Why on earth shouldn't Todd Carney go out?

Sydney Roosters rugby league player Todd Carney. AAP Image/Paul Miller

Steve Noyce said yesterday that he knew Todd Carney had been drinking for the past three weeks. If I were Nick Politis, I’d be asking some serious questions of my CEO as to why he didn’t do anything about it other than impose a meaningless late-season alcohol ban.

The Roosters, who can’t make the semis, put a two-week grog ban in place four weeks out from the end of the season. What is the point of that? It’s a ludicrous rule at a stupid time of year that is begging to be broken – and thus create headlines.

If that is honestly the CEO’s best attempt to address his star player’s slide back into alcohol use and abuse then Politis has got every right to be looking at Noyce’s contract as studiously as he’s reviewing Carney’s.

I can’t help but think there’s also a glorious irony of a club that celebrates having a Kings Cross nightclub owner and alleged criminal as its number one supporter taking the moral high ground on any matter, let alone one of their players going out at night for a few beers.

Don’t get me wrong, Carney absolutely deserves to be in the last chance saloon. If you’re of the opinion that his last chance should have expired some time ago, then you’d have to change the subject to get an argument out of me.

However if he is on his ‘last chance’ then it should be a last chance for actually doing something wrong, not just having a few incident-free beers.

I shake my head at the ‘outrage’ displayed over this non-event. This is an absolute media beat-up that we all fall for hook, line and sinker.

Forty years ago Johnny Raper ran through an English hotel in nothing but a bowler hat in an incident that is much celebrated and used as an example of his larrikin, free-spirited nature.

These days he’d have be deemed a sexual predator and have to undergo alcohol counselling, be stood down from footy until his ‘problems’ were dealt with.

NRL players like anyone like to have a bit of fun… and sometimes that fun involves alcohol. Unless they do something that harms someone else or their property (that is, breaks the law) then there is no outrage, no disgrace and certainly no need for someone to be sacked as a result. There should also be no story.

I put a hypothetical to some work mates this morning. Suppose we decided the next month was vitally important to our business, we realised that we needed to be at our absolute best and as a result we made a pact that we all stay of the booze for a month.

We then find out that one of our co-workers had been one of several staff to go out for a drink on the weekend. We’d likely be disappointed, we may even feel that a trust had been broken, but would we even remotely be able to consider sacking him for breaking the ‘rules’? No way.

What if he’d been undergoing performance management for other issues? No way. Why is it different for Carney?

By going out on the booze, Carney is putting himself in a high risk situation of an ‘incident’ occurring which is absolutely stupid for someone in his situation, but going out in and of itself shouldn’t be the reason that his contract gets torn up.

Rugby league fans are our own worst enemies. It’s actually us that drags the game through the mud – not Carney – by these ridiculous standards we set for young men, who we adore one minute for being violent and risk taking and then pillory the next for displaying the same behaviour.

We damage our game with this false moral outrage that a 25 year old should happen to be at a pub at 2am, and by showing the media that we care more about inconsequential soap opera and gossip off the field than we do the game itself.