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David Gallop has made a mess of Benji Marshall’s request to play rugby in Japan in the off-season, and perhaps come back to Rugby League if he can’t get a long-term union contract.
The mess is this: telling Marshall that if he goes and plays rugby in Japan, his league club, the West Tigers, can’t sign him on to a new contract in 2010. As Marshall says, he is determined to be a one-club league player and equally determined to take the rugby money and run with it.
Gallop has essentially forced his hand.
All things being equal, if he has no major injuries this season for the West Tigers, Marshall will be off to Japan. I believe he will be successful in making the transition, if he plays at fullback, or even on the wing as a type of Shane Williams mid-field, twinkle-toed threat.
There is always the possibility that Marshall plays rugby in Japan and doesn’t do well and decides he wants to come back to league and the West Tigers. If Gallop tries to block this sort of a move, he could expose the NRL to a test case involving restraint of trade allegations.
Admittedly, I passed my Contract Law examination many moons ago with a mark of 52, but I reckon that Gallop would have a hard time trying to justify preventing a player playing another sport in the league off-season (even rugby, which he says is a “competitor”).
If league players are forbidden to play rugby, why not ban them from playing professional cricket (if they can get a chance), or boxing (which is a sort of sports competitor to league), professional touch rugby (Marshall was a touch-rugby star), or professional running?
What players do in their off season in terms of sport could well be ruled – and should be if a test case came up – their own business, and not the business of the NRL.
Gallop argues that any sport other than rugby would be okay for a league player to do in the off-season. But how can he argue that rugby in Japan competes with league in Australia?
The seasons are different. There is no complementarity of audiences or spectators. The argument doesn’t wash.
Nor does his argument that earning money from playing rugby in the off-season jeopardises the integrity of the salary cap. If this is right, that money earned in another country and in another sport should be part of the third party agreements, then any money earned out of season must be compromised too.
And this is plainly nonsense.
This is all hypothetical. The crux of the matter is that if Marshall wants to try his hand at rugby and open himself to the big dollars that this code can offer him if he becomes a star, then Gallop’s threats of expulsion won’t stop him.
But what the expulsion threats will do is close down an avenue to Marshall to come back to league if the Japan experiment doesn’t work out.
This represents stupid brinkmanship on the part of Gallop and virtually invites Marshall to gallop off to Japan.