- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Rugby league currently finds itself in Australian sports version of no man’s land. It’s a purgatorial style middle ground surrounded on one side by the positive light thrown from the NRL’s unstoppable popularity and resilience.
The game continues to impress on the field by showcasing an era in which a handful of the greatest players to ever play the game operate on a week-to-week basis.
Unfortunately, to the opposite side lies the dark shadow that is being cast by a drugs investigation, lurching the game from negative headline to negative headline.
For this writer and fan it is a confused situation and is one that is proving frightening to even this most hardy of games.
This strange atmosphere currently surrounding the game would not have been out of place in an episode of Rod Serling’s classic supernatural series. Rugby league: welcome to the Twilight Zone.
In this mysterious dimension fans are being asked to continue watching and believing in the game they love, all the while knowing that at any time in the near future the whole thing could come horribly unstuck.
It’s like an inescapable game of Russian Roulette, where each new ASADA linked newspaper headline represents the empty click of the trigger, leading us one step closer to a bullet through the games heart.
The ASADA investigation, with its diligent government processes and confidential, behind closed doors method is confronting to a game built on standing toe to toe against an opponent.
And the confusion and lack of confidence in how to deal with this crisis is becoming ever more apparent.
Stoic rugby league types are jumping at shadows and the mere mention of ASADA is the cue for faces to contort through several different emotions (anger, confusion, sadness) before being met with a shrift ‘if they have evidence, then show us the evidence’.
As the season grinds on this seems less a statement of defiance and more a plea for the circus to end.
Stark examples of this were recently seen during the deflated press conferences of the Cronulla Sharks coach Shane Flanagan after his teams past two losses.
The Sharks are at the vanguard of this surrealist tragedy having been singled out as the starting point for the ASADA investigation after the club’s involvement with under suspicion sport scientist Stephen Dank.
Flanagan’s attempts in trying to protect his players from the enormous pressure created by the ASADA strife is one of the more admirable coaching acts of this rugby league season.
But this stressful effort has obviously taken a massive physical and psychological toll.
The strain on the coach’s face portrays the demeanour of a man who understands all to well the horrors that lay ahead for his beleaguered team.
Flanagan and his captain Paul Gallen admitted last week that the ongoing episode continues to sap the life out of their teams week to week preparations and justifiably they see this as a major reason for the team’s sinking fortunes.
Rugby league was a game that was founded and then flourished on a siege mentality, the ‘us versus them’ trope that has been a constant throughout the code’s storied and controversial history.
But this mentality has always required a clearly defined and physically manifested opposition or controversy, like players off field indiscretions or a club’s financial crisis.
The shadowy way in which the drug investigations have been carried out in reference to Cronulla have so far sidelined the NRL and its communities effectiveness in supporting a club under siege.
If journalists and media commentators are to be taken at their word, the ASADA investigation will soon reveal the names and circumstances of the players and officials directly involved in the affair, suddenly plunging the game into the darkness.
The Sharks are all but dead in the water as a competitive force just six weeks into a competition and this only serves to highlight the strangeness of rugby league’s current situation.
Because while all this is playing out the game continues on its merry way, comfortably carrying on like a blissfully innocent child unaware of a looming family tragedy.
As a fan and observer it is an absurd situation, one in which the outcome is uncertain and the effects of which cannot be predicted. Like waiting for a slow-moving flood that is inevitable and promises nothing but heartache and destruction.
Until the NRL can gain clear air and escape the ASADA fuelled purgatory, it’s impossible to watch the completion without thoughts constantly returning to what difficulties the future may hold, all the while betraying this fans enjoyment of watching the greatest game of all.
Reckon you can pick the winning team? Build your own dream team with Draftstars daily fantasy and compete on any match. For great odds on the NRL head on over to PlayUp. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.