Why #NRLtalkthegameup is a dangerous step down a dangerous road for rugby league
TODD Greenberg says rugby league needs to be defended from “crisis merchants”, but the reaction to the dramas at Manly prove #NRLtalkthegameup is a dangerous trend for the game writes PAUL KENT.
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LEADERSHIP reveals itself at every level.
Look at South Sydney. The Rabbitohs were in Thursday night’s game, leading Brisbane, until the cost of playing without Sam Burgess began to tell.
Burgess is the game’s greatest enforcer. He is the one most coaches would go for if they were allowed to pick any forward from the other 15 teams.
He is the Rabbitohs’ soul, their undisputed leader.
Yet at some point Burgess has to realise that he is useless to his teammates while watching from the sideline.
Burgess has another week to go on a suspension after already serving two weeks earlier this season.
He is not a dope, though. He’ll get it.
Good leaders are all the difference. Good organisations reflect the values of their leader.
So do the bad.
Todd Greenberg’s campaign to #NRLtalkthegameup is a dangerous step down a dangerous line.
It sounds like Russian politics. If you don’t like the message, kill the messenger.
From someone supposed to be the game’s boss, it is immature and potentially damaging. No other boss of a major sport has turned on the media in such a way.
It is potentially damaging because it gives those with a role in the game permission to overlook genuine problems — and the NRL can’t deny there are problems — by cynically dismissing any criticism of those problems as “negative”.
Given perception is reality, Greenberg is halfway there.
And yet the game continues to run a poor second to AFL, with the gap between codes widening, with no deep thought why.
Now, anyone that asks the question is at danger of being labelled a crisis merchant, with whatever valid criticism there might be in the question dismissed as simply being negative.
Any debate that raises criticism can be easily dismissed under this new model.
Greenberg has granted the players an easy out.
Just when the game needs a mature understanding of the media’s role and it’s ability to sell the game the game has taken a step backwards.
The ARL Commission meets Monday and one of the first questions that should be asked in the room is why?
Beginning a war with the media is about as productive as going to war in the mafia. It’s bad for business.
Hopefully reconciliation begins with understanding. Hopefully the Commission gently guides Greenberg back to focus on change from within the game.
Manly’s problems are not a by-product of negative media.
It is coverage of a legitimate news story.
Manly’s season ticket holders, their sponsors who pour hundreds of thousands of their money into the club, their members, they all deserve the right to know what is happening inside their club.
If players are fist-fighting, the financial supporters of the club, no matter how small, deserve the right to know. That is the contract you agree to by having a public life.
But players are confused. They have long been advised by coaches to be wary of the media.
The directive is less a thought for their own welfare than it makes life simpler for the coach.
Tell them nothing, take them nowhere. No headlines to follow.
Too often it leads to poor Akuila Uate there on Tuesday, trying to defend his teammates as his face revealed his confusion and hurt.
“You guys (in the media) can actually help us by being positive,” Uate said.
“We’ve had enough of these dramas.
“We get dragged down by you guys. To stay positive, you guys can actually help us. I feel for whoever gets involved because we’ve got feelings as well.”
It was a moment of heartache.
Uate, never properly taught how to deal with the media, was giving it an honest try.
“It’s not a good look when we know the real story and there’s a different story out there,” he said.
So Uate was asked to give the real story: “No comment.”
Uate is not much different from his coach.
Trent Barrett finds himself in a leadership vacuum at Manly. Club owner and chairman Scott Penn is often overseas on business and chief executive Lyall Gorman has lost voice since arriving from Cronulla.
Barrett is a good young coach learning at a very quick pace.
He has to, as support around him is minimal.
The major guide helping Barrett through the minefield of NRL coaching was Bob Fulton but the NRL kicked him out of the game and are yet to tell him why. That’s another story.
Last week Barrett declared Jackson Hastings would no longer play first grade after his players went to him and said they no longer wanted Hastings in the side.
The coach backed his players.
Almost as soon as he did it, though, some players publicly declared their support for Hastings. Then a dinner was organised where Hastings and his pugilistic rival, captain Daly Cherry-Evans, hugged it out and declared all was good.
Too late for Barrett. He was already on the record supporting his players.
Did they lie to Barrett?
Or were the players not strong enough to stand by their claims?
In the meantime it emerged some of the same players Barrett supported, including Cherry-Evans, broke Barrett’s curfew to sneak out of their hotel and go to a strip club in Gladstone.
Now, though, fuelled by Greenberg’s strategy to #NRLtalkthegameup, the story is being spun another way to absolve Manly of wrongdoing.
It is the result of a negative media, the new narrative goes, an agenda driven by “crisis merchants”.
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Public debate is the consequence of a public life.
Greenberg needs to drop the social media campaign and get his clubs, and his clubs the players, into line.
It has to be driven from the top.
Cultures that are most toxic, leadership expert Warren Bennis once said, are those where nobody knows the truth — or where nobody is talking about it.
Bennis couldn’t find the pointy end of a football but he has identified the problem within the NRL, which lives in a culture of denial.
Rugby league is now a billion dollar industry.
Yet we continue to drive old ways, resistant to change within club land, disguising an inability to change and become professional by leaning on sure-fire prejudices like blaming a negative media.
The game never fell for this under previous administrators.
Greenberg needs to be taken aside on Monday and quietly advised there is a new direction.
*****
THE NRL’s list of nominees for the Hall of Fame gets culled from 100 to 25 tonight and, as with all lists, more than a few old broken noses will be out put of place.
Lists like these always do, but well done to the NRL for finally putting some prestige around back into the HoF after it looked like, in recent years, the Immortals was going to completely diminish it, to the point of making it worthless.
The Hall of Fame needs to continue creeping into our conscience until, one day, it holds a place at the forethought of our minds when it comes to the game’s greatest players, with the Immortals to sit over the top of that.
From the 25 named tonight a selection panel will sit down and decide on the final six to be inducted into the Hall of Fame on August 1.
The biggest danger for judges is to look past the prejudices in game, which cultivates many.
Most importantly, recent trends where ex-players who remain in the game through broadcast or club affiliations are subconsciously given more credit than those who rode off into the sunset.
It’s why, in many cases, the selection of the judges is as important as the process itself.