Paul Kent: Braith Anasta perfect choice as new host of NRL 360
Incoming NRL 360 host Braith Anasta has done it all in the game of rugby league, but it’s his life off the field that sets him up to succeed writes PAUL KENT.
NRL
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Not for the first time has Braith Anasta emerged as the next good young one coming through.
This might seem a somewhat odd thing to say about a performer like the 40-year-old Anasta, who continues to head down a path only George Clooney seems to have trod before, ageing like summer wine, but alas, so it goes for the lucky ones.
Anasta is the new host of NRL360.
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He replaces Yvonne Sampson, who asked for a brief intermission when pregnancy called, poor Vonny now suffering under the twin burdens of pregnancy and the highly vigilant husband Chris O’Keeffe, who frets for a hobby.
Anasta will step into the chair as the third regular host in less than a year. He will join the show at full gallop, and he comes with pedigree, which will please most.
Not only in the areas you first imagine, though.
He is a former international, an Origin star and a premiership winner.
He was a star from his first game in the NRL.
He drew comparisons to Brad Fittler from the beginning, took home the Dally M Rookie of the Year trophy and toured with the Kangaroos after his first full NRL season.
He has all the credentials to talk about footy long into the night, which are the kinds of conversations that happens on 360 and, on top of all that, it must be confessed with some sadness, he raises the glamour factor considerably.
Except for a brief interlude last season when Vonny replaced the Brisbane-bound Ben Ikin, the original host for what turned out to be just over nine years, the show has never been known for being easy on the eye.
Most of all, Anasta comes ready with an understanding to talk about the game at any level.
Anasta always handled himself like someone ahead of the game.
Years back the NRL knocked on the door here for help to teach or, failing that, at least explain to the players how the media works, which basically equated to why we wrote what we did which was at times counter to what the players would have preferred.
It was a vain attempt. I don’t know how many clubs I spoke to, well more than half, but each session was like talking to schoolkids waiting for recess.
The players slumped in their chairs and did all they could to show how bored they were.
Invariably when the talk was done and the floor was opened to questions the first one fired through took the form: “Why do youse write the shit youse do?”
Giggles all round.
The simple answer is the NRL stopped being pure sport many years back, the same time it started charging television networks for the right to broadcast its product.
Players often say without the NRL the league journos would not have a job, but it is actually the opposite that is true, and it remains an uncomfortable truth for many.
If anybody wants to argue that particular point, ask for a look at the NRL finances which reveals in very clear numbers that roughly 80 per cent of the game’s revenue is generated from media rights, who naturally demand a return.
Some players claim they just want to play footy and that the soap opera around the game is an intrusion, so they should be left alone.
Well, they don’t have to accept those terms. If they just wanted to play footy, as some claim, they can always go and play for Wee Waa, like Jamie Lyon did when he found the NRL life too much, and take home $500 a win and enjoy their lives without intrusion.
But if they want the big dollars available in the NRL then it is part of the contract they sign.
That’s the deal. There is not a job in Australia that pays half a million dollars and does not come with some kind of pressure.
This is the uncomfortable truth for many players, like it or not. The game is there to be talked about and, in turn, made interesting, and in turn more profitable to sell.
Anyway, at every club during those talks long ago there was always just one or two, though, whose ears piqued.
Canterbury was particularly hostile at the time.
They were in the throes of a salary cap scandal as well as the fallout from the trips to Coffs Harbour which stained the club tremendously.
To say there was an animosity towards the media would be understatement, and they tried to make sure you felt it.
Anasta, though, was a standout.
In a room filled with veterans, he had the integrity to follow his own conscience and not be peer-pressured into being a gig.
He remained alert throughout and when it was over and the floor was opened to questions his questions arrived with the directness of somebody already thinking years ahead.
Few knew the burden he carried at the time.
His father died when he was 15 and he dulled his grief through footy and the chase for tomorrow. Always moving.
He was the next young good one coming through and it remained that way for several years before things happened as they often do, which was people began to turn.
He had it too easy, some thought. Wasn’t deserving of the accolades, wasn’t what they thought he should be.
So in the middle years Anasta went from fan favourite to fan target with every part of his game seemingly open for criticism and, behind the scenes, he struggled.
The pressure got so much somewhere in his early to mid-20s he told his mum he wanted to retire. That’s when everything else he was outrunning began to catch him.
He stuck it out though and, if it did nothing else, it toughened him up nicely for what he is about to endure on 360.
It was already obvious back then there was an intelligence there, an alertness, so much it was no surprise he continued to work in the game well after he retired and now emerges as the player ready to sit in the big seat on the 360 desk.
He comes to the show as a man built to follow his conscience, to bring his own sense of fairness and opinion, driven by that strength he always had to stand alone.
It was there to see so early on.
SHORT SHOT
Is it any wonder the NRL is in a perpetual state of alarm.
Four out of five coaches believe rivals are rorting the concussion protocols, which Blind Freddy can see is true, and which is a damning weight of argument, and yet the NRL twists itself in knots to deny that there is a problem.
The reason this is such a problem, which the NRL does not seem willing to address, is the concussion rorting – to artificially create interchange replacements – is in direct contrast to the changes made in recent years that have brought viewers back to the game: the breakdown of structure through fatigue.
Fatigue makes the game more entertaining, even if coaches hate fatigue, as it is the one part of the game they cannot coach against.
Rugby league was a once a game for all shapes, sizes and speeds, right up until wrestling dominated the game, when every footballer from then on had to be six foot and weigh 100kg and run 100m in even time.
They didn’t necessarily have to be able to catch though, as footballers became athletes. Wrestling, which eliminated fatigue, promoted this.
The NRL has no idea how to stop the concussion rule being rorted, so instead it deflects.
It offers a reason that medical staff “ethics and integrity are beyond reproach” and so therefore it is offensive to even question them.
If there was any truth to this statement – that medicos are beyond reproach merely by hint of their profession – there would never be malpractice suits in our courts.
Medical staff are as capable of being as dishonest or incapable as any profession, just hopefully not mine.
The coaches, clearly, certainly don’t believe the NRL’s spin. After all, they know what they tell their own medical folk.
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