Sins of the past a roadblock when trying to win the culture war
ROY MASTERS
March 6, 2010
A bad football club culture is a little like pornography - hard to define but once you see it, you know what it is. It can be reflected in something as simple as players arriving at the stadium in an array of club clothing, rather than the team uniform. Often it's revealed in a blame culture. Good clubs never worry who gets the credit. Bad clubs only concern themselves with who takes the blame.
A strong culture takes years to develop, yet it can evaporate overnight. Penrith won a premiership under Phil Gould in 1991, yet disintegrated the following year; the Roosters won in 2002 but coach Ricky Stuart was later sacked and they have had three coaches since.
The final, rapid unravelling of the bonds that tie a club is reminiscent of the passage from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in which Bill asks Mike, the dissolute party animal, how he went broke. ''Two ways,'' said Mike, ''Gradually and then suddenly.''
The Knights have won two premierships (1997, 2001) since their entry into the competition in 1988, a significant achievement considering Cronulla, who joined in 1967, have yet to win one. But they have now lost two key forwards on serious drug charges and face a season challenging for the wooden spoon.
Insiders at the Knights say they were happy to see prop Danny Wicks go but the loss of forward Chris Houston has gutted the club. University-educated, a qualified schoolteacher, a reserve Origin player who had captained the club twice, Houston was seen as a future, long-term leader.
It would be almost impossible to find a player who epitomises the self-sacrificial, gritty ethos on which rugby league is built more than the Knights' current captain, Kurt Gidley, yet he would appear powerless to break an association between drugs and football in Newcastle that goes back 50 years.
In the 1960s, Sydney footballers swore by an old Newcastle wharfie who they would visit when injured. No-one can be certain whether it was his magic hands, or a pill that made greyhounds go faster, but those players travelled back down the Pacific Highway minus the corked thighs, or bruised ribs that seemed certain to rule them out of their next Sydney match.
The perennially cash-strapped Knights have cut corners with qualified training and medical staff and in 1998 three Knights players were handed long suspensions after using banned food supplements.
In 2007, Team of the Century halfback Andrew ''Joey'' Johns was arrested for possession of an ecstasy pill and later admitted on Channel Nine that he had ''run the gauntlet'' at training sessions at Newcastle, hoping to avoid the testers from the Australian Sports Drug Agency.
Towards the end of his career, a ruling by the World Anti Drug Agency meant testing for illicit, ''recreational'' drugs became the responsibility of clubs, not the NRL. Full battery testing is expensive and the Knights were one of only two NRL clubs that did not conduct its own in-house tests. Early in 2008, when the NRL considered a zero-tolerance punishment regime for drug-takers, as opposed to the AFL's liberal three-strikes policy, the Knights voted against it. To be fair, the new administration at the Knights engaged in some rapid catch-up in 2009, with a comprehensive educational campaign against drug use but club culture is hard to change.
Team of the Century coach Jack Gibson, who had been successful at most of the six clubs where he coached, once lamented losing was ''in the woodwork'' at Cronulla. He compared waiting for a Sharks premiership with turning the porch light on for Harold Holt.
He also dubbed the Roosters the ''transit'' lounge in reference to players seeking to drop in at Bondi Junction for big contracts before alighting for a serious career somewhere else. It's a tag that endures. When coach Brad Fittler asked me to speak to his players before a game against Newcastle last year, one of the first questions asked was: how does a club build an identity?
Listening intently and respectfully was forward Willie Mason who has now transferred to the Cowboys, after being courted by Storm coach Craig Bellamy.
Bellamy is convinced the strong Storm culture could have transformed Mason back to one of the game's most dominant players, yet the Roosters suspect he will destabilise the Cowboys.
The Cowboys, established only 15 years ago, have not developed a definable culture. They are capable of self-destructing in a matter of weeks, yet can galvanise within days. Big Willie's influence on their culture will be one of 2010's intriguing stories.
). My family is full of teachers and I have shared accomodation with a number of soon-to-be-teachers who had to put quite a fair effort into what they have done! Part of the reason why it appears the entry scores are low is because they probably try to keep as many places open for teachers, as we're starting to need a lot more of them now that all the baby boomer teachers (now in their 50's) are all retiring.
