What is the first thing you do when you have been caught systematically cheating? Launch legal action to protect your job of course!
Supporters of the game have ZERO sympathy for administrators who take it upon themselves to risk any success their clubs has by cheating the salary cap. Lets not forget, the only reason any club administration decides to cheat the salary cap is because they have decided they can not compete with the other 15 clubs in a fair fight for the title. They then have to resort to cheating, and they do that, not for the good of the club, but because of their own greed.
Rugby League doesn’t care what you have achieved over the course of a career. All it cares about is what you have done lately. Do you think the South Sydney Rabbitohs all feel like winners because they won the premiership in 2014? Of course not. The only team in the league right now that feels any sense of success is the North Queensland Cowboys, our current champions.
In this environment we have seen administrators, coaches, and even players push the boundaries of what is legal within the laws of the game. If you are a coach, your head is 3 bad months away from being on the chopping block. It doesn’t matter what you have achieved, after all, this is a results based business that also has a short memory.
Administrators have a little more leeway. They normally find themselves immune from this pressure because when things get a little bit too tough, they just sack the coach. Pressure relieved.
At the Parramatta Eels things a little different. There are constant challenges to the board and everyone in the clubs administration only has a short amount of time to prove they are leading the club in the right direction.
The incentive is there….all that was needed were people in place willing to break the rules of the game to make it all happen. Well done to everyone involved…
The most hilarious thing in all of this is the move by people connected with the Melbourne Storm to pursue legal action against the NRL because they feel as though the Eels were dealt with less harshly than the Storm were when they were found to be systematically cheating the salary cap over a number of years.
Think about that for a moment. These people think that scale of the penalties between the two clubs have been unfair. A club that was found to be cheating for years is not happy because they feel as though their penalty was unfair.
How fair was it for the rest of the clubs in the National Rugby League to be forced to compete against a club that was cheating? Was that fair?
Only in Rugby League could a club that breaks the rules of the game whinge about how fair something is!
As all this goes on, players and supporters have to deal with the fallout. Both groups find themselves at the mercy of people wearing suits who have brought another club crashing to the ground.
I have said for a long time that the reason we see a handful of clubs going through turmoil every single season is because Rugby League club administrators are, for the most part, inept. These same people who attack the NRL over the way it runs the entire game can’t even run single clubs without everything collapsing like a house built on sand.
I even saw one administrator a few days ago make the suggestion that the reason clubs feel the need to cheat is because player salaries rise in an open market where demand is high. Please!
I feel sorry for the NRL because it has to go from one club to another cleaning up giant messes, completely taking over some club, handing out loans to others, while also needing to parachute in hand picked administrators who have a really tough job putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Through all of this….do you think a single club administrator has handed back the free cars they negotiate for themselves? Do you think any of them show any sense of remorse for what they do to our clubs?
One of the conditions the Eels face before they can play for competition points once again this season is that the administrators the club named two days ago have to leave. Until that happens, the Eels can not claim a single premiership point.
So what did those administrators do? They went to court to try and make sure they could stay at the club as long as they possibly could.
Do you think they did that for the players and the supporters?
What a fucking disgrace!
