“Fabric” is the preferred metaphor when exploring deep controversy in rugby league. There are typically three things you can do to it: threaten it, tear it, or destroy it. These are the rules. So what does Wednesday’s news of a NSW police investigation into allegations of “cheating at gambling and match fixing” do to the game’s fabric?
Sadly, it’s not clear-cut. But whereas cheating seems more rampant in global sport than ever, shade over rugby league is nothing new. And while the actual details of league’s shadiness aren’t ever common; the perception of shadiness, which matters most, is.
How deep a shade do the allegations cast on Richard Ings’ then-ridiculed “blackest day in Australian sport” line in 2013? Looking back, Ings’ illustration was in response to evidence that personal relationships between professional athletes and organised criminal identities might “have resulted in match fixing and the fraudulent manipulation of betting markets”.
In the quest to win the battle of perception, perhaps it doesn’t matter. Such a brutal job was done on mocking the drama of that moment that mere mention of “blackest days” might simply incite a shudder and nothing more. People cope in their own way.
In a recent radio interview, CEO Todd Greenberg said that when it came to rugby league, he was conscious “not to take the ‘soap’ out of the soap opera”. A grabby media line, sure, but an instructive one too. Since Donny Lane defied residential rules and played for Glebe, not Annandale, in 1917, shadiness has forever been part of the game.
League fans have developed the resilience to embrace it and own it, too. Humour helps.
Early in the Wests Tigers game on Sunday, a solitary roar emerged from somewhere near the grandstand. The home team, trying to keep their season alive, had conceded another debatable penalty – laying on the ball too long. “We get it ref! Jarryd Hayne must play semi-finals!” came the raspy, conspiratory cry, followed by laughter at the notionally absurd joke.
League-types, with backs to the wall, stick together. Witness one of the game’s wisest, funniest and senior elder statesmen, Roy Masters, commencing an analysis of the match-fixing allegations on ABCs Melbourne-based TV program, Offsiders, after they emerged in June. The man who first coined the term Fibros and Silvertails was sitting alongside an all-Melburnian panel of Gerard Whateley, Caroline Wilson and Waleed Aly. On the allegations, he submitted that “what it all boils down to is this: people want it to be true, because it adds to the salacious gossip, rumour and innuendo surrounding sport, particularly at this chilly time of the year”.
In one way, the construction of rugby league as the sporting embodiment of Who Weekly works in its favour. Fans are conditioned to the tawdry vulgarity of league’s weekly drama; it’s part of the show. Sydney, where these latest acts of alleged sin are set, has forever been its moral home.
Speaking at the Tom Brock Annual Lecture in 2001, the late playwright and league devotee Alex Buzo described 19th century Sydney as a “raffish capital with rather too much in the way of violence and corruption…looked at rather askance by the rest of the country…its dominant sport called ‘Thugby League’”. In 2016, despite some well-intentioned attempts at polish, the game still retains that identity – its devotees revel in its earthiness; and outsiders are rarely envious.
So when match-fixing allegations emerge, the league public can be forgiven for thinking they’ve heard things like this before. In the spirit of scandal, there will be intimate interest in the sordid detail, no doubt, but not for them the confected and puritanical shock and horror that fans of other sports may habour.
It remains to be seen just how large the appetite is for yet another sermon – another navel-gazing exercise – on the insidious links between gambling money and the game itself. The same money that rugby league elder statesman Phil Gould, in response to the Gillard government’s proposed poker machine legislation in 2011, said would “destroy your club, and the game of rugby league at all levels in the Sydney metropolitan area”. That sermon will come, but is the cognitive dissonance too strong?
And as news of the police investigation emerged on Wednesday, administrators and custodians were quick to advise to be careful what you say; that these things are difficult to prove; and you don’t want to cast blanket aspersions on the innocent. The reaction amongst the league rank and file to the news was typically muted. It was not out of shock. They haven’t actually been here before, but it feels like they have.
The game’s fabric may be damaged, but as with scars, some people just prefer it that way.
