You have to hand it to the Aussies. They don’t do things by halves. If you’re going to have a salary cap scandal, might as well make it a big one. The salary cap transgressions of a handful of Super League clubs a few years back look piffling in comparison. But then, the sanctions handed down to those clubs by the RFL were equally piffling, almost laughably so in comparison to the punishments handed down by the NRL to Melbourne Storm. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. The NRL has a track record of whacking errant clubs with the big stick, as the Canterbury Bulldogs discovered in 2002 when they were docked 37 (count ‘em) points in the league table for breaching the salary cap.
That doesn’t seem to have acted as much of a deterrent to those at Melbourne Storm who cooked the books so deliberately for so long, presumably convinced they’d never get caught.
In contrast, Super League hasn’t seen any scandals of a similar nature since it dealt with its own problems with what many criticised at the time as being too light a hand. That may be just good luck, or that there simply isn’t the same kind of money sloshing around the game in Britain. Or perhaps the Super League salary cap is just more effectively policed in the first place. Let’s hope so. Prevention is usually better than cure and it is hard to imagine any British club surviving the level of penalty or critical onslaught that has befallen Melbourne Storm.
Some have criticised the NRL for being too harsh. That the penalties punish innocent third parties too much: the players and supporters, rather than those who perpetrated the crime. That it undermines the expansion of Rugby League in Australia by hammering a successful club in an AFL stronghold. However, it is hard to see what else the NRL could have done in these circumstances. The rules are there, they have been broken, quite spectacularly so, and severe punishment is therefore inevitable. It would be unfair to the players and supporters, not to mention the backroom staff keeping their own books in good order at the other clubs in the competition, to pussyfoot around the issue and contrive a punishment that didn’t match the severity of the deception that has taken place. Nobody loves a cheat, and cheats shouldn’t be allowed to prosper.
The players and supporters at Melbourne may be innocent bystanders to what was going on behind the scenes at their club, but had the club kept within the limits of the salary cap, as their competitors were doing, it is fair to assume that this formidable, world-beating squad of players would not have been able to be assembled in the first place, and the rewards capable of being attained by a team with fewer of those highly paid stars may have been somewhat harder to come by.
None of us will ever know for sure. But any sympathy should be reserved for the battered image of the game of Rugby League, which has been badly tarnished by the greedy, unsporting and downright deceitful actions of a handful of people who, if they have not already gone, ought to be driven out of sport – not just our sport, any sport – forever.
All that said, Rugby League is nothing if not resilient. It is a quality that has enabled it to endure as long as it has in the face of so much adversity over the years, both of the external and self-inflicted variety.
None bar the most short-sighted Sydneysider would wish for this calamity to result in the eventual demise of Melbourne Storm and the further geographical contraction of Rugby League in Australia. It was tragedy enough losing Adelaide Rams and Perth Western Reds as bargaining fodder in the deal that ended the Super League war a few short years ago.
Up until now, the success of Melbourne Storm has shone like a beacon to those of us who believe that Rugby League is a sport that can appeal to anyone, in any part of the world, not just the historical enclaves of the north of England or the suburbs of Sydney. On paper, the AFL dominated territory of Victoria is perhaps as unwelcoming a place as it could ever be imagined to attempt to establish a top-flight Rugby League club. Yet the Storm pulled it off. They did more than simply exist. They put the city of Melbourne somewhere most of its residents could never have imagined they’d ever be: at the centre of the Rugby League map, as domestic Premiers and World Champions. To paraphrase Frank Sinatra, if Rugby League can make it there, it can make it anywhere.
To discover that to a disappointingly large extent, they ‘made it’ by cheating makes the betrayal all the harder to bear. But the game has to move forward now, particularly in Melbourne, and there are already encouraging signs that it will. Sure, sponsors may have bolted and who can blame them. A hostile media will do its best to twist the knife as hard and as long as possible. But the club’s supporters appear to be rising to the challenge. It has made them confront the question as to whether they want a Rugby League club anymore. It seems they do. In that sense, though they may not realise it, they have become as one with Rugby League supporters around the world who, at different times in different places and for different reasons have found themselves in similar danger of losing their club through no fault of their own, and have stood up to fight for its survival.
The achievements that follow may not be as great as those enjoyed before, but at least they will be honestly deserved.
Page XIII Editorial – First published in Rugby League World Issue 350 (June 2010)
