Paul Kent: The simple tip to stop clubs and players rorting the salary cap

The NRL salary cap is not working because it’s still being cheated. PAUL KENT’s stunning player admissions over rorting and the radical change to stop it.

The Panthers celebrate their second straight NRL premiership win. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty Images

It is hard to fully accept Phil Gould’s comment that the NRL’s salary cap does not reward development, although parts of it are right.

Gould was the architect of Penrith’s pathways system and the one who turned the club around and showed them how to do it right, which was to capitalise on the 4500 juniors they have, the most of any junior league in the country and for which they have done an enormous job.

At the same time, though, Penrith has won the past two NRL premierships, played in the past three grand finals, and are well-placed to go on for years after winning the State Cup, Jersey Flegg and SG Ball competitions.

That is the benefit of development, and the reward is the NRL premiership, which is its intention.

Yet for all the reasons offered to say the cap is no longer working, the biggest reason the salary cap does not work is that it can’t be properly policed and cheating still happens, no matter how easily it is laughed off by those who know.

And the reason I am so confident about this is that players leave some clubs and retire, or go to other clubs, and with time they are happy to speak about it, although always off the record.

Like Gould, the RLPA is arguing the cap no longer levels competition as it is intended.

If the RLPA is genuinely intent on fixing it, the first action they should take is allow the NRL to access the players’ tax returns.

While it won’t catch every dodgy dollar, it makes under-the-table payments an illegal act, and there for the Australian Taxation Office to prosecute.

As it stands, players can be illegally paid by their clubs under the cap but commit no tax foul.

RIVAL SPORTS FAIL NRL’S UNPLANNED CHAOS THEORY

Nothing sings like the sweet sound of controversy in the NRL.

Ryan Matterson learned as much this week when he put his head in the mouth of a Panther and, with only the truth to back him against an onslaught of social media, walked away with a few lacerations and superficial bruising.

He’ll survive.

Matterson caught the tail end of the second season of Keeping Up With The Panthers, or whoever it is they pretend to be this time around.

The NRL has done little about their show of extravagance, still scratching foreheads and wondering even what to make of Jarome Luai’s “My N****’ comment that doesn’t appear altogether hard to resolve.

Ryan Matterson accepted a three-game ban instead of a $4000 fine. Picture: Richard Dobson

As some within the game know, though, even bad business is good for business in the NRL.

So might as well let it roll.

Meanwhile, throughout the week NRL head of football Graham Annesley has been collating survey answers from a variety of sources like clubs, players, fans and even those from the Froth Estate, the media. Mine went somehow missing.

Annesley is a laid-back kind of man and, you get the feeling, was in no special hurry to find a solution. He has been around these parts long enough to know good old-fashioned controversy is good for business in rugby league.

It sounds a bit odd, but this is where the NRL goes right when so many other sports go wrong.

Back in the day when journos wrote shorthand and were ferocious two-fingered typers, we called it the smoko test. It would hardly pass any scientific tests, but it had a way of working that seems to be lost nowadays.

The 2022 season was another eventful year for the NRL. Art: Boo Bailey

The way it went, when a building site stopped for its morning smoko, what was the story that some brickie, reading the paper, nudged the bloke next to him and said, “What about this?”

That was the story that sold newspapers, and with it the game.

Mike Gibson, who always had a keen sense for what a reader wanted, would catch the train from North Sydney across the Sydney Harbour Bridge into the city just to watch what newspaper stories commuters stayed on and what ones they quickly passed over.

What interested them?

Rugby union and soccer long ago forgot this. They have become sterile to the point of boring.

The A-League has got it right only ever once, 10 years ago when it allowed marquee players outside the salary cap and Sydney FC signed Italian soccer legend Alessandro Del Piero and the Wanderers recruited Japan’s Shinji Ono. Nobody knew much about them, but they were intrigued enough to talk about them over morning smoko.

Alessandro Del Piero and Shinji Ono in 2013, when the A-League was a headline act. Picture: Gregg Porteous

It has been in slow decline ever since, its broadcast rights now barely able to be given away as it airs on backwater free-to-air channels.

Rugby union has become Australian sport’s Invisible Man.

It has become so sterile as a game and also as a product there is nothing to talk about anymore. Nothing is interesting.

Finally, Rugby Australia harpooned its own broadcast negotiations, calling a bluff when there was none to call, to walk out with somewhat of a third of what it commanded previously, and disappearing to the same back channels soccer is now on.

By design or by accident, keeping the game interesting is a quality the NRL excels at, as the Penrith Panthers have shown this week.

You could argue the game kicked its toe on a successful formula.

In the short years after the Super League war, which really was an uneasy truce, the game worked hard to shut down the leaks coming out of both league headquarters and also the clubs.

Few clubs trusted each other after the war, particularly those from the other side. No exposed secret was too much, no embarrassment too harsh.

Jarome Luai, Nathan Cleary and Isaah Yeo at BlueBet Stadium after winning the grand final. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty Images

Clubs gave each other up for all kinds of adventures.

As the League tried to shut down the leaks and maintain control of the narrative, failing hopelessly, a strange thing happened.

They realised they were the only game in town anybody was still talking about.

Chaos was good for the game, was the discovery, and Unplanned Chaos Theory was born.

So as another season ends and Annesley collates his review for the ARL Commission, don’t expect him to move too swiftly. Or be too drastic, whatever the findings.

Already there is a push from clubs for minimal change going in to next season to try and bring some stability to the game.

The question is not so much what changes will be made but whether changes will be made at all. This might come as some surprise to those who have just survived the season.

Few survived the final couple of seconds of the Wests Tigers-North Queensland game, for instance.

Most in the game were howling at the late call. A few weren’t, but everybody had an opinion and those filled the water cooler talk and dominated the morning smoko. The NRL, sticking to the Unplanned Chaos Theory, calmly explained why the ruling was correct.

NRL head of football Graham Annesley.

As for the bunker’s interference in games, it is at the point where so many are so irritated by the constant hold-ups called by the bunker, and the fact they still get some wrong anyway, according to their trusty eyes and several beers that help sharpen their razor focus, they want it abandoned altogether.

Or just used for tries. Will that really quieten the controversy?

Or just change the point of conversation, which is all it has done all along.

The one problem the bunker has not been able to solve in the game was the same problem that began the push for its inclusion in the first place: human error.

Tired of refs missing incidents on field, acts of foul play or try scorers stepping in to touch — was that a knock on or a strip? — momentum began for the bunker until it was finally installed and everybody was happy.

Until they weren’t.

Until they saw it differently to how the bunker saw it, and then it was on, like cats in a bag.

The problem is we can’t agree on what we want, let alone what we see.

Some clubs are happy for players to lay down for a penalty, some won’t, and some fans are highly annoyed that it happens, and some aren’t.

Inside the NRL Bunker.

Nobody is completely right or wrong. It is just our opinion.

Same goes with the judiciary.

An overhaul was done last summer and when the NRL launched the revamped judicial system everybody was glad. Except it did not fix what could not be fixed. You guessed it, human error.

We argued over whether it should be grade ones or grade twos, about how often they could continue letting one player get away with repeated acts of violence, and in the end all we did was argue.

The revamp just changed the point of the argument.

You can see what is happening here.

Even as we relive the incidents from the season and begin to get a little tight through the chest in our recall, we are all falling into the NRL’s Unplanned Chaos Theory.

Like it or not, we’re passing the smoko test, so forever may we argue.

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