I don’t expect to revolutionise the NRL with this post, but I would like to give a fan’s perspective on the current situation with the Melbourne Storm.

No one in my family ever watched or supported NRL, but when I was 15 I went with friends to watch a trial game between Parramatta and the Knights in Tamworth.

After the game, I met the Eels players and had my photo taken with Clinton Schifcofske. I thought it was great and have been an Eels fan ever since – going on thirteen years now.

Living in Tamworth, there was no stadium close by and I never made it to a game. In 2003, I moved to Canberra and I was absolutely stoked there was a stadium so I could finally see my team in action.

I watched my first live NRL game at the age of 23 – Parra v Canberra.

Unfortunately, Parra went down by about 50 points, but I spent the whole game really excited that I was so close to Luke Burt, Nathan Hindmarsh and other players that I loved, but had been only able to watch before on TV.

My husband is a mad Raiders fan and has been for 24 years.

His enthusiasm for the Green Machine is infectious and we have been going to Raiders games together for the last three years. We’ve been club members for the last two years. It didn’t take me long to see why he loves the Raiders so much.

They’re talented, they play entertaining football and they have a lot of heart.

I love watching Campo play when he’s fired up and Dugan really has no fear. In addition, they are all obviously blokes who are down to earth and can poke fun at themselves (something increasingly hard to find in NRL today).

I remember my roots.

I’m a Blue and Gold Army member and we go to Eels games in Sydney 6-8 times a year, plus finals. I support both teams because I see so much good in both. I have two jerseys, two memberships and happily cheer on both the Eels and the Raiders.

When they play each other, I just hope no one gets injured!

Maybe I’ve raved on for too long, but I’ve written this to give context to my comments below and to try and demonstrate how the NRL, something I have loved for so long, has recently turned so sour.

I won’t lie, I’ve never been a Storm fan.

To me they play dull, mechanical football and I have always thought that they went too far in pushing the rules. Storm games equal a short ten, grapple tackles, chicken wings, niggling in the play the ball area and generally slow play.

Not exactly entertaining stuff.

When the news broke about their salary cap cheating, I was shocked. It was immediately clear that this was no accident, no mistake. For years the Storm were cheating the cap.

It was deliberate, it was underhanded, it was a knowing violation of the rules and there was no defence.

As an Eels fan, I was extremely upset.

I was at the 2009 Grand Final. My husband and I followed the Eels run to the finals, travelling to Sydney to watch as many games as we could and watching the rest on TV. When the Eels made it to the Grand Final we took money from our wedding fund, bought expensive tickets we couldn’t afford from a disappointed Bulldogs fan and took a long weekend off to watch the game.

Needless to say they didn’t win, but I was proud that they had made it to the end and really enjoyed the atmosphere at the game.

To find out after the fact that the Grand Final was heavily influenced by cheating is upsetting. This might sound dramatic, but I feel like it taints my memories of the 2009 season, like the game that I invested so much emotion in and enjoyed so much revolved around a lie.

After disappointments in 2001 and several semi final knockouts, I wanted that premiership and the knowledge that my team had overcome the odds to emerge victorious.

The final was not an even playing field however and the Eels lost.

You put it in perspective.

I agree that the Eels shouldn’t be given the Premiership. They didn’t win it and you can’t play the what-if game and say with any certainty what would have happened if Melbourne hadn’t cheated. Initially I felt like the Storm had been punished and I was at least somewhat satisfied with that.

Then the media attention starts and everyone is very careful to avoid blaming the players. I agree with that as an initial approach (innocent until proven guilty), but I have to admit that I find it very hard to believe that some players in particular who were on such large salaries and getting money delivered to them in all sorts of unusual ways didn’t even suspect that something was up.

It doesn’t really make sense. How can one player receive so much of an entire salary cap (in a team where there are at least four players who would demand a similar level of money) and not know?

Sure enough, more and more comes out in the media about double contracts, double group certificates, money being filtered through sponsors and training camps, dodgey security jobs, speed boats and Harvey Norman vouchers. It’s obvious that some of these players (though not all) knew what was going on.

The continual claims that they didn’t insults my intelligence!

I am surprised to hear that certain Storm players say they still feel they won the premiership. I feel like those comments are in poor taste and show a complete lack of remorse for what happened. I thought ‘pull your head in!’

Anything won by cheating has to be forfeited.

Gold medals, titles, premierships. How can the community allow a club to retain something they obtained through fraud? The simple answer is, you can’t! I feel sorry for players who didn’t know and were penalised, but they should be looking to their complicit team mates and the club itself for answers, not blaming the NRL for taking the action that was clearly required.

