The expensive arms race which has painted Rugby League into a corner
“I don’t need this.”
Those four words were uttered to me by a senior member of the Queensland team ahead of last year’s opening State of Origin match in Melbourne.
It’s not how it initially sounds.
He wasn’t objecting to my questions. He wasn’t opening the relief valve after a stressful week.
He was making a pointed commentary about the plush, palatial surrounds of the Maroons’ team hotel.
“I don’t need this. Is this going to help us perform any better? It’s a bit much.”
The history books will show the Maroons went down 22-12 a short walk away at the MCG, but it would be disingenuous to lay that result solely at the feet of the accommodation.
After all, injury-ravaged Queensland was leading 12-8 with 30 minutes left in the game and the final score was perhaps misleading.
However, the off-the-cuff remark from a figure who has spent plenty of time around the traps provides pointed commentary about one of the biggest problems in rugby league.
We are stuck in a Cold War-esque arms race, where states, and professional clubs, and even State League teams, are often in a battle to see who can spoil their players the most.
A large part of Mal Meninga’s legacy in Queensland’s dominant Origin era was how he and support staff endeavoured to make the players feel “special” by paying attention to detail.
Of course, being treated as “special” frequently comes at a cost, both financial and in terms of man hours spent fulfilling every need.
When you start to taste success with that modus operandi, it’s difficult to wean yourself away.
How do you give the players the moon one season, do the sums, then come back and offer them a ball of cheese the next year?
It doesn’t happen like that.
The pressure is on the coaches and administrators to continually up the ante.
If a team wins eight series in a row by making the players feel like gods, how do they plan to recapture that success?
It’s not by slashing budgets and doing things on the cheap.
When a request slides across the desk for Kevin Walters to engage a $5000-an-hour psychology ‘expert’, you might hazard an idea why the man signing cheques has reached a point where he considers it acceptable.
The whole Bradley Charles Stubbs (aka ‘The Coach Whisperer’) saga has blown up for two distinct reasons.
The first reason, from non-invested rugby league fans, is because the move brings into question Walters’ aura as a leader.
The second reason, from those with a defined stake in grassroots league, is because $5000 is the type of lifeline that could provide a struggling community club with stability.
Now Walters is not the sort of figure who could be accused of losing touch with the grassroots. He’s a regular at suburban grounds, holds his memories of Ipswich park footy dear to his heart, and is always keen to remind players where they come from.
But he – and the people signing the cheques – have been swept along in the way of thinking that largesse and excess are necessary factors in the equation of success.
And if you stay in the poshest hotels around and lose a series? Well, it’s better than losing and staying in a one-star dive with roaches on the walls.
You see this thinking mirrored across all different levels of rugby league, and indeed across most big sports.
European football and the NBA are famed for their private jets and perks. No expense is spared to make the players and coaches feel like they are above mere mortals.
One club trumps another. Then that club is overtaken. And so on and so forth.
Where do you draw the line on the off-field one-upmanship?
Even sports scientists will tell you that much of what they research and adopt has minimal physical impact on players.
But they do it because of the “perceived” psychological benefit.
There are entire industries built around this. Sports compression garments have made some individuals extremely wealthy at great cost to sporting clubs.
The actual scientific results are mixed, but coaches demand their players have the latest items, predominantly because they don’t want their charges feeling like they are missing out, or like they are second-class, or behind the times.
If it doesn’t make your team any better, at least it might prolong your career as a coach.
Now, we have to acknowledge budgets don’t work in the kind of straightforward manner where whatever is spent at the top end of a sport comes out of the lower levels.
There are complicating factors.
But gee, it’s hard to see the money that gets outlaid at the elite level and think how far that would go when invested wisely on opportunities of growth – or easing the burden on volunteers.
It takes a brave coach to buck the trend and take things back to basics in search of a winning formula.
It’s fraught with risk.
It takes brave team staffers to refuse to be on call 24-7 for players so they can enjoy some semblance of a normal life.
The alternative is a never-ending bicep flex for ascendancy until exhaustion takes hold or the well runs dry.
Whenever athletes complain about having to go without or making do with rudimentary resources, my mind harks back to the USA Rugby League team of 2013.
The team arrived in France from three different continents the night before a game, plenty of them digging into their own pockets to make it happen.
Exhausted and disorientated, they jumped on a bus together, trained once and then took on one of the game’s previous powerhouses in Toulouse.
Against the odds, the USA scored an unprecedented 22-18 triumph.
Elsewhere, there have been plenty of other sporting teams and individuals in past decades who have flipped the status quo on the smell of an oily rag.
A huge part of it is making the players believe it can happen.
But before you can even think of that, the coach and administrators need to have trust that a methodology of modesty can provide a means to victory.