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Rugby league bodies quite rightly say they are not boxing promoters, but the volatile and brutal nature of their game ensures the hard men bred to play it won’t always behave as saints. Over the course of a century, Sydney and Melbourne have evolved different tolerances to the rougher side of football.
Rugby league has its send-off and sin bin rules to discourage potential brawlers, but no matter what scale of punishment exists over players, when the red mist blinds the eyes and clouds over the brain, clenched fists inevitably fly.
Rugby league is a football code, though critics from time to time argue that it is more hand-ball. But significantly, as every tackle attests, it is a wrestling game. Rugby league isn’t classed among the martial sports, but it is no distant relative.
It’s not offered as apology, but since the code kicked off there has been an acceptance that one-on-one bouts that draw fists and blood are a consequence of nature of the game itself.
The notion that two men (or boys) should be left to fairly settle their differences via use of their fists is an old tenet of the ‘sturdy English spirit’ tradition.
Examples are legion through rugby league history of individual players arrogating to themselves the right to immediately retaliate against an opponent for a perceived wrong.
When the fighting has been confined to two antagonists it has been endured without severe sanction (the final stages of Game III of 2009’s State of Origin series a recent example).
In Victorian rules in Melbourne the brazen bare-faced fist fight on a football field became an intolerable affront to decent society, to be replaced by the subtle elbow and other less obvious and ‘off the ball’ tactics of intimidation and retaliation.
In Sydney that sort of game was, perhaps still is, seen as underhanded, back-alley and ‘cheap.’ The two codes clearly have different cultural norms and values.
What transpired at Brookvale Oval after Stewart and Blair were sent to the sin bin has been widely condemned by all within rugby league – but what happened in the first brawl is largely seen as a rare, but natural, occurrence of the game.
To enforce and breed a new mood into rugby league where ‘the biff’ is extinct and no longer has a place in the game is a particularly optimistic endeavour, and would almost certainly require players, fearing consequences, to bring less ardour into all of their play.
Over the past week the most vocal critics against the Manly and Storm suspensions and talk across the media that the game needs to be put in a harness, have been many of the most prominent players of the past 10-15 years.
Whether rugby league is ‘brought to heel,’ muzzled and leashed to sit alongside Australian rules at the feet of Mother Political Correctness, time will tell. If it is, to many it won’t be rugby league, but something else getting about using its name.
Marketing strategists might argue that ‘market differentiation’ offers greater potential for growth for rugby league on both sides of ‘the Barassi line.’
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