First to Walsh, who arrived at Saints in 2014 from Penrith Panthers and looked, in the early weeks at least, like the halfback that Saints had been missing since the departure of Sean Long back in 2009. Walsh was assured, could take on the line and had a varied kicking game. He lacked a yard of pace but for the needs of a Super League team he looked a perfect fit. And then it happened. During a routine win over Widnes at Langtree Park in July 2014 Walsh suffered a gruesome double fracture of the ankle and leg. It was one of the most unpleasant injuries I have seen in my 30+ years attending rugby league games and watching them on television.
To his credit Walsh battled back but he was never the same player. There was a visible reluctance to run at defenders when he returned nine months on from that Widnes game. He preferred instead to just ship the ball on to the next receiver. The kicking game was still there and there were still moments of brilliance, but they became ever more isolated. More regularly Walsh began to look ordinary, predictable even, and it was no surprise when he was moved on to Catalans Dragons at the end of the 2016 season. Well, I say no surprise. It was a bit of a jolt to learn that his replacement would be Matty Smith but that is another story.
Walsh played an underwhelming season with the Dragons in 2017, disrupted again by injury until in the early weeks of this season he suffered ankle ligament damage in a game against Hull KR. This time there was no way back for the 30-year-old Aussie. He called time on a career that saw him make 120 NRL appearances before his move to Saints, for whom he appeared 56 times scoring 16 tries and landing 183 goals. Despite the shortcomings he developed as a result of the injury Walsh made a significant contribution in the red vee and I’m sure the majority of my fellow Saints will join me in wishing him well in whatever he chooses to do next.
The Challenge Cup draw has been covered elsewhere on these pages to let’s skip straight to the potential sale of Wembley stadium which the FA announced on Thursday. They revealed that they had received a bid in excess of 800million from Shahid Khan, owner of Fulham Football Club and, perhaps more pertinently, Jacksonville Jaguars in the NFL. I have a view on why the FA should not sell Wembley but coming at it from a rugby league angle the issue is whether the sale, should it go through, will have any effect on the Challenge Cup final which has been played at the national stadium regularly since the mid-1940s.
Social media is awash with apathy on the subject. Many have cited reduced attendances at the final in recent years and the general devaluation of the competition as reasons why we no longer need to cling to the Wembley dream. I have a different view. If the Challenge Cup final is no longer held at Wembley then the greatest knockout competition in world rugby is devalued even further. It becomes just another event if you hold it at Newcastle, Manchester or heaven for-bloody-fend Coventry! We already have the Magic Weekend and the Grand Final filling the void marked ‘events’. The Challenge Cup is special. It represents the game’s history in a way that the Magic Weekend and the Grand Final will never do. In many ways they are both gimmicks. Extra fixtures that we could function perfectly well without. Unlike the FA Cup in football the Challenge Cup still matters. It is not something to be scoffed at, a reason to sack your coach if that is ‘all’ you manage to win one year.
Then there is the question of what moving from Wembley would do to the profile of our already undervalued sport. Wembley gives an event a sense of importance that no other venue in the UK can match. If an event is being held at Wembley it enters the national consciousness. Giving that up would move the sport further away from the attention of the casual sports viewer. At a time when we are forever squabbling among ourselves about how best to raise the profile of the game leaving the national stadium doesn’t seem like a good PR move. Mr Khan may have no intentions of keeping the Challenge Cup final away from Wembley but it is clear that his long term goal is to make Wembley an NFL venue first and foremost. Rugby league must do everything in its power to stay in its plans so that the national stadium does not become known only for American football in years to come.
York City Knights are one of the more upwardly mobile clubs in the UK. On the fringe of extinction not so long ago they are now flying high in League One, attracting some big crowds along the way. They made the news this week when they smashed West Wales by a world record 144-0 score-line. Many congratulated the Knights on their achievement which is justified on one level, but the result does raise concerns about the competitiveness of the division.
West Wales have lost all five of their matches so far and in so doing have managed to score only 26 points. That’s only just over 5 points per game. At the same time they have shipped in well over 400 at the other end. It has been suggested that many amateur sides in the NCL would be more competitive than West Wales have been, a feeling only added to by the fact that they had to postpone a game earlier in the season due to the lack of some medical facilities. The postponement came on the day when fans had travelled from the north east of England to see the game. It was not a good look for the game, and this latest result will be viewed by some as another embarrassment for the game.
The RFL needs to look at whether it has the balance right in the lower leagues in terms of competitiveness. Their need to have representation in as many parts of the UK as possible is understandable given the criticism the game receives for being geographically limited. Yet spreading the game far and wide cannot come at the expense of a proper contest. Though York’s crowds have been good that support for the game is at risk if we cannot ensure that games are more seriously contested. Someone has to win and someone has to lose, and the odd blowout score should be nothing for the game to worry about. But 144-0 takes that to new and dangerous levels.
And so to Zak. The news broke on Monday that the former Leeds and Castleford fullback will serve a 14-month suspension after he was found guilty of taking a banned substance. The length of ban is interesting given that Rangi Chase among others has been handed a two-year ban for effectively the same offence. He has already tweeted his displeasure at what he understandably sees as an injustice, so why has Hardaker been given relative leniency?
The report on the UKAD website is heavily redacted, but there is enough in there to gather that Hardaker has been judged to have had mitigating circumstances. There is something in there about an anniversary and something about depression. All of this may be entirely genuine, but was any of this taken into account when Chase and others were banned? It now seems that the two-year ban which many thought was mandatory for taking a banned substance during competition is out of the window. The door has been opened for any player found guilty of taking a recreational drug to be treated more leniently if they can convince the panel that they were feeling low enough to make drug use seem like a reasonable course of action. It will be very interesting to see what happens to Thomas Minns of Hull KR after he admitted to a similar indiscretion recently.
The backdating of the ban is also a head-scratcher. Hardaker’s ban is said to start from September 8, which is the date that he was tested. Yet he played in competitive games for the Tigers after that date. How can he be said to have already served that time then if he was playing until the end of September? The Grand Final on October 7 was the first game that Hardaker was forced to miss because of the test and so surely this should be the earliest date that any ban should be backdated to. Cynics have suggested that this abhorrent fudging of the rules has something to do with Hardaker’s impending arrival at Wigan. Others have claimed that the Warriors club doctor and other club employees poked their noses into UKAD’s business in helping determine the length of the ban and the date that it should start. Certainly Chris Brookes, the Wigan club doctor, is also involved with England who are another side who have sorely missed Hardaker since his failed test.
Whatever you think of Wigan’s conduct spare a thought for Castleford in among all of this. They were morally obliged to sack Hardaker at the time of his failed test, only for another club to come along and benefit from UKAD’s rather generous decision making. So, is there one rule for the bigger clubs and one rule for the rest in rugby league? Wigan fans will point to Ben Barba’s 12-game ban for drug use as a reason for this writer to wind his neck in about the whole affair. But the key difference is that firstly Barba’s drug use was out of competition, and that secondly Saints nor any of their employees had any part to play in deciding what punishment should be meted out to Barba. Saints took advantage of what you could reasonably argue was a lenient sentence after the fact, which has its own rights and wrongs. But Wigan appear to have played a part in engineering a lenient sentence for a guilty player whose past record is hardly the stuff of the nice boy next door.
Most fans outside a certain Lancashire town can smell something unpleasant in all of this.
No comments:
Post a Comment