IN FEBRUARY, it was injections. Today it is injunctions.

Words similar on the ear but very different in adding context to the AFL’s investigation of Essendon’s supplements program of 2012.

The progression from injections to injunctions has taken six months. A long, ugly and embarrassing six months for the club and the game itself, with no definite end in sight.

Right now, this game, this fight between the AFL and the Essendon Football Club, is about resolve.

Whoever possesses the most resolve wins the war from here.

History says the AFL doesn’t lose. History also says the AFL has never faced an opponent like the one Essendon has become since David Evans exited as chairman and Paul Little took over.

As spiteful and disturbing and unseemly as it has already been, it is going to get a whole lot worse from here.

This is uncharted, and it now has more to do with which team boasts the best legal advice as it does with unearthing, then facing up to and actually properly dealing with, the real truth of exactly what went on at Essendon from late 2011 to mid-2012.

The AFL loves to negotiate outcomes. That’s what it does. Think recent cases involving Kurt Tippett, the Melbourne Football Club and West Coast. Identify the fault and those who committed it, then work with the club and individuals to find middle ground on sanctions.

The AFL tried that with Essendon this week. But as it outlined at least 20 specific charges that fell beneath the general "bringing the game into disrepute" rule, it was like someone trying to push together two magnets with the same pole.

Which means the August 26 date set for the AFL commission hearing into conduct unbecoming charges laid against the Bombers and their coaches James Hird and Mark Thompson, football department boss Danny Corcoran and doctor Bruce Reid, is wide open to legal injunction.

Essendon does not like the fact that the AFL has sat with ASADA during its wide-ranging investigation, doesn’t like how the AFL has then acted as prosecutor in laying the most serious charges allowed under its own rules, and certainly doesn’t like how the AFL will then be sitting in judgment on sanctions.

The AFL argues that this is how it does business; how it has, mostly very successfully, operated since the late 1980s when the independent commission was formed. To the AFL, the key word there is independent. But Essendon sees nothing but conflict of interest.

In February when this story broke on the back of open, honest, reflective comments about Essendon's drugs program made by ex-player Kyle Reimers - comments which have proven to be 100 per cent accurate - the club's coach James Hird said he would take responsibility for whatever was deemed to have gone on in his football department.

There is still no definitive take on exactly what happened. There never will be. And everyone needs to get their heads around that right now.

The actual truth, so desperately sought by the coach in his many media appearances in the past couple of months, on this matter will forever be unknown.

But whatever did take place, it was enough for the coach's great mate Evans to stand down. For Ian Robson, the CEO, to fall on his sword for, as he said, not knowing what he should have known, after a club-commissioned external report damningly revealed that in 2012 Essendon Football Club was a "pharmacologically experimental environment".

For fitness boss Dean Robinson to be stood down, and then to resign and attempt to bring down a few with him in a recent interview.

And that's before we even get to the most mysterious character to ever set foot in an AFL club, biochemist Stephen Dank.

So, a lot has happened by way of fallout since the coach said he would take responsibility for whatever happened last year.

Football clubs keep telling us there is no individual greater than the club.

But Hird is bigger than Essendon Football Club. This is said not as criticism, just simple observation.

This man is bigger than this club. So big that he has been prepared to take on AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou.

No other person would have survived to this stage of this incredible saga, let alone still be standing and vowing to "defend vigorously" every ugly allegation that will be made against him in days to come.

There's carnage everywhere, and there is more to come. For the club, the AFL, the game itself.

Deep down, every figure central to this saga knows that.

The game now, though, is not a desperate search for the truth. But on who will blink first.

The AFL, under Demetriou's watch anyway, has been renowned for its long and steady stare.