This is the NRL’s chance to set a new precedent
A teamsworth of NRL players have assaulted women and been welcomed back into the game. Hopefully the Ben Barba decision marks a new era of zero tolerance, writes Eliza Barr. Female fans of the game demand it.
At long last, enough is finally enough.
The National Rugby League has finally drawn a stern line underneath domestic violence after fallen star Ben Barba was deregistered following an alleged assault against his wife at a Townsville casino on Australia Day.
Barba never played a single game for the North Queensland Cowboys, who took a risk on the troubled former player after a long and chequered history in the sport he loved.
The problems began when images showing Barba’s wife Ainslie Currie’s bloodied, bruised face after he allegedly beat her.
RELATED: Ainslie Currie is who we should be thinking of now
They continued when his contract was ripped up when he tested positive to cocaine days after he helped the Cronulla Sharks to their historic first ever premiership in 2016.
Now, NRL CEO Todd Greenberg, who was the Canterbury Bulldogs CEO when Barba was first accused of domestic violence against Ms Currie, has seen the damning CCTV footage of the alleged incident and Barba’s final chance was over before it even began.
It’s about time.
In Australian rugby league, if you urinate in your own mouth (then-Sharks player Todd Carney, 2014), you’re finished.
If you dabble in exotic gambling on your games (then-Wests Tigers player Tim Simona, 2017) — you’re gone.
If you aren’t a criminal yourself, but you’re friends with one (Sharks player Andrew Fifita, who wrote coward punch killer Kieran Loveridge’s initials on his strapping tape during games in 2016) — you’ll be fined and scratched from representative football to boot.
However, if you beat women, leave them bloody, sexually attack them, damage their property, or frighten them half to death — you can have another chance and the nation’s admiration.
Then-Tigers player Robert Lui pleaded guilty in March 2012 to pushing his partner in the chest, headbutting her and savagely dragging her by her hair to the floor at their North Strathfield apartment after his team was knocked out of the finals.
Understandably, the Tigers tore up his contract and he was out the door — but by season’s end Lui was subject to a bidding war between the Cowboys and the New Zealand Warriors which reportedly reached the preposterous sum of $1.2 million for the violent offender’s signature.
You couldn’t help but wonder if this is a league that cares more about the game than the women who support it.
Lui now plays for the Salford Devils in England’s Super League competition, and it seems Barba is set to follow in his footsteps as his deregistration leaves him considering options overseas once again.
RELATED: Ben Barba could get a lifeline in England
Barba has reportedly received a new offer from his previous club St Helen’s — a chance to make more money off the sport that gave him every opportunity he ever foolishly squandered.
Here’s my question. Why?
Why does St Helen’s want to hire someone who is alleged to have repeatedly battered his wife and the mother of his children?
Why did the Salford Devils want to hire someone who would drag their girlfriend to the floor by her hair in a foul temper about a football game?
Why did the Sharks want to retain Isaac Gordon, who pleaded guilty to attacking his heavily pregnant partner in a drunken rage in 2012?
Why didn’t the Canberra Raiders rip up Blake Ferguson’s contract when he was found guilty of indecently assaulting a woman at a Cronulla nightclub in 2014?
Why were the Brisbane Broncos so desperate for Matt Lodge’s signature they would cough up hundreds of thousands of dollars for a man who admitted to terrorising a family in their own home in New York on a drug-fuelled bender?
Why did the South Sydney Rabbitohs suspend Kirisome Auva’a for just seven days after he threw his girlfriend into a garage wall?
They’re good questions. And I don’t know the answers.
What I do know is that if the NRL doesn’t crack down on this problem now it will be to their shame and to society’s detriment.
If there are no consequences, there can be no change.
The NRL has sent a horrifying message to its players for far too many years now — that they can assault and abuse women and keep their extremely profitable careers, just as long as they don’t do anything victimless like urinate in their mouths and embarrass the game.
Playing one of the country’s great sports and reaping the splendid rewards of money and celebrity are privileges — not rights.
If you are going to be violent with women, we do not want to see you in dazzling lights on our fields and our television screens.
We don’t want you at all.
It’s time for the NRL, and the rugby league community across the entire world, to prove its women, its fans and its culture are more important than winning games with violent men.
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