It is hard to believe South Sydney, jointly owned by two billionaires and an actor, is so cheap the club
refuses to pay Anthony Milford his wage while he lives in Sydney and trains alone.
Milford is caught in his very own Catch-22.
His contract won’t be registered because he faces assault charges and the NRL has a strict no-fault stand down policy. Yet Milford cannot be subject to the NRL’s no-fault stand down policy because he does not have a registered contract.
So, he finds himself in No Man’s Land, caught up in the kind of bureaucratic absurdity that allows South Sydney to not pay him with a bizarre sense of self-justification.
Milford signed a contract with South Sydney in July and, for all intents, thought he was heading to the Rabbitohs once his contract began on November 1.
The Rabbitohs even paid for his flights to Sydney and reimbursed him his moving costs.
They paid for his temporary accommodation and a rental car and they paid for a personal trainer to help him get a jump-start on conditioning.
To many, this would suggest Milford has a contract with the club.
But halfway through November, Milford discovered, by complete accident, his contract was not registered at all and that he was, effectively, unsigned.
He would have found out soon enough. He was due to be paid that month.
It seems a simple mistake but the Rabbitohs have used it to their advantage.
It seems that a couple of weeks after he signed his contract in July, the NRL sent it back to the Rabbitohs in mid-August telling them there was a “technicality”.
The NRL told the Rabbitohs the statutory declaration was not correctly witnessed.
Milford does not know whether this error was on his part or on Souths part. He was not told.
If the error was his, then Souths should have told him and corrected it. If the error was on their part, they should have fixed it and returned the contract to the NRL.
Whatever the error was, though, South Sydney failed to fix it in August.
And they failed to fix it in all of September and all of October.
Milford is still trying to find out who made the mistake on his contract.
He signed the contract during the Covid lockdown, the protocols of which meant he was allowed to have only one person from outside the bubble with him.
That person was his manager Sam Ayoub, who had to be there to co-sign the contract.
This meant the witness had to witness the signatures by video conference.
Milford was assured beforehand this was completely legal.
From here, it all becomes a shifting narrative, the actions taken seemingly adjusted to suit the situation. The Rabbitohs registered the contract with the NRL in August but had it sent back to them a week later.
Why it was not immediately fixed, why he was not told, has not been explained to him.
It gets complicated, though, because in September
Milford was charged with three counts of assault and wilful damage of a vehicle.
The Rabbitohs seem to be leveraging this for all it is worth.
On the charges, there are already events that have passed that cannot be reported.
This has made it more difficult for Milford to explain his case.
And from everybody else’s perspective, the whole conversation around it changes dramatically depending on what happens when Milford goes to court in, hopefully, February.
In a bid to continue playing, Milford offered to explain to the NRL Integrity Unit the events that night to provide a fuller picture of what happened.
Already his lawyer, Dave Garratt, is preparing to fight the charges.
“I have viewed the footage and Anthony is definitely defending himself in relation to the alleged assaults against any females,” Garratt said on Friday.
Two Wednesdays ago, NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo, integrity unit boss Joe Collins and Souths officials, including chief executive Blake Solly and coach Jason Demetriou, listened to Milford and watched the security footage that captured the incident.
The hope was the NRL would witness the footage and align their thinking with Garratt and overrule the NRL’s stand-down policy.
The precedent was when former NRL boss Todd Greenberg watched Curtis Scott’s arrest and, based on what he saw of the police bodycam footage, allowed Scott to continue playing.
Scott won his court case and is now suing NSW Police.
But this time, different boss, different outcome.
After the meeting, the NRL told Milford his and his family’s welfare was a priority.
They shook hands and Milford has not heard from the NRL since.
Then this week, the NRL announced that it would not be registering Milford’s contract until his legal matters were settled.
He could live with that, too, even though the contract was supposed to be registered well before the alleged incident happened.
But if he is not a contracted Souths player, why did the club pay his moving fees, his car rental, his flights to Sydney, pay for a trainer — all of which was done after charges were pressed?
Instead of helping him, being all they pretend to be, the Rabbitohs are distancing themselves from him.
What this all means effectively, is that the Rabbitohs, the Pride of the League, supposedly, and now owned by billionaires James Packer (worth $4.3 billion) and Mike Cannon-Brookes (worth $32 billion) and actor Russell Crowe (estimated to be worth about $100 million), don’t have to pay Milford the wages he should be due.
Last month he was not paid a cent by the Rabbitohs, because he has no registered contract.
There is nothing worse than a rich club that won’t spend money.
