Liz Cambage Nigeria fight video: Why troubled Opals star was doomed from the star

The only surprise to emerge from Liz Cambage’s pre-Olympics meltdown was that it didn’t happen sooner, writes Robert Craddock.

There’s only one thing you can normally bank on when a sport gets seduced by the Big Star Syndrome – it never ends well.

The soft discipline. The corner cutting. The secret concessions. The pandering. The teammates’ private angst.

It bubbles and it bubbles then … kaboom.

The surprise of Liz Cambage’s pre-Olympics meltdown against Nigeria and her falling out with basketball in this country is not so much that it happened but that it didn’t happen sooner.

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: The five minutes that ended Cambage’s career

Liz Cambage’s international career with Australia was a rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows. Picture: getty

It’s what happens when you let your superstar become a maverick force and you bend your system around their needs, not the other way around which is the way it’s supposed to be.

Cambage recently tweeted “the truth will always come to light’’ … sadly for her it has.

Two things stand out in News Corp’s expose of Cambage’s behavioural explosion against Nigeria.

The first is just how crass and appalling it was but just as surprising is the fact that she was never properly punished as basketball authorities tried to keep the details of her offences away from public view.

The lack of action tells its own story about a career spoiled by a sense of entitlement which became a poisonous force on a crumbling team culture.

Footage from the infamous closed-door practice match showed Cambage striking a Nigerian player.

Cambage claims she was never properly supported or protected in the Australian environment but if you put that claim to her teammates expect them to rise from their chair and headbutt the wall in disbelief.

They swear the polar opposite is actually the root of the problem.

It was the fact Cambage was so supported and protected as the team’s best player her ego spiralled out of control.

The moral of Cambage’s day of shame stretches far beyond the narrow boundaries of the sport she plays.

Football clubs take note. This is what happens when you fall at the feet of your biggest star.

The fact that neither Basketball Australia or an independent panel which investigated the incident took no major action against Cambage is extraordinary.

Liz Cambage with Opals coach Sandy Brondello before the Olympics.

The panel, in giving Cambage nothing more than a reprimand, found she did engage in conduct that brought Basketball Australia into “censure’’ in one incident but three other charges were dismissed.

You wonder what, on earth, those three other charges could have possibly been. The elbow? The monkey slur?

How long do you reckon you would cop in the NRL or AFL if you called a rival player a

“monkey’’, ordered him to “go back to his third world country’’, then hit him with a vicious right elbow?

It would be a matter of months not weeks on the sideline and plenty of them.

Cambage helped the Opals become one of the best teams in the world – but behind the scenes, all was not well. Picture: Shae Beplate.

Olympic sports are different but not that different in that you let people escape in such a way.

Now, at last, we can fully see what mild mannered Andrew Gaze was on about when he launched the biggest tirade of his media career against Cambage.

As a committed team man – even when, like Cambage, he was the team’s biggest star – it must have broken his heart to see a player behave in such a way.

The wounds are deep and long-lasting.

Several of the players who were involved in the Olympic team remain deeply upset about the whole Cambage affair and can barely talk about it without being overcome with emotion. There is a sense they will never get over it.

It’s not just the Nigeria experience. It was being ground down by Cambage’s threats to boycott the Games, or stay apart from the team, or her flaky commitment to team rules.

Team-mates who were trying to live their dreams were instead having nightmares.

Originally published as Liz Cambage Nigeria fight video: Why troubled Opals star was doomed from the star