Expert
NRL season 2018 is finished and all the major media awards and club championships have been handed out. But that doesn’t mean there are no important prizes left to scoop – I proudly present the inaugural celebration of the NRL Crises awards!
Although these are the first iteration of the Crises, there’s a long and distinguished history of teams wasting talent, wistfully thinking of alternate realities and plenty more. Only now we are able to come together and celebrate these efforts.
Here are your 2018 nominees and winners. I’m always keen for new categories, any and all suggestions will be considered. Tell me who should get what. Now let’s get into this!
Nominees
Honourable mention
Penrith Panthers. Sacking your coach when you’re on the brink of the top four? It’s certainly something.
Winner
Canberra Raiders. It’s not often a team finishes tenth with a positive for and against. That’s pretty impressive.
Nominees
Honourable mention
Canterbury Bulldogs: what if they’d kept their clothes on? And what if they twigged to Dean Pay’s system earlier than Round 20?
Winner
Penalty wars 2018. Just imagine if the NRL had supported its officials in enforcing the rules. We’d have a faster game, cleaner around the ruck with more attacking play.
Nah, I didn’t want to see that either.
Nominees
Honourable mention
Peter Beattie doesn’t know who Cronulla are, then confuses a Barcelona jersey with a Newcastle one: it was funny, sure. But hoo boy did it get taken seriously.
Winner
Mad Monday Bulldog-gate. think of the children!
Nominees
Honourable mention
‘Billy Slater/Cameron Smith/South Sydney/The Roosters/The Broncos are a protected species’
Winner
“Let the game flow”. I still need someone to explain to me just what this mythical ‘flow’ actually is.
Nominees
Honourable mention
Whoever let Greg Inglis do a press conference on his own before his suspension was announced.
Winner
Tie: Leilua and Hipgrave. If a team needed someone to attempt an unnecessary offload, to give away a penalty late in a tackle count or perhaps even do both at critical moments in games, Keegan and BJ were reliable producers in 2018.
This being the first ever Crises ceremony, it may seem a tad premature to name an immortal. Yet sometimes someone out there performs to such a level that there’s no choice but to confer their due status.
Congratulations to Phil ‘Buzz’ Rothfield, the spiritual grandfather of these awards. Without Buzz’s years of work cultivating a constant and feverish state of crisis, we’d never know that Origin games may not sell out each year and that referees constantly cost your team the game.
Buzz’s legacy means we have professionals to enjoy like Paul Kent, Dean Ritchie and Paul Crawley, among others. He’s selflessly built a path for others to tread and tread they do, over and over again.
Buzz will stand up and fight moral outrages like nude footballers being stalked by paparazzi at a private event, even if it means having to have lingerie models photographed sitting on his lap. We salute you!
Congratulations to all our 2018 winners! We look forward to next year, as long as there’s an NRL to enjoy. From what Buzz and co. tell me, it’s touch and go right now.