Dear Blake, recently you engaged in some vivid and unrestrained extra-curricular activities. Setting aside the small matter of your conduct, your timing was terrible.
Cronulla is no place to carouse at the best of times, and mid-Origin series is in no way the best of times.
Actually, it’s the absolute worst time to do anything that deviates from the ever-narrowing definitions of what constitutes acceptable behaviour. Particularly in public.
I mean, compare your situation to Ben Te’o’s. Whatever happened or didn’t happen, he’s still playing Origin and still hasn’t had any formal charges laid against him.
This poses the question: if a girl gets a black eye in a townhouse but there are no CCTV cameras around to capture it, does it really happen?
I have no answer for this; it’s just something you might like to consider, in case there’s a next time.
You came to public and police attention at a time when many are claiming league to be in the grip of a terminal identity crisis.
Some are questioning whether the NRL should be responsible for taking a lead role on every major social issue. The argument seems to be that as long as our cultural life is viewed through the prism of sport – in this case football – the NRL has a greater role to play in influencing and upholding social standards than most.
So as the theory goes, a seemingly isolated incident in which a footballer throws a punch will cause soft-skulled children all over Australia to begin brawling and beating each other up with brutal abandon, such is the extent of the NRL’s social influence.
In my opinion this link is tenuous at best, and seems to be symptomatic of a wider trend toward knee-jerk hysteria which is rendering us a nation of increasingly panicked sheep.
Even some of the sharpest among us are being driven to mindless panic by rolling, suffocation-level coverage that unspools endlessly after any major or minor incident that occurs and then, to gain more traction, cannibalises itself and covers that too.
This is the current climate, in league and in life, and your incident constitutes another sordid thread in the lavishly tarnished tapestry that is the NRL.
By now you’ve probably heard it said that it’s people like you who give the game a bad name. Aside from being a bit harsh, this would imply that the game once had a good name.
It didn’t. It has always been an acquired taste, a kind of crude delicacy. But there seems to be a loss of public perspective in regards to what league actually is.
This is not helped by the fact that the boss of the NRL is a businessman whose enthusiasm for what he calls ‘growing’ but what translates as ‘diluting’ a game he barely seems to understand, much less appreciate, shows no sane bounds.
In any case, you appear to have broken one or several laws and have been charged accordingly. And while all this debate about whether or to what extent football is a microcosm of life is valid, you probably don’t care, and just want to “get back to playing some good footy.” This is what I want for you too.
In light of this, I think you should consider using the ‘I want to be a firefighter so I require a clean record’ plea that Carlton’s Heath Scotland used twice to escape assault convictions.
As excuses go it’s not exactly Keith Richards-worthy but it should serve your purposes at this grim juncture.
Good luck with it all.
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