NRL is it too bland?
This article is by Roy Masters - and he raises some very good points here. I couldn't resist posting it and I look forward to your comments.
Close matches and some upsets have added interest to the NRL in 2007. Many fans feel the game has lost one time flair. Most matches are dominated by one-out running and mainly defence. There are only a few champion players left. Bad decisions on field break fans' hearts and loyalty is a memory.
The NRL is just a rambling 16-room house painted beige. Now judging by the NRL's bizarre logo, the code's colours are black, white, green and yellow but they may as well be changed to dull shades of brown, to reflect the lack of colour and uniqueness among the clubs.
The Parramatta fans hold blue and gold banners and the Manly supporters wear their maroon and white, but really, on the field these two great enemies of the early 1980s are as different as Trinidad and Tobago. Everyone is playing 'not to lose' rather than playing 'to win'.
Parity has surely produced uniformity.
The salary cap restrictions and the mid-season transfers have really created a landscape like Garrison Keillor's 1997 novel, Wobegon Boy, where the kids in the fictional US town are all above average.
Maybe not all the NRL's 16 teams are above average right now, but the salary cap and players swapping clubs before June 30 these days has created a competition where all clubs are just clustering to a mean.
Take this bizzare scenario, second-rower Clint Newton's recent switch to Melbourne from Newcastle offers the best example of this leveling process.
Clint Newton's transfer allowed the opportunity to Mitchell Sargent to move from the bench to a starting position with the Newcastle Knights.
Mitchell Sargent had previously played for the Cowboys, whom he joined after being a benchman at the Storm.
So Melbourne acquired a player whose original position is now filled - two clubs later - by a player that Melbourne had originally released.
This merry-go-round has occurred with coaches too, with half of them having been at another club the year before.
The fans are loyal and so are players and coaches but really only in the way a cow is loyal to lucerne.
The NRL might as well give everyone with black blazers with its bomb-shaped logo on the front pocket and allow an executive search team to randomly place players according to a computer that only produces eight golden-point results every single weekend. The NRL's commercial partners - Betfair and Tabcorp - would be very happy with the total unpredictability of every round.
All the colour bleached from the game, it's now no wonder Paul Oliver's documentary, The Fibros and the Silvertails, has become the big hit of the Sydney Film Festival. It was the very first to sell out and required a second session setup.
The new 55-minute film features an overview from over 20 years ago featuring Western Suburbs and Manly players from 1978, the very first year of the bitter Fibro-Silvertail war.
Both players from the Eagles and Magpies speak very passionately about their clubs, 30 years after they had literally bled for their teams in warring games.
Expect the show to be shown on ABC TV either during this year's NRL semifinals or in the code's centenary season in next year.
Wests Tigers coach Tim Sheens was at the premiere and witnessed first hand the passion on the screen and in the audience that night.
Tim Sheens is one of the very few NRL coaches that is conscious of the games history and has even taken his team to the now dilapidated Lidcombe Oval, showing them the dressing room with battered lockers where all the pre-match motivation took place.
Tim could not have missed that some of the big audience on Tuesday night were wearing old hand-knitted jumpers adorned with three-decades-old club logos. No wonder the retro footy jerseys are very big sellers.
Revitalising the now obscure brands, brands like Dux Heaters and Paramount shirts, this mightn't please modern day marketers but they do reflect a time when footy fans identified with the little kid down the road who played with the local juniors and then progressed through the grades to complete his footy career with just one club.
There was great disparity in this era - with the rich clubs plundering the poorer - but everyone still spoke about it being just a short distance from the penthouse to the basement.
These days, the NRL is just a sprawling one-level house with 16 rooms of equal size and it's the same distance from the toilet to the bedroom as it is from the dining room to the laundry.
We see seasons where a club goes from worst to first within only seven months, such as Wests Tigers and the Panthers recently. But thenwhat happens the following season?
These teams are forced to jump on the descending escalator, which does seem to be travelling faster than the original one going up. It's almost as if all the huge passion in winning a premiership has totally drained out by the following January.
Nothing demonstrates the removal of expression and individual differences more than the case of St George Illawarra five-eighth Richie 'Rich' Williams.
Before the Dragons-Roosters round-7 clash, Richie Williams made a media comment about his opposite number, Braith Anasta, that many believed was true: Anasta was not as good as when he first represented the Bulldogs.
For this crime, Richie Williams was hammered on the field, then bagged by his coach and banished to premier league for five weeks until injuries to teammates saw him recalled.
The NRL and media 'Thought Police' weren't finished - as he has now been released to Penrith.
The best chance the NRL has to change its very sterile current form lies not with an outspoken player.
There are some signs that Roosters chairman Nick Politis and also Rabbitohs co-owner Russell Crowe are hammering away in a private war, luring some players off each other and spoiling planned media announcements by posting defections and bulletins on their club websites.
It's very unlikely this battle between millionaires for dominance of the inner-city footy scene will have all the emotion of the Fibro-Silvertail war but hey, it might just produce some good colour if they actually say something on the record.
Meanwhile, the rest of us must live with black and white results in a world dappled with greys.
Roy MastersReturn to NRL News Rugby League
