David Fifita’s Bali nightmare a symptom of a club lacking role models
Bali should be a banned zone for all rugby league players, writes Robert Craddock, but even that may not be enough to save Broncos youngsters who appear to lack role models at the club.
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Peace agreement: Deal done to free Fifita
Cop the tip boys – next time a boofheaded rugby league player needs a break send him to Burleigh not Bali.
Or even Byron where there’s couple of nice Asian takeaways.
But Bali should be a banned zone for all sorts of reasons which can make it a crass hot bed of player misbehaviour (not that, we stress, it has anything to do with the locals).
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Remember those good old days at the Titans when they successfully banned players from going to the wrong side of a cab rank on Cavill Ave after dark so they did not get seduced by the nightclub strip?
If you can do that why can’t you ban players from going to Bali?
The trouble with Bali is that it’s not quite here or there.
The six hour flight is far enough Australia for some players to feel as if they are in a more promiscuous world where, for some reason, acceptable standards of behaviour don’t matter.
That no-one’s watching. That they are above the law. That anything goes.
But it’s close enough to home for the place to be teaming with boisterous drunken Australians with cameras and bad attitudes.
To see David Fifita apologise his way out of trouble with a “peace settlement’’ for an offence which could have landed him two years in jail says a lot about why some young sports stars never grow up … because they don’t have to.
There will always be someone following them around ready to clean up their mess.
We may not know for years whether Fifita would actually have been better off sweating it out in custody for a few weeks or even facing trial.
Instead, just 30 hours after his alleged offence, he is a free man.
Fifita got lucky. If the bouncer he allegedly hit on the right cheek had wanted to make a point about it Fifita might well have been stuck in Bali indefinitely.
It will be interesting to see what action the NRL integrity unit takes for the facts looked damning before the complaint was withdrawn.
Fifita, exceptional player that he is emerging to be, is a slow learner and we are not simply talking about the Melbourne Storm’s dramas at the same nightclub a few weeks ago.
When the Broncos players were preparing for their last match of the season, a final against Parramatta in Sydney, Fifita was the player allowed to be out by himself after midnight playing the poker machines.
At any age that would be a folly but at age 19 you wonder what the influence of the senior players is at the club.
Does the team have any role models? Does it have any senior player brave enough to give the youngsters strong guidance?
The problems is many of the veterans are fighting for the futures so they are consumed by their own struggles.
Originally published as David Fifita’s Bali nightmare a symptom of a club lacking role models