In Australia’s sporting landscape of salary caps and slightly altered jerseys for every other round, we are subject to a vast array of new and fresh sporting successes, losses, and intrigue.
But there are always slow weeks and when they come around, certain stories always get dug up.
Some may call it lazy journalism but the argument could just as easily be made it’s merely pandering to an easily pleased public.
After all, we’re the ones who click on the stories and keep the advertisers forking out, even when the story we’re being told is just a re-heating of one we’ve heard dozens of times this year or hundreds of times this century.
George Piggins won’t attend a Souths game
The biggest rugby league story of this year is that Souths – as in, no kidding, the South Sydney Rabbitohs – are winning rugby league games. They’ve won so many games, in fact, they are all but mathematically guaranteed of making the finals for only the second time since their 2002 re-entry to the competition.
Said re-entry to the competition came on the back of former Souths captain and coach, George Piggins. As Chairman of the club, Pigggins… look, you can Wikipedia the whole sordid thing. In a nutshell Piggins saved Souths and Bunnies fans think he’s the business.
However, after their 2002 re-admittance, Souths spent four years continuing down the path which saw them booted in the first place.
They failed to win games, churned through coaches, picked up the wooden spoon three times (and only avoided it in 2002 due to Canterbury being stripped of points for salary cap breaches) and had an average home ground attendance of less than 12,000.
Following season 2006, Russell Crowe and Peter Holmes a Court bought a 75 percent stake in Souths and they’ve gone from strength to strength. True, they’ve only made the finals once but their home ground attendance is up, they are attracting big name players and have 22,000 members – the most of any NRL club after Brisbane.
The one thing Souths fail to have these days is George Piggins at their games. He has not attended a Rabbitohs game since season’s end 2006, saying Russell and Peter ran a smear campaign against him and his family to gain control of the club and, as such, he won’t support the team in person while they are majority owners.
So now, when a journo is short a column for the week, they simply go and see George and ask him if he’s going to head out to Homebush to watch the Bunnies this weekend. They know the answer is going to be no – just as it has been every other time someone’s asked him over the past five years – but they continue to ask.
Quite why he doesn’t simply say “no comment” or, better yet, “stop wasting my time” is the only part of the story which is worth pursuing at this stage.
Sonny Bill is coming
Since walking out on the Canterbury Bulldogs midway through the 2008 NRL season, there has been one question constantly asked when talking to, about or (in the case of Danny Weidler) on bended knee in front of Sonny Bill Williams – when is he coming back to the NRL?
It’s been acknowledged he would return since virtually the day he left. The Bulldogs only allowed him to leave without further incident after receiving a pay-out and assurances he would not be permitted to return to any club besides them until the contract he signed with them expired at the end of season 2012.
They knew he’d be back. They just assumed it would have been by now and they’d have made more money out of it.
Early talk of SBW being unhappy in France fuelled the flames of his return. Then, as his contract with Toulon expired, NRL clubs came chasing his signature. Obviously he signed with New Zealand Rugby Union and won a World Cup.
He again signed with NZRU for season 2012 but since then it’s been the worst kept secret in Antipodean sport that SBW would be playing NRL in 2013, and would ply his trade with the Sydney Roosters.
Sonny holding public meetings with Roosters chairman Nick Politis means the deal is all but sitting in front of NRL salary cap auditor Ian Shubert, for him to scrutinise and work out just how the Roosters are able to afford a bloke who can command half an NRL salary cap by playing rugby in a non-English speaking country.
However, since Ian hasn’t seen the deal yet, we continue having to play the game of ‘when’s Sonny coming?’ Every week a column is printed assuring us that it’s happening. The most recent based it on the fact that the Roosters are in Sydney and Williams would be in Sydney for the Bledisloe. So… story?
Sonny Bill’s announcement he would be returning to the NRL means this particular story has an expiry date. Luckily, Sonny likes one year contracts, so he’s just as likely to return to rugby for 2014 and we can read stories of Sonny’s return all over again.
Time for rugby to rethink its scoring system
Whenever a game of rugby union ends with a scoreline whereby both team scores 20+ points, a quick calculation is generally advisable. Are both teams’ scores divisible by the number three? If the answer is yes, odds are that neither side scored a try and, instead, the crowd was witness to a series of penalty and drop goals.
When this is the case, there is generally a suggestion from an ex-player, pundit, journalist or angry ticket holder that it’s time for rugby to re-think its scoring system.
The usual arguments are wheeled out – ‘fans want to see running rugby’ and ‘certain players’ abilities to kick their team three points from inside their own half is unfair’ versus ‘less points for penalties would lead to more penalties’ and ‘you’re only complaining because your team doesn’t have a decent kicker’.
The fact is, rugby has awarded three points for penalty goals pretty much since the game began and drop goals have been worth three since the ’40s (and were actually worth four prior to that).
Interestingly, the try only became worth more than penalty and drop goals in the early 70’s, when a try went from being worth three to four points. So those who bring up the golden age of running rugby are either remembering it wrong or the players back then weren’t much for mathematics.
Nevertheless, complaints over how much goals should be worth in rugby have been carrying on since, I assume, 1992 when the current scoring system was implemented.
This season’s South Africa Varsity Cup was played with conversions worth three points and penalty and drop goals worth two. So perhaps we’re not far away from a fresh story about rugby’s scoring system, which can then be re-hashed for 20 years until another rethink.
Australia topped the Olympic medal tally
As a sporting nation, Australia is a Welterweight nation which fights – successfully – in the Heavyweight division. We have always been relatively small population wise, yet have a proud history of international success in tennis, surfing, cycling, swimming, athletics, rugby league and union – to name a few.
Every four years at the Olympics, we remind the world of our sporting prowess. While London was one of our leaner medal hauls in recent memory, we still stood up and showed the world that we may not be the biggest but we are right up there with the best.
Seven gold, 16 silver and 12 bronze medals is an impressive haul. Regardless of how a medal tally is gauged, we did phenomenally well. If you subscribe to the idea gold is all that matters, we were tenth in the world.
For overall medals we came in seventh. And if you want to go by weight (three points for gold, two for silver, one for bronze) we were sixth. But in Australia, that’s never enough.
No, in Australia we have to be the best.
Usually we simply go for a per capita ratio to prove we’re best. Unfortunately this time around we were pipped by most Caribbean nations, as well as the Kiwis, the Hungarians…
We may actually have ended up lower down the tally by this method. It looked like this was to be the first Olympics in my memory where we couldn’t spin a number one in the medal tally.
Until the Sydney Morning Herald rolled out a “statistical breakthrough” which gave us the ability to, once again, claim medal supremacy. With the formula “medals won multiplied by athletes in your team divided by home count population”, Australia retained its place as the number one nation in the Olympics.
All was right in the world, and it was the SMH’s most read article for the day – perhaps underlining the argument it’s not the journos’ fault, it’s ours’ for clicking on the story.
I’ll put my hand up, I did.
Follow Joe on Twitter @joebfrost
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