Thursday 14 November 2013

Rugby League World Cup 2013: Watch out, there"s a Kangaroo about


If she was not aware, the late-night drinking culture in our inner cities

tends to be far removed from that of, say, Seville, where one can still

enjoy perfectly civilised company over a final tempranillo.



Bridge Street, Manchester, by contrast, offers a more open invitation to

trouble at that forsaken hour than if Slater had stencilled ‘Hit Me’

alongside his other tattoos.



Slater’s primary excuse for this cultural excursion was that he and Team

Australia were spending eight weeks away. The implication, as the England

rugby set first tried to suggest after seeking the company of Queenstown

dwarves, was that they needed to let off steam. Go for a run, then. Go

swimming in the Manchester Ship Canal if your veins are coursing with so

much adrenalin. And just maybe, give the carousing a miss. Two months of

relative asceticism are hardly a trial when you are favourites to restore a

World Cup to your country, but if history teaches us anything it is that

athletes abroad are an incorrigible breed.



Gazza’s ‘dentist’s chair’, Freddie Flintoff and the case of the missing

pedalo: the list is endless. Remove a team sportsman from his domestic

duties and soon enough



he begins behaving like some frat-boy sophomore on spring break in Vegas. Not

that Australia are likely to acknowledge as much in Slater’s case.



When they left Sydney Airport last month one of their press team, presumably

auditioning for a contract with Mills Boon, wrote of captain Cameron

Smith: “He is mesmerised by his iPad, a window into another world. Staring

back through the glass are three little faces — his lifeblood. His kids.”

And then, almost as soon as the Qantas stewardesses switch the doors to

automatic, the ‘what goes on tour, stays on tour’ mantra descends like a

drug.



Thus far the Kangaroos have not exactly been delivering an object lesson to

fathers everywhere. Even before Slater spent his evening in clink, rookie

forward Josh Papalii had £200 stolen outside an ATM machine on his very

first night in England. “The man,” Greater Manchester Police added, “had not

been able to recall what happened.”



A stern edict was issued against any further partying, but one might as well

tell the cat. Off-duty league tourists seem to swarm towards these

controversies like moths to a 100-watt lampshade. ‘Atrocities’, Australians

call them, as if these are simply integral stitches in the narrative, like

an arrow in the eye on the Bayeux Tapestry.



With the faintest modicum of restraint, it need never be thus. Harry Redknapp,

hardly the most puritanical of judges, made this shrewd observation at

Tottenham in lambasting David Bentley for



drink-driving: “Look at the problems managers have, and so many come from what

has gone on in nightclubs.



“The rewards for these players are fantastic, and they have time off in the

summer to enjoy themselves. Otherwise I don’t see why the drinking should be

any part of what they are doing.”



For men whose bodies should be their essential tools, the Kangaroos were

certainly furnished with a plentiful supply of beer in their Cardiff

dressing room after vanquishing England. But Redknapp’s wisdom might equally

be applied to fellow managers, after the hapless Steve Kean of Blackburn

found himself all over YouTube and several sheets to the wind in a Hong Kong

bar, making highly actionable comments about Sam Allardyce.



Alcohol and sport, you see: the two combine about as smoothly as oil and

water.


Article source: http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/news/rugby-league-wane-test-stars-dragons-den-130441553.html


Rugby League World Cup 2013: Watch out, there"s a Kangaroo about

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