By DANNY LOCKWOOD
APPARENTLY rugby league players who ply their trade for Kingston Press Championship clubs don’t have mortgages.
They must live some form of financial mediocrity that befits their limited rugby talents, happy to supplement their daily endeavours as plumbers, brickies and electricians with beer money earned playing for Batley or Featherstone, Keighley or Whitehaven of a weekend.
At least that seems to be the patronising view, intended or not, of a great many of their full-time ‘betters’ judging by the teddy-throwing tantrums of the past week.
I always thought rugby’s class prejudice was the domain of Twickenham, rah-rah and ‘the gentlemen’s game’, looking down their snooty noses at we whippet-owning flat cappers.
Not if we’re judging by the squealing, self-entitled whingeing of some Super League players who apparently think they have a God-given right to full-time employment ad infinitum, until they are good and ready to eventually hang up their boots.
Who do they think they are -Jamie Peacock?
The obvious conclusion to that argument is that Championship part-timers should be considered lesser mortals than the pampered, privileged heroes who inhabit Super League.
Or at least those who inhabit Super League until the cruel fortunes of the Million Pound Game dictate otherwise.
“It’s not fair.” “It’s blokes’ mortgages.” “Boo hoo – how can the dastardly RFL do this to us? The wife will be thrown out on the streets, the kids put in care.”
Dearie me. Get a grip boys.
Relegated Hull KR full-back Ben Cockayne put his boot into the Million Pound Game early, claiming last week that it made a mockery of the State of Mind campaign.
Thankfully Cockayne didn’t quite say we’d find players swinging from a nearby tree if their club was relegated. But that was his clear implication.
He called the MPG concept “a disgrace”. I think his cheap inference trumped “disgraceful” by a large margin.
In the immediate aftermath of the MPG’s breathless climax, Justin Carney tweeted “How can you celebrate when you just took someone’s mortgage! … have a look at yourselves RFL.”
Since when did any player have the absolute entitlement of financial security? Ever?
And that’s not just in our sport, it’s any sport. (continued below)
If you are rubbish, don’t perform you don’t get a new contract. If you don’t cut it at Wigan or Leeds you might end up at Swinton or Hunslet.
The £70,000 you are fortunate to earn for two or three years might suddenly be £20,000 or less.
In every major British sport (apart from Super League during the licensing period) there has always been the threat of relegation – which with it brings the absolutely equal opportunity of promotion.
One man’s meat, another man’s poison and all that.
Should Rovers chairman Neil Hudgell make good on his threat to go part-time next year (and I don’t think he will) do you really believe that players like Maurice Blair, Josh Mantellato, Ken Sio, Albert Kelly, Terry Campese, Mitch Allgood and Dane Tilse won’t be picked up by another club?
And did you happen to notice what all of those Rovers players I named have in common? That’s right, none one of them is British. They are foreign imports – mercenaries if you want to look at it that way – coming over on fixed contracts with no guarantee (on either side) of long term commitment.
That’s not a criticism by the way. It’s the reality of professional sport.
I SENSE that it’s the sudden death, gladiatorial concept of the MPG which seems to have prompted these emotional outbursts.
I get that. There is the sense for we fascinated neutrals of The Coliseum, the nerve-shredding prospect of there being only one survivor. But isn’t that the essence of sport? What’s the difference between being relegated by the MPG rather than on the last day of the season?
I suppose that if a team was effectively relegated with several rounds of matches to go – as would have happened with Wakefield last year – players’ agents could get busy finding a berth for the better players in advance of the inevitable. But that’s still the situation Hull KR players find themselves in this morning.
And the bottom line is this – over the course of 30 league games and this decider, they have simply no been good enough. The players who have performed will find employment, the ones who haven’t will face the inevitable outcome of any player in any sport – step down a level, or move on entirely. It’s everyone’s fate eventually.
What’s the betting that Derek Beaumont and Neil Jukes, plus a dozen or more Super League counterparts, were running a critical eye over the KR squad yesterday, looking for potential recruits?
It’s sport, lads. The great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly might have made famous the saying that it’s more serious than life or death, but really, it isn’t.
