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How many rugby league fans secretly yearn to bring back the biff? The Manly-Melbourne storm indicates a decent chunk – how many is impossible to say – not only tolerate the odd brawl but love it.
Many fans were disgusted by the Brookvale donnybrook, which resulted in $100,000 worth of fines and action against 10 players.
But some took the distinctly un-PC view that it was terrific.
NRL boss David Gallop is doing his earnest best to protect the game’s image.
But what exactly is that image?
And for whom is he protecting it?
Even one of the players at the centre of all the fisticuffs came out and said how much he enjoyed the match.
Manly front rower Darcy Lussick, elbowed by an opponent but banned for three matches over a retaliatory head slap, called it “the best day of my life”.
“I knew all my team-mates had my back so we loved it out there,” he told Rugby League Week.
“We prepared all week for it to be that intense but you don’t really know until you get out there. But I loved it. It was good.”
Gallop commented tersely: “To now be boasting about it is up there with the silliest things I’ve heard said this week.”
Some might condemn Lussick for oafishly compounding his original sin.
Others might applaud his honesty, and thank him for saying what others are thinking.
Especially when one of those others proves to be one of the greatest players ever.
“Seeing grown men throw punches at each other in the heat of the moment has always been part of the game,” Andrew Johns commented on the ninemsn website.
“If we are going to be honest, the majority of rugby league people, including myself, absolutely love it.
“What Manly and Melbourne got up to the other night was no worse than what I saw every weekend running the sidelines in Cessnock back in the ’80s.”
Players might be forgiven for wondering who they should listen to.
They are trained as gladiators, promoted as gladiators, then expected to behave like sugar plum fairies when passions become inflamed.
Media outlets seem to have a dollar each way, criticising their appalling behaviour at the same time as they re-hash the brawl over and over again.
It’s just as well the punches thrown in these stoushes usually miss.
The whirlwind of flying fists at Brookvale exposed the players to as much risk of pneumonia as broken noses.
But all it would take is one punch, of the sort with which Nick D’Arcy broke fellow swimmer Simon Cowley’s face, to make the biff brigade think twice.
Assuming, that is, they had already thought once.
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