Yes, I get that the ongoing skirmishes between rugby union and rugby league over players like Joseph Sua’ali’i and even Nathan Cleary, can feel these days like a war without end.
Just quietly though?
Just quietly, I heard a very strong whisper this week that we ain’t seen nothing yet. This is not just because Rugby Australia is suddenly tossing money at leaguies in the hope of bolstering the Wallabies for the coming Lions tour and home World Cup. It is because as rugby continues to explode in popularity overseas, ever more eyes are turning to Australian league players, particularly those with a background in rugby union. Major raids are coming. When it happens, I don’t want you to say you were never warned!
Vegas venture is for all the wrong reasons
Purely from the point of view of expanding revenue, I guess the idea of trying to sell NRL matches to the American gambling market by starting next year’s season with a doubleheader in Las Vegas might make a certain amount of sense to someone with a gambling instinct.
But beyond that?
Beyond that, I am – not for the first or last time –with the Reverend Costello. Even if it worked, do you really want to build the revenue of your own game on the lost wages of poor bastards living in Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi? At its best, league is a great game filled with derring-do, athleticism and on a good day even chivalry and a rough kind of heroism. It lives off the enthusiasm of the crowds both at the game and watching at home. Putting this same game ever more on gambling revenue is a bad error.
As discussed a couple of weeks ago, the challenge for the NRL now is not how to get more gambling revenue, but how to wean itself off the gambling sponsorship they have now.
In short order, the regulatory environment for those kind of sponsorships is going to be tightened in this country, ideally to the point of extinction. The days of players, stadiums and entire broadcasts acting as billboards for mug punters to blow their dough will go and while that might be bad news for the pinstripe brigade, it is good news for the league community who inevitably will have more money in their pockets.
For there really is no way around it – the more the game’s powerbrokers shill their own communities to the gambling interests to shake them down, the poorer that community becomes.
NRL CEO Andrew Abdo and Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V’landys.Credit: Dean Sewell
Stop howling. Why else do the gambling interests go after those communities if not to enrich themselves at their expense? Forget Las Vegas. Start weaning, here in Australia, now!
Vince and Virat prove kindred spirits
The connection between Vince Karalius, “The Wild Bull of the Pampas,” arguably the greatest lock in the history of British rugby league and the great Indian batsman, the rather more diminutive, Virat Kohli? I thought you’d never ask.
TFF has long treasured the great yarn first told to me by the one-time Labor Senator Stephen Loosley, about Karalius. See, the scene was set back in the early ’70s after a particularly tough Test match against the Kangaroos, which the Brits had lost. Karalius, by then retired and a successful businessman, walked into the Lions dressing room to find a bunch of whingeing, whining losers carrying on about the ref, the Kangaroos, the conditions, and everything they could think of.
Vince Karalius and Rex Mossop in action in 1960.Credit: Fairfax
Karalius, simply couldn’t bear it, and roared at them: “Shoottt oopp! Shoottt oopp! Luds, in this game, yer gives it, yer takes it and yer don’t fookkin’ groomble!”
Meantime, this week, after an Indian Premier League match between Kohli’s Royal Challengers Bangalore and the Lucknow Super Giants, where Kohli and opponent Gautam Gambhir had to be physically separated from each other, Kohli made no apology whatsoever. In his own victorious dressing room – his side won by 18 runs – Kohli told his players as the cameras rolled, live: “That’s a sweet win boys. A sweet win. If you can give it, you got to take it. Otherwise, don’t give it.”
Precisely.
We now resume our usual service of no interest at all in the IPL, and little interest in British rugby league.
Dear Paul, please look after your brain
Paul Gallen? We need to talk.
Last week you told my friend Danny Weidler how pleased you were to have had your brain tested up Newcastle way and more or less getting the all-clear.
“I spent two days getting tested by the people who tested Kalyn Ponga in Newcastle,” you told Danny. “It was completely comprehensive and the result was good for me. I’m not boasting or sitting here saying I’m in the clear for the rest of my life. But the way it’s been explained to me is that I’m the same chance of having dementia or an issue like that as someone who has not played any kind of contact sport. That’s about as good a result as I could have hoped for.”
Mate, as I have long said to you, you are kidding yourself! Look at what you are doing. After nearly two decades of being one of the toughest and most brutal – give and take – players in rugby league, you then get into the ring and engage in a sport where the aim of the game is to inflict brain damage on each other. How can you not be so damaged?
And you actually believe you are the same chance of dementia as someone who has taken no such punishment? I call bullshit. And you needn’t take just my word for it. When I showed your quotes to Dr Rowena Mobbs, the neuroscientist from Macquarie University who specialises in the damage done by concussion – who spends much of her time trying to help former sportspeople who are badly afflicted, who also once felt it wouldn’t happen to them – she was gobsmacked at the very idea that your testing gave you an all-clear to continue.
