Card Shark
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Fancy you turning up again in this thread Luke.
Don't start any arguments mate, may I suggest.
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http://m.theage.com.au/rugby-league...urned-for-besieged-sharks-20130919-2u2gg.html
Taking the heat: Cronulla coach Shane Flanagan has had a tough task keeping his players focused. Photo: Sasha Woolley
Cronulla's belief they have done nothing wrong has helped insulate them from the tremendous pressures of season 2013.
Take it right back to the Parramatta game, in round five, and go inside the away dressing room after full-time. That's where you will find Cronulla at their worst.
They've lost 13-6 to the team that eventually set this season's benchmark for mediocrity, but it isn't the defeat that hurts as much as the pressure. Oh, the pressure. It had been gurgling for weeks after Cronulla had been pushed out into the light as the club the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority was gunning for because of a secret regimen of banned peptide use two years earlier.
''Flanno was up us a bit,'' Sharks captain Paul Gallen says of coach Shane Flanagan.
''And then a few of us flew back at him, saying, 'This is f---ed'. We were angry at everything.''
With whom? Flanagan? The club? The NRL? Stephen Dank?
''Angry at the situation,'' Gallen continues. ''Now, everyone knows the situation of what happened. No player went out and did anything wrong. It was something that was brought to us.'' Gallen stops himself. ''I don't want to say too much about that.''
Flanagan remembers that Saturday night, too.
''It all came to a head in the dressing room after that match,'' he says. ''Some blokes weren't happy with what was happening. Why are we playing football? Why are we even training? They're f---ing our season, f---ing our lives. I can't do it any more. It was directed at me because I was the coach. And they've never had a CEO since I've been here.
''The players didn't think they were getting support from the NRL, the club, the board was gone. They weren't angry with me. But they wanted answers.''
Bring it back to this moment, with the Sharks two victories away from a grand final appearance, in search of a breakthrough premiership, in a catastrophic season.
Serious questions remain about the Sharks, Flanagan, Gallen, former strength and conditioning coach Trent Elkin, other members of the coaching staff and those players at the club in 2011, some of whom are smattered across the rest of the NRL.
Serious questions remain about the 11-week period - and possibly thereafter - when sports scientist Dank became involved and banned peptides were allegedly injected, swallowed or rubbed in. Dank denies any wrongdoing.
Those questions have split rugby league.
The argument is divided between those who believe the Sharks deserve their place in the finals series because the ASADA investigation is not complete, and those who insist they should have been kicked out because there is sufficient smoke, if not a fire, to suggest they cheated.
In other words, put them on ice, right where the AFL put Essendon earlier this month.
''I generally don't say much about ASADA,'' Sharks chairman Damian Keogh says, ''and I'm not reading into it in anyway, but there are too many people who want to put us and Essendon in the same box. Anyone who knows the circumstances knows they are very different.''
Some will argue the Bombers had 5000 injections over a year compared with the Sharks, who were haphazardly given peptides in different forms over 11 weeks. Others will insist cheating is cheating. The degree doesn't matter.
''The whole process, the intent, and the things that went on, that's the difference,'' Keogh continues. ''Most people in sport and rugby league understand that if the players were truly just following instructions from the club, they really deserve to be looked after in the appropriate way. The people who committed injustices need to be held to account. In my mind, that's the way justice should come.''
The Sharks swear they've done nothing wrong, to the best of their knowledge. They are either innocent victims, or have a poker face as immovable as Shane Warne's.
The answers will come eventually. Until then, there's a premiership to win.
If we can momentarily suspend our judgment about what went wrong at the Sharks this year, what's just as intriguing is what has gone right.
In the foyer of the Sharkies Leagues Club, a large billboard trumpets Cronulla's future: a $300 million retail and residential development of Woolooware Bay that has been discussed for decades but will finally have soil turned as early as next year.
As I sit with Flanagan in the bar this week, as a nearby pensioner slowly eats her roast and sips her riesling, he calmly talks about the Sharks' hellacious season.