Then more reports of players who say the punishment is too much. Gus Gould and other commentators talk about how the Storm will have to play for no points, that it isn’t fair.

I think that pales in comparison to the unfairness that would result were the Storm actually able to accumulate points and make it to the finals with a team more than a million over the salary cap!

What would be fair about that?

No I do not think taking a salary cut is good enough – the Storm were built on extensive fraud over five years and that isn’t undone by losing one player or a few players having less in their pockets for the rest of the season.

At the first Storm game, the crowd is filled with banners in the crowd supporting the players and calling on fans to unite. The Storm players hug and celebrate every point like it’s the grand final. It’s pretty sickening to watch. There is no sense of shame or remorse, just this sense of entitlement, arrogance and ‘overcoming adversity’ that has no real basis in reality.

What adversity?

What about the adversity faced by other clubs who were pitted against a team well over the cap? What about the Eels, the Raiders (and other clubs in the NRL) who lost juniors and very talented players, only to have them picked up by other teams and then have to play against them?

I don’t believe the Storm have faced that kind of adversity – they retained their core playing group and have done pretty nicely out of it.

Every media clip I read is full of comments saying other clubs do it, so why should the Storm be punished. That is the line also taken by Brian Waldron.

It’s really classic little kid stuff – Johnny and I ate the cake, but he didn’t get punished because Mum only caught me doing it, so why am I in trouble?

The Storm are proven to have cheated. If other clubs are caught doing it, I would expect the same action to be taken against them, regardless of who they are. The Storm should take some responsibility for their actions and stop trying to point the finger elsewhere.

Even if other clubs are doing it, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t do anything wrong. It doesn’t make what you did alright!

Then the whole salary cap comes under scrutiny and Cameron Smith in particular is suddenly the poster boy for underpaid NRL players who are getting a raw deal.

How arrogant.

Melbourne cheat the cap so that players like him can be paid tens of thousands more, and he wants to stand up and put his hand out? Is he now the poor victim of a cruel system that forced his club to cheat so they could pay him extravagant amounts of money and renovate his house for free (which I’m sure was a real dump!) The whole thing is ridiculous.

For me it all came to a head Saturday night at the Raiders v Storm game.

I was there and I have never been more disappointed and angry – I went home absolutely livid. I watched the narrowest ten metres I’ve ever seen. I watched the Raiders copping high shot after high shot and niggling in the play the ball.

I watched referees allowing tries from off-side positions and disallowing tries that were clearly okay. I watched a smug Adam Blair put on report justifiably, then mouth off at the referee, pull silly faces and bobble his head ridiculously as he penguin-walked his way back to the line.

His arrogance disgusts and offends me, especially when it came on the back of a number of aggressive and dodgy tackles from him that weren’t even penalised!

I watched a team who didn’t care about anything but themselves and about winning.

Where does this sense of entitlement come from? Where is any sense of remorse for what happened?

For the impact that the Storm cheating has had on the game in general and the impact it has had on the fans?

No, not the Storm fans who are rabid in their defence of a team caught red-handed with their hand in the cookie jar. I’m talking about the fans whose teams were denied an even playing field on grand final day. The fans who spent time and money watching their team lose to a stacked opponent.

The teams who continue to lose competition points to a Storm team that is over the cap and prolonging the impact of their cheating every time they take the field.

I’m not expecting an apology, particularly from players who did nothing wrong. However, I would have expected from the players some self awareness, some humility and an acknowledgement that regardless of player involvement, their club wronged the NRL community.

Instead, I see a team that feels hard done by (as hard as that is to believe), a team that is self righteous, unrepentant, smug, arrogant and plays with a cavalier attitude that risks the physical safety of their opponents and gives the finger to all the fans affected by their club’s actions.

I support the stance of David Gallop and the NRL.

I think they have done the best they can under circumstances where there is no clear fix and not every wrong can be righted. How do you undo the impact of this cheating on five years of the game?

How do you make it fair for the teams who have already played the Storm this season and those teams who haven’t (particularly when some teams play the Storm once and some twice)?

How do you punish the club without punishing the uninvolved players? I don’t have the answers.

I am writing this letter because I need to feel like I have a voice. I am angry. I am railing out against the attitude of the Storm, the club, the players, the independent directors, the CEO of Bulldogs’ major sponsor JayCar, the fans and the commentators who argue in favour of a corrupt organization.

I feel incredibly disillusioned by something that used to give me a lot of pleasure.

I don’t look forward to watching games the way I used to and I feel like my passion is less than half what it was. I can only hope that when all of this blows over, I still support the NRL and don’t feel compelled to turn away completely.