Bourbon Beccy weighs in on the matter:
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/sport/nrl/story/0,26799,24371490-5016307,00.html
Cronulla Sharks stand tall
By Rebecca Wilson | September 20, 2008 12:00am
IT would be a delightful change to be able to actually write about football this week.
Here we are smack bang in the middle of the AFL and NRL finals - a time when columnists are usually reaching for other ways of saying "fever pitch".
Instead, the front-page headlines north of Albury/Wodonga have been relentlessly and almost tediously about allegations of badly behaved footballers.
The National Rugby League has suffered its worst year for appalling acts committed by its fulltime professionals.
Last year, the AFL could lay claim to the title. This year, it has been an annus horribilis for David Gallop and his cohorts (who have incidentally invested a hell of a lot of time and money in trying to make young athletic males respect females).
One of the league's flagship teams, led by a coach who has put himself on a pedestal as one of the best managers of footballers, is in the midst of a crisis that could blow the entire club apart.
The Broncos play a major semi-final against the Melbourne Storm in Brisbane tonight. Whether they can pull themselves together in time to win this match remains to be seen.
What is clear is that at least 10 of these blokes may have committed acts of idiocy in recent weeks that suggest the most elite footballers still don't understand what it's like to show restraint or behave in a socially acceptable way in very public places.
To paraphrase PJ O'Rourke, "Stupidity is a renewable resource".
Naturally enough, all of these players (three of whom allegedly had sex with a young woman in a nightclub toilet early on Sunday morning) will take their place in the Broncos team.
Their captain, Darren Lockyer, is also under a cloud - he is accused of committing drunken and foul acts outside a nightclub with three teammates. Lockyer has strenuously denied the allegations.
The Broncos claim they will not tolerate bad player behaviour. They proved this week that of course they can. After all, it is a finals week.
So protected have the Brisbane players become that even their local newspaper (
The Courier-Mail) has refused to name those three accused of indecent assault last weekend.
The nightclub manager has had threats against him from fans for daring to come out against the Broncos. Nightclubs around town have tolerated appalling acts from Brisbane since 1988 - they have run the town for so long that standards of normally acceptable behaviour no longer exist.
I have written here in recent weeks about the furore that surrounded the Cronullas' Greg Bird after he allegedly glassed his American girlfriend after an all-night drinking binge.
He was dropped indefinitely from the side and his ban remains in place in spite of calls from fanatical Sharks followers to have him reinstated for next week's preliminary final, despite charges being laid against him. In fact, his girlfriend - bearing facial scars - remarkably went to court late this week in an attempt to have lifted the AVO taken out on him by the police.
But the club have stood firm. It could cost the Sharks their first premiership, but they have done what so few clubs have ever dared to do.
Football clubs love to hide behind the law when they defend the indefensible. They say a player is innocent until proven guilty (Ben Cousins-style).
Yet what they forget is that the player has already brought the game - and his club - into disrepute no matter what the legal outcome.
The Broncos have attracted shocking headlines to a sport that really needed to be on the back pages for the right reasons this week.
Eyewitnesses say the players they saw were not just enjoying a quiet couple of beers after a game. They drank on Friday night. And then they started again at lunch on the Saturday. By Sunday morning, the ugliness had started. If it's true, what were three blokes thinking to take one girl into a public toilet and have sex with her?
Bird was out drinking nearly all night the Saturday after a Friday night victory, just days before finals matches were due to start. The alleged glassing happened nearly 36 hours after his first drink.
This, by anyone's definition, is not the right thing to do.
No amount of lecturing from university academics is going to stop these blokes. They thumb their noses at those do-gooders who speak to them in grave tones about binge drinking.
The only way to fix it is to do what the Sharks have done and that is to cut the player. Deprive him of a livelihood and make him miss the thing that is so dear to him - his football.
The lack of respect these players have for authority is a reflection of the soft way they have been treated in the past. Only stands like those taken by Cronulla can turn the tables. Premiership or not, the Sharks are my team of the year for that.
