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Rugby league fans would be well aware that the game has made few cinematic forays over the past 118 years or so.
A couple of gritty dramas and a couple of atrocious comedies.
Despite the lack of celluloid exposure though, this season’s NRL fan has the ever nagging feeling that they’re stuck in the middle of a slowly unravelling film plot.
Not so much on the field mind you, which has gone to schedule like the opening hit up, but rather off the field hidden from the game’s bright lights.
Unfortunately for NRL fans the script they’ve unwittingly been roped into as extras in isn’t an exciting adventure yarn, or suspenseful thriller, but rather a plodding and confusing conspiracy number starring the previously unknown ASADA.
Everything about the government backed organised crime and drugs in sport investigation to date has seemed like something out of a B-grade action movie, and it turns out it just may be.
Firstly, there was the big opening explosion sequence, the one you saw in the previews that makes you think “Hmmm, this appears to be relevant to my interests”.
Boom! A press conference is called, it’s the worst day in Australian sport since they tore down Seagulls Stadium. 150 players across a range of codes will be interviewed.
Thrills, chills, some big name cameos-this is going to be huge!
Pretty soon though you become suspicious that the producers pulling the strings might have done their dough in the first five minutes, as heart racing thrills give way to a lot of dull talky stuff between actors you’ve never heard of.
The follow up action scenes are pretty mild (Sharks investigation), but you keep watching because there’s still a lot of foreshadowing of many sensational future events to come…and plus it was in the previews wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
Unfortunately it turns out you’re the victim of some slick editing.
The events fail to materialise as if they’ve just been cleared from the tape and you end up wondering why the hell you even bothered and didn’t just watch your 1994 NSWRL grand final VHS if you wanted to see something depressingly predictable after the first three minutes.
On Wednesday, after being told two weeks ago that the Cronulla situation was a blueprint for what is likely to happen at several other NRL teams, fifteen NRL clubs were cleared of systematic doping.
So…is that it? Really? Has ASADA been holding a pair of threes this whole time and pretending they had a royal flush?
Even in the worst case scenario, that the entire Cronulla team from a past season has been found guilty of doping, is that going to rock the NRL’s world?
Footy players hate cheats. They will spear tackle them, drop the forearm in their face on the way down and stomp on their fingers on the way to marker.
A bunch of players who took a banned substance after they were told by a sports scientist “here’s your medically researched supplement plan that I went to uni for seventeen years and get paid to create” then not winning the comp?
That’s not even cheating, it’s being cheated.
As I can see it, the only way things are going to rise above a midday movie level of suspense is if the NRL goes through with its emergency plan of an internal draft to fill the Sharks roster if players are indeed banned, a decision on par for mine with building a Paul Carige statue in Parramatta mall.
Sure it reads like the miracle story about a bunch of ragtag castoffs and veteran coach binding together against all odds to deliver a club its first ever premiership, but realistically it would be a rugby league disaster movie about a club on its knees with alienated fans continually getting the crap kicked out of it by all and sundry.
And, as it turns out, they already perfected that particular rugby league movie back in the 80s.
Follow Chris on Twitter @Vic_Arious
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