whatmichaelsays

Did Widnes own Naughton Park? Aren't they essentially tenants to the local authority now? Salford wouldn't have been able to afford to refurbish The Willows and retain ownership.

I don't want to come across as an apologist for Sam's poor decision making, because that's not what I'm trying to do. But I do think that it's worth asking questions as to whether RL players seem more likely than average to make bad decisios and, if so, ask why that is and if there is anything that can be done about it. You will never be able to stop people making bad decisions, but you can help them to make the right ones. Because aside from the "it's a decent human thing to do" argument, there is a reputational argument here. It's easy to write these guys off and tell them that they deserve everything they get, but it does RL's image no favours when our players are in the newspapers, in the courts or in The Priory. The armed forces thing is clearly not a like-for-like scenario, but I think there are enough parallels to make it a fair comparison. If the game is asking young kids to divert their attention to what is a high-risk (and often low reward) opportunity, it's not unreasonable to expect the game to help those young men divert their attention back to "Civvy Street" when their careers end - especially if that career ending wasn't planned. Is it a player welfare issue? Is it a training and education issue? Is it down to family circumstances? Are these poor decisions driven by financial pressures? Is mental health a factor? Is it simply down to the socio-economic background of where the majority of RL players come from? Whatever factors or combination of factors it is, there is both an ethical and a commercial justification for trying to address it. You're right, Sam did make a lot of money out of RL and I did say that he was an outlier. What it shows is that money alone doesn't help people make the right decisions but for every Sam Burgess, there and many many more Scott Moores, Malcolm Alkers, Chev Walkers, Ryan Baileys, Leon Pryces, Stuart Reardons, Zak Hardakers Brett Dallas' and that's just off the top of my head of SL players who have had brushes with the law relatively recently. Let's treat this issue like we should any other player welfare issue. As a sport we're having a debate about head injuries because there is evidence the RL players seem to show a greater propensity to develop signs of dementia at a young age. I'd argue that the same debate should be had if RL players have a greater propensity to make poor life choices that put them on the wrong side of the law.

For me, this isn't about saying that Burgess shouldn't be responsible for his actions. Instead, it's about understanding whether ex-rugby league players seem to have a greater-than-average propensity to have these types of difficulties and, if they do, find out why that is and what rugby league could do differently to support it's ex-pros. Like I said, the military has a similar challenge but unfortunately, it's one that all of society ends up paying for. My maths and recollection might be slightly out here, but Sam's age means that he was probably in an RL academy system where it was relatively "hit or miss" whether clubs provided college or university courses for their academy players. I'm talking in general terms here as I don't know what non-rugby skills Sam has, but I don't think it's unreasonable for RL to question whether and how it is equipping its players for life after rugby. I also don't think it's unreasonable, given what the clubs ask these players to put themselves through (how many other industries ask young lads to pack in education opportunities for a very high-risk career opportunity?), for clubs to take that responsibility seriously. Sam is a bit of an outlier in terms of what he made from the game, but it's not as if playing RL sets many people up for life.

Completely agree. The problem the RL (and to be fair, most professional sports) has is similar in many ways to the problems that the armed forces have when you consider the prevelance of drug and alcohol abuse in ex-squaddies. We take young blokes, put them in a highly regimented and structured environment, train them in an industry where the eminent skill is to get back up from a pretty big physical shock and spit them out into the big wide world when we're done with them - often with relatively few other life skills and - more often than not in RL's case - with not an awful lot of money for them to fall back on. Then we act shocked, stunned and furrow our brows when those same players find it difficult to go back into normal society. The sport doesn't take player welfare anywhere near as seriously as it likes to make out when those players are on the pay-roll, never mind when those players come off it.

I also think it's worth pointing out that, in most stadium developments, there is undoubtedly a lot of fortune that goes alongside the hard work. Had the new stadiums at Warrington or St Helens been planned a couple of years later, given that the 2008 recession forced the major supermarkets like Tesco to really rethink the "hypermarket" model that was so critical to the projects at the Halliwell Jones and Langtree Park/TWS, it's not in any way unfair to suggest that those venues wouldn't exist in their current guise. Wakefield have a lot of criticism to take, but there is no question that they got shafted by the botched enforcement of a S106 agreement that has been the basis for a lot of new stadia in Super League. This development has a good chance of going through because it's probably the least ambitious project they have put forward (it's for the most part, a fairly simple new stand project). I don't mean that in a disparaging sense, but in the sense that Wakefield are pretty much running this project themselves - not beholden to a developer that is exploting a loophole or on a council finding some land to donate to them.

A personal favourite...