NATIONAL Rugby League CEO Todd Greenberg should be entitled to a long stretch of stress leave after another off-season horribilis for the state’s premier winter sport.
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Even for a code prone to such chaos and controversy off the field, the past few months have been extraordinary: a grand final-winning coach kicked out of the sport; a star turning his back on his side to try his hand in America’s NFL; an entire club banned from a popular Sutherland Shire nightspot (and that’s only what the Cronulla Sharks have served up).
Add to all that the salary cap investigations, the two-coach circus at Manly and Wayne Bennett’s bitter separation from Brisbane and you’ve got another late spring and summer to remember.
(The very serious sexual assault allegations hanging over a number of players have also added to league’s problems, but are obviously in a category all of their own.)
As the game reels, stunned, from one self-inflicted black eye to another, it’s worth wondering whether league continues to thrive in NSW – both in its biggest city and in the bush - despite its many controversies or because of them.
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Is league’s ability to soak up the newspaper back pages with coaching intrigue and toxic feuds even during the long off-season part of the secret to its success? Or has the game simply been lucky that its main competitors haven’t been able to gain much traction?
Certainly, rugby union, which has been stumbling through the valley of death ever since the Super Rugby competition started to implode and the Wallabies lost the ability (or the will) to win, must look at its close cousin and wonder how the 13-man code does it.
Where other codes try to project an air of stability, rugby league remains a sporting soap opera – liable to produce the most outrageous twist at the most shocking time before moving smoothly on to the next drama.
Like the classic soap operas, its got a cast of larger-than-life characters and a back story filled to bursting with back-stabbing, betrayal and barely believable antics.
As Todd Greenberg counts down the days until the trial matches begin, so there are at least some games for the journalists to report on, the rest of us will watch on with mouths agape at the pre-season madness.
Summer just wouldn’t be the same without it.
