Lame Reds appointments made to look foolish

There was real pain when James Slipper was named as the very first person to ever test positive twice under the Illicit Drugs Policy.

Reds prop James Slipper was warned he was being targeted for drug testing after an earlier positive to cocaine

In January 2015, the Queensland Reds announced a leadership team of James Slipper as captain, with Karmichael Hunt and Rob Simmons as vice-captains.

How lame those appointments now look. Slipper and Hunt have both been busted for drug use, not once but twice, while Simmons — the only player to, as it were, keep his nose clean where cocaine is concerned — was dumped by the Reds and picked up by NSW where he has become an indispensable member of their pack.

Even at the time, Hunt’s appointment was questioned. He had not played a minute of rugby in Australia since switching codes — again — and within a matter of weeks his recent past in the AFL had caught up with him.

There was real pain, however, when Slipper was named as the first person to test positive twice under the Illicit Drugs Policy. Seemingly, he was one of the Incorruptibles, a man who had captained Queensland in 41 of his 104 games. A man who thought more of others than he did of himself. He was on the board of the Rugby Union Players Association, which yesterday was questioning itself about its failure to detect any telltale signs of depression, just as the Reds and Rugby Australia too were busy second-guessing themselves.

Slipper was not one to crave the Reds captaincy. He took it on because they asked him to and in just 3½ years, he has served under four coaching structures — Richard Graham, Nick Stiles and Matthew O’Connor, Stiles alone and now Brad Thorn.

And then, having done the best job possible, he was happy for Thorn to find some other leader — in itself, perhaps a warning sign — but then was forced to reluctantly step back into the captaincy when new skipper Scott Higginbotham lasted only eight minutes in round one before being suspended for three weeks. The man who had gone through the deluge had to find his wet weather gear again.

Three seasons, 41 games, 11 wins, the culling of Quade Cooper, the loss of Simmons and Will Genia, the suspension of Higginbotham in 2017 after an incident with police, the Hunt arrest, the George Smith detention in a Japanese jail for 10 days. And overlaying it all, a family member’s desperate cancer battle. And then, yesterday …

The Reds were insisting that trying to connect the dots, Hunt and Slipper, was too much of a stretch, that there was no cocaine culture in the Queensland camp. Certainly, there’s precious little to go on. The two of them trained apart from their teammates last year, Slipper while recuperating from a torn Achilles tendon, Hunt from an ankle syndesmosis but it’s a huge leap from there to “drug central”.

It had seemed, certainly at the start of the season, that after the cruel break of his snapped Achilles, Slipper would finally resume his Test career this year. He had stalled on 86 Tests at the end of 2016 but so well did he and Taniela Tupou and Brandon Paenga-Amosa perform for the Reds in 2018 that it seemed Queensland would at least provide the Wallabies’ front-row bench reserves.

But then Slipper’s form started to slip, he complained of a collarbone problem and by the time the Wallabies squad assembled at Sanctuary Cove for a training camp this month, Slipper was nowhere to be seen.

Slipper is only 28 and had been Australia’s best ball-playing prop but there is a sense that his days in the Wallabies may be over.

No one has ever been truly busted by the Illicit Drugs Policy before, not until Slipper. Once he tested positive in February, his identity was still kept secret but he was made aware that he had now been moved to a targeted testing list. Still he continued to use cocaine. The choices he made were those of a man who wasn’t thinking rationally.

His reaction on being detected a second time last week was highly instructive. He told RUPA president Ross Xenos that he felt no shame or embarrassment or guilt but rather relief. Relief that he could finally receive the treatment he knew he needed but somehow couldn’t actively seek.

The Reds’ anger at him is understandable. The franchise is desperately trying to pull itself together, to get its culture back on track. But perhaps more than anyone else at Ballymore, James Slipper has earned a second chance.