Will the Parramatta Eels ever manage to right the ship?

AS the Eels lurch from one crisis to another in the worst season in their history, RICHARD HINDS asks can they ever set things right?

Kieran Foran, Corey Norman, coach Brad Arthur and Junior Paulo during a Parramatta Eels training session earlier this year. Picture: Mark Evans

The staggering thing was not Brad Arthur’s damning comments about the ineptitude of the administrators of his strife-torn club.

It was that the Parramatta coach made his stinging remarks before the Eels became an utter embarrassment.

The interview with the NRL integrity unit in which Arthur declared the Eels ‘’a shambles since I got here’’, as revealed in the Daily Telegraph, took place way back in April.

In retrospect, how innocent those barmy Autumnal days must seem to the respected coach given the calamity that has since besieged his club.

Back then all Arthur had to worry about was the spectre of horrendous salary cap rorting. A scandal that would mean hours of hard work on the training track and a genuine crack at the finals were flushed down the toilet like a dealers’ stash during a police raid.

When Arthur was describing the Eels as a “shambles’’ to NRL investigators Kieran Foran still looked like the answer to his halfback prayers.

Brad Arthur has watched the club crumble around him.

Not an overpaid and less than fully committed calamity who would be out the door by July.

April? Long before Semi Radradra did more island-hopping than a bored billionaire.

And before Radradra faced allegations of domestic abuse that threatened to see him sidelined before a knee injury finally did so.

All those months ago Corey Norman had not yet publicly auditioned for the NRL version of Boogie Nights.

He was just another magnet on Arthur’s board, untainted by a now career-threatening association with the drugs any NRL player time-sharing a brain cell surely knows are taken at your peril.

Shambles? Parramatta must have seemed like the local version of Manchester United or the New York Yankees to Arthur when he was unburdening his conscience at headquarters.

After all, he had not yet been forced to coach the club’s NSW Cup team Wentworthville because the Eels didn’t have sufficient resources to replace the usual coach when he fell ill.

So when you read Arthurs’ condemnation of his club’s administration you are not struck by shock and horror. Instead, you wonder: If the Eels were a shambles in April what would Arthur have to say about them now?

Kieran Foran and Corey Norman have both had off-field issues.

You also wonder how some of the Machiavellian figures who brought Parramatta to its knees would have responded had they been privy to their coach’s trenchant criticism when they still ruled the roost.

Those far closer to Parramatta tell me there was a time when the publication of Arthur’s stinging statements might have been considered an act of treason.

That by laying bare the Eels’ retrograde leadership and stultifying dysfunction, Arthur would have been accused of breaking the club’s code of silence and banished forthwith.

Now? If Parramatta has any hope of climbing from its knee Arthur should be awarded an extended contract and immediate life membership for exposing the delinquency of those who turned a once proud club into a rotting corpse.

Other than Arthur’s stoic performance, one of the few heartening things to come from this catastrophic season is that the Eels’ fans — at least those with the club’s true interests at heart — have had their eyes opened.

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Even those diehards who muttered dark conspiracy theories about ‘’victimisation’’ when the salary cap rorting was revealed now realise their club is riven with conflict and poisoned by the self-interest of a miserable few.

In April, Arthur said the club needed to ‘’urgently make changes’’ and ‘’we’re leaderless’’. If it wasn’t obvious then, subsequent events make that leadership vacuum as obvious as Donald Trump’s toupee.

The problem for the NRL is its attempts to reform the Eels remain the same as with other clubs in desperate need of improved administration. The game’s rich media rights deals and pokie palace revenue mean clubs remain relatively wealthy despite their worst efforts. The commission does not have economic levers to pull.

In Arthur, at least, they have an influential figure on the inside who has called a spade a shovel. Will the Eels respond positively to their coach’s scathing critique?

Or just find new ways to cement their reputation as Australian sport’s greatest laughing stock?