League's dummy and swerve
* March 13, 2009
IT TOOK them a while but finally they managed it. As rugby league's season opens tonight amid the steaming, malodorous wreckage of its publicity campaign, the code's bosses can at least be pleased they have pulled the Manly club into line, and ensured Brett Stewart is not part of its on-field line-up while the sexual assault case against him is pending. Even so, the episode suggests that values which are obvious to the rest of the community are still something of a mystery for some who administer the greatest game of all.
Manly has long thrived on, and motivated itself with, its status as the team others love to hate. An alone-against-the-world attitude may be useful for team bonding, but the same attitude at higher levels of the club becomes dangerous. It has worked to Manly's disadvantage in the Brett Stewart affair. Manly fans viewing their club management's truculent approach to the matter, as reported in yesterday's Herald, may perhaps shrug and say: 'That's just the rugby league culture - the tribe defending its own'. But if the code is to survive it must market itself more widely, and Manly's defensive and inept response will strike the general public as simply ludicrous - a dinosaur trying to tap dance its way out of quicksand.
The National Rugby League, which does not want to run a game for dinosaurs, should be praised for managing to get the club - eventually - to see sense. Its focus has rightly been on Manly's ill-managed season-opening event, where an abundance of alcohol appears to have been a factor in two alleged incidents - the second involving an altercation between Anthony Watmough and a club sponsor.
But the NRL deserves no praise for presiding over a code in which embarrassing incidents occur year after year. It has tried to address the behaviour issue, hiring consultants to educate players on how to conduct themselves off the field. Clearly, though, they have not been especially successful. League's defenders have argued it is society, not the game, that is at fault. Or that Brett Stewart has been hardly done by because others similarly accused have not been sidelined. Perhaps - but the fundamental problem is that, too often, significant sections within rugby league appear to say one thing about player behaviour and mean something else. A consistent response may not stop players' misbehaviour, but it will show league does not condone it.