''When we come here, we can get away from the newspapers,'' he says. ''There's been TV cameras outside that front gate for 26 weeks, mate. Every channel has been in the carpark. Cameras have followed me home, knocked on my front door. When we get here, we're all together. And we handle it together.''
Asked if he sympathises with suspended Bombers coach James Hird, who greeted media at his front doorstep each morning, Flanagan replies: ''He was part of the supplement program, where I wasn't. I had no knowledge of anything illegal or incorrect.''
Some argue, of course, Flanagan must have known. And if he didn't, he should have.
It's just another part of the chaos that started the day after the fateful press conference in Canberra when ''the blackest day in Australian sport'' was declared in the face of the Australian Crime Commission's investigation into the use of banned peptides.
Flanagan and his players learnt the following day Cronulla were the NRL club firmly in the crosshairs. ''I can't remember who said it, but I do remember someone saying that those players [from 2011] would not start the competition,'' he recalls. ''We went to a pre-season camp on the central coast. It was a waste of time.''
According to Sharks players, NRL boss Dave Smith visited the club two weeks later, and suggested the matter would be wrapped up within ''about three weeks''.
He visited them early this month, with no end to the investigation in sight, to restate the league's support. ''We appreciated it,'' one player said. ''Because they haven't always shown it.''
In many respects, the Sharks' form has been inexorably linked to events and revelations throughout the season.
The depressing defeat to the Eels was part of a four-match losing streak after Flanagan was stood down and coaching staff members - club doctor Dave Givney, physiotherapist Konrad Schultz, football manager Darren Mooney and trainer Mark Noakes - were sacked.
Noakes has since been reappointed by Keogh's board, much to the angst of the NRL and interim chief executive Bruno Cullen, who subsequently resigned.
The Sharks have struggled for on-field consistency but still managed to finish fifth at the end of the regular season.
Unlike Essendon, the club is split between those players who are under investigation - 11 in total - and those new recruits who are not. There have been whispers those new players have grown tired about constant talk around the club about ASADA.
It's been suggested one player wanted out, while another was ready to roll over to ASADA investigators before one of his teammates talked him out of it.
Ask this season's new recruit, winger Beau Ryan, if there has been any resentment shown towards those who were at the club in 2011, he says this: ''I have never regretted the decision to come to Cronulla, or question anyone about what has happened. Never did I ask the coaches, 'Why did this happen?' I spoke to Flanno the day he was stood down. I trust him. I stand by him and everyone else in the club. I will walk the plank with them if I have to. We're all part of the family. We've all got each other's back. Until you are in the sheds, or in their houses, you can't explain how much it has affected them.''
The leaking of Dr Trish Kavanagh's report - commissioned by the club's former board - to sections of the media has also had seismic consequences.
While the report did not reach any conclusions, her chronology painted a sinister picture of what happened at Cronulla during 2011, even if it remains untested.
''The leaking of the Kavanagh report has been diabolical for our club,'' Keogh says. ''It's been used to whack us with a big hammer on a regular basis. The heavy suspicion was that it was someone who was closely involved with the club, potentially a former board director. I'd hate to think someone who was once a supporter of the club has inflicted this pain on the team for the year.''
It's been impossible for the Sharks to ride the waves this season and not ask where they go.
Steve Noyce, the former Tigers and Roosters chief executive who was parachuted into the club just before the Eels loss, has calmed the waters.
In the last month of the season, though, interviews with ASADA investigators often meant players missed two consecutive days of training. When they beat premiership favourites the Roosters 32-22 in the third-last round, Flanagan knew the reason.
''The interviews were over,'' he says. ''That was a direct result of a good week, good training, let's jump into these blokes.
That doesn't mean the white noise of accusations and theories are no longer hurting the players.
Gallen has employed his own legal team to face whatever charges might come his way.
''Gal has been the worst mentally, emotionally, through this whole period,'' Flanagan says. ''But he's still playing good footy. Some times he's been a mental wreck going into games, hasn't talked all week - but he's still performed.''