“We have no brain testing available that can 100 per cent clear players,” she told me. “Every head injury, be it through boxing or football, is one step closer to CTE. I can’t say what the doctors truly said, but Gallen’s statement is misguided and bears no relation to the science. It would be dangerous for anyone to think otherwise.”
Paul, based on everything I have learnt from researching and writing about it in the last 15 years, I strongly agree. Any expert that says anything that makes you think it’s fine to keep getting hit in the head at the age of 41 after the punishment you have already taken is, in my view, on dangerous ground.
WHAT THEY SAID
Tasmanian independent Federal MP Andrew Wilkie: “More than a billion dollars, and that’s what the stadium will end up costing, for an AFL stadium in sight of another one, with just 3000 more seats and likely no roof, is beyond bizarre. This is a failure of governance on an eye-watering scale.”
SMH writer, Angus Livingston: “Congratulations to my fellow Tasmanians on securing an AFL franchise. Now, let’s all keep quiet, until after our new team has played its first game, about how the stadium will probably never get built. I’m sorry to tell the AFL, Gil, and our soon-to-be fellow clubs across the nation, but we islanders have pulled a swifty on you all.”
Gil McLachlan announcing that Tasmania will have an AFL team in 2028: “There are big days and there are really big days. For our national game of Australian rules football and for the state of Tasmania this feels really big. Historic. It’s been a journey, but I am so happy to say we have reached the summit. A 19th club in Tasmania. For Tasmania. Uniting Tasmania.”
Jamal Fogarty on Jack Wighton after the Raiders beat the Dolphins with a late try and golden point field goal: “The way Jacko plays his football, he’s like a little five-year-old playing in his first carnival. That’s the way he played today, with a smile on his face, so it’s good for us.”
Jack Wighton celebrates with teammates scoring a try against the Dolphins in Wagga Wagga on Saturday.Credit: Getty
Chair of Rugby Australia Hamish McLennan: “League scrums are so lame. League talks about toughness but I reckon an arm wrestle at the pub would be harder than their scrums. Let’s have a competition between the two best sides and see who’s tougher.”
Ian Roberts: “Reflecting now, as soon as I started playing for Souths [in 1986], I wish I had come out then. I wish I had never been in the closet, if that makes sense. It’s not even about being in the closet, I wish I didn’t have that militant take that I shouldn’t have to come out. But I also understand that you can’t be what you can’t see . . .”
Ricky Stuart on Jack Wighton leaving: “If we weren’t hurt by him going, we don’t care about him, and we don’t care about the club. Am I pissed off he’s going? Yeah, I am, but that’s his decision.”
Swans coach John Longmire after a one-point loss to the Giants: “We’ve got to keep that intent as our baseline, which we dropped well away from last week, we’ve got to do it again next week that’s what the AFL industry is about and we’ve got Collingwood next week and that’s going to be a tough one.” Might I offer an untutored thought, Coach? Treating the game as an “industry” connotes precisely the mechanical way the Swans seem to be playing? Maybe go back to it being a game?
North Melbourne coach Alastair Clarkson after losing their last five matches: “It’s tough yards, but we’ll roll up the sleeves, get to work.” Sounds like a plan, if only their uniforms included sleeves?
The Reverend Tim Costello thought he was reading the Onion when reading this SMH article on the NRL planning to begin next season with a double-header in Las Vegas, as a first step in capturing a slice of the US gambling market: “Is that satire? Surely that’s satire. It is appalling that, with gambling doing so much harm in our community, that the head of the NRL seems obsessed with finding new ways to further entrench the league with the gambling industry. It is a tragedy to me that it is actually changing the way people follow sport, especially young people. They are now following the game not to support their team buy to see if their multi comes off.” What he said.
Fans of football heavyweights Celtic as they played Rangers last week, in a sing-songy chant that quite shocked me!: “You can shove your coronation up your arse.”
Boston Bruins broadcaster Jack Edwards after they lost in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs after having the best regular season ever: “[Carter] Verhaeghe wins the series for Florida, and this joyride ends in an Hindenburg-like ending.”
Celtic fans in full voice.Credit: AP
TEAM OF THE WEEK
Wests Tigers. Their win over the reigning premier Panthers ended a 273-day drought.
England Women’s Rugby team. Sealed a Six Nations Grand Slam in front of a record women’s crowd of 58,498 at Twickenham
Waratahs. Meet the Reds tonight at Ballymore.
Sydney FC. Women won their fourth A-League Women’s championship with a win over Western United.
The U13 girls Ryde Hunters Hill Pirates cricket team. They’ve been playing together for five years, only dropped one game this season, and have been notably good sports throughout.
Craig Foster. The former Socceroo captain, will be speaking at the Byron Community Theatre from 6pm on Friday 26th May to present on a number of topics including Reconciliation and Independence, The Voice and The Republic to raise money for the Gilchrist Foundation, which helps disadvantaged students. You can book here.
