certain circumstances and others again totally prohibited - not for therapeutic reasons nor because they were necessary for the players' health but because in this way, and only in this way, could he achieve the result of fraudulently and not physiologically improving the players' athletic performances.There is the full and certain proof that EPO was administered to the players."

The Turin Appeals Court is called on to decide whether the interpretation of Judge Casalbore (and the medical experts he summoned) is correct - namely that Juventus cheated by using performance-enhancing substances. Or is the Juventus defence team right to argue that Dr Agricola's medical practices were (and are) legal, fair and in the best interests of his players' health? Over to the court in Turin.