I tell Gallen this, and he shrugs. ''What do you do? We've all got issues,'' he says. ''We're lucky enough to help people out. I've been and seen kids in hospital, and people who aren't well off, and they're the ones doing it tough.
''I heard [Sharks utility] Wade Graham this year say, 'There wouldn't be a football team [but for] you'. You look at the dark days of 2009 and 2010 and it was a bit like Parramatta at the moment. Cronulla have got me, and Parra have got Jarryd Hayne.
''That gives you some hope of attracting players, and that's what I did. To think I could have that influence on people's careers is something I'm pretty proud of. If I finish my career without winning a competition, at least I can take that out of it. But I still want to win.''
Many at Cronulla will say Graham, 22, has been a surprising figure of strength, regardless of the sloppy streetwear he infamously wore to the first of the ASADA interviews.
They will also point to prop Andrew Fifita, who played for NSW this year and is playing through excruciating injury right now in the same way that his captain has done.
Then there's five-eighth Todd Carney, who was so desperate to stay on the field against the Cowboys in the elimination final last Saturday that he tried three different types of tape on his torn hamstring.
Noyce was at the helm of the Sydney Roosters when Carney rose to Dally M Player of the Year one year, only to be sacked the next because of his struggles with alcohol.
''People expect more of him here,'' Noyce says.
''I sense that he'd grabbed that with both hands.''
Noyce saw the change in Carney at half-time against Newcastle in round eight.
That was the Sunday when Gallen hurt his knee in the opening minute and didn't return, and halfback Jeff Robson kicked the ugliest field goal witnessed in years to clinch the result in extra time.
Before the players left the dressing room for the second half, Carney gathered them in. ''If this jersey means anything to you,'' he told them, ''don't come back without a win.''
That victory, according to all concerned at the Sharks, was the seminal moment of Cronulla's season. They finished just outside the top four, but they showed resilience not seen at Essendon, who were pumped in five of their last six home-and-away matches.
''After that Knights win, things turned,'' Gallen says. ''I've been around for a long time. I've always said you play when you're injured, you play when you are sick.
''They aren't excuses. A few of us probably were using it [ASADA] as an excuse, and from that day on we were there to play football. That was the turning point. That's when we said, 'F--- it.
''Because we know as a playing group, we've done nothing wrong.''
The Sharks have struggled financially for years, although the pending development has eased the pain.
A couple of seasons ago, they could not afford to hire a team bus for a match at Allianz Stadium, and prop Sam Tagataese drove into the eastern distributor and emerged on the other side of the harbour.
He reached the stadium as his teammates were warming up.
The Sharks remain eternally optimistic about their future, though, regardless of whatever findings ASADA brings down, whenever that might be.
It's a complete contradiction to an outside perception that the club will either fold or be forced into relocation if players and coaches are sacked en masse.
Said Bruno Cullen last month upon his messy departure: ''The worst-case scenario is very, very bad and Cronulla would need financial assistance in going cap in hand to the NRL, who they have upset, I would suggest, by reinstating the staff''.
Keogh, whose ''Sharks Unity'' ticket swept to power following elections in late April, responds: ''That is a potential avenue if we had to do it, but it's not the preferred avenue. There's been nothing that's been mentioned to me as chairman from a commission level or NRL level that has any suggestion whatsoever that the Sharks won't remain part of the competition, and in the Sutherland shire. That is all innuendo.''
Dave Smith echoes the sentiment, but falls short of a guarantee about the club's future.
''We've demonstrated our willingness to work with the club and I think everyone would like to see the Sharks grow on and off the field,'' he said. ''It isn't as simple as guarantees. We've made it very clear to the board that it is responsible for club governance and for building a sustainable model for growth in the future.
''We have said that we will work with them on that basis. At this stage it's impossible to speculate on the outcomes of the ASADA investigation or its ramifications.''
In the meantime, there's a premiership to win. After Manly on Friday night, there's South Sydney, and after that …
''They're two matches away from a grand final because they're young men who haven't knowingly done anything wrong,'' Flanagan says.
''That's the point: they feel like they are the victim here.''
