Nightmare on Church Street

Sometimes, being the son burns.

The rugby league bubble can be one of the most intensive and magnified vessels of public opinion and scrutiny in the entirety of Australian popular culture. Every week there are stories plastered on the front and back pages and all throughout media channels about a player’s latest misstep.

Sometimes, these stories are of serious offences and criminal activity, while some are overblown exaggerations of a night on the beers taken a little too far.

And sometimes, a player can be in the news for…well I don’t really know what it is that Jakob Arthur did to offend Eels fans as such.

To catch you up, Arthur is a utility, capable of operating in the halves mainly but, due to his larger frame, also capable of playing spells further out wide as an emergency centre.

He is also the son of the current Parramatta coach Brad and clearly the product of blatant and unbridled nepotism running rampant among the ranks at the Eels.

I’ll pause to let that sarcasm settle.

Over the last year, the booing saga of Jakob Arthur has been one of the more puzzling subplots in the NRL, mainly because no one has any real idea as to what elicited such a strong response from, it must be said, a vocal minority of the Eels fanbase.

Vocal minority or not, it’s there, so let’s talk about it.

Booing is inherently a part of sports, which might sound like an obvious statement to bother to put into writing but the reality is it’s getting a bit out of hand at the moment, and it isn’t limited to the NRL. Just recently the AFL went through its own booing saga with champion forward Buddy Franklin mercilessly booed every time he touched the ball in a game against Collingwood.

I’m not across the specifics of the relationship between Buddy and the Magpies fanbase but I did see widespread condemnation of classless treatment of one of the game’s great ambassadors.

Collingwood themselves offered an apologetic statement saying that when presented with a chance to celebrate one of the game’s greats, they as a club fell short.

Back to Arthur, the mistreatment really started midway through last season when he began to be regularly selected on the bench as a utility option, much to the disgruntlement of the Eels fans.

Given the settled star halves pairing of Dylan Brown and Mitchell Moses, the 80 minute engine of Reed Mahoney, and the general skepticism around carrying a bit part utility on the bench, it’s pretty clear in my mind the root cause of the disdain was purely strategic disagreement.

The problem is though, when you boo everything, it loses meaning, and it begins to take a life of its own. Pretty soon, what started as murmurs about the tactics morphed into misguided malevolence at a player that was caught in an unfortunate crossfire of being a questionable selection while also having the added glare of being the coach’s son.

To his credit, Jakob Arthur always maintained an outward persona of positivity, making sure to do his best to keep the fans onside, noting it is their right as paying customers to express their emotions however they see fit.

All reports that came out of Paramatta from the player’s side told of understanding, how heightened scrutiny and an unfair perception simply came with the territory of being a professional athlete, especially in an environment as highly observed as Parramatta, with their long history and rabid fans starving for success.

Still, irrespective of the projections coming fro the Parra camp, it was always uncomfortable to hear the chorus of boos rain down during player introductions at a source with little to no input in the decision. Was the booing of Jakob thinly veiled contempt aimed at the coaching decisions of Brad? Probably, but I’m not a psychologist.

Staying on the human element for a moment, it’s an incredibly challenging balancing act between being a tough taskmaster head coach at work while seeing the vitriol your son is attracting from fragments of the fanbase, and second guessing whether it’s your own actions that are the driving contributor to the dissidents.

Sometimes, we as fans forget that these players are human beings at the end of the day. Modern media coverage, the heightened popularity of sports betting and the accessibility of social media have all contributed to a dehumanisation of athletes to little more than mindless pawns for our own enjoyment.

There’s a culture of dismissal and disrespect for the sacrifice and craft these athletes, across all sports, have put into their careers. An armchair hero, sat down in his quiet little town watching the game by the dim afternoon light, a fistful of crisps in one hand, remote in the other, sneers as Latrell Mitchell misses a game winning field goal.

“I could’ve done that” he scoffs, taking a swig of his third Tooheys Extra Dry.

Sarcastic example aside, the hubris of the common man has overshadowed any semblance of empathy we have for our professional athletes. Just because our society has placed extraordinary monetary value on being able to kick a ball better than the average human, doesn’t give us the right to treat sportspeople as holier than thou deities capable of withstanding personal attacks most of us wouldn’t be comfortable sarcastically jibing to our close friends.

Back to Arthur, the chief scapegoat of all that went wrong with Parramatta last season (again, sarcasm, please don’t hurt me), a small part of me was happy to see him get his Grand Final moment last season, scoring a late consolation in Parramatta’s eventual loss to Penrith.

I know that, despite all the hardships of the season, the fan reaction and the general sour taste the Grand Final would have left in his mouth, he can walk away with the smallest of victories, something he can sit by the fireside and tell his grandkids in fifty years time, how he scored in an NRL Grand Final.

I have no affinity to Arthur the player, but I was happy to see him finally get out of the shadow of his own father and forge his own path, securing his release to join Manly in the last week, debuting in Manly’s 28-18 loss to Newcastle on Sunday.

Sports history is littered with examples of players blossoming after a change of scenery and escaping a vitriolic and miserable past. While I’m sure Arthur had every intention of wanting to make it work at Parramatta, the swirling noise around his place in the team coupled with the entrenched halves pairing made it almost untenable, and leaving was the only real option.

Arthur seems to be embracing that challenge and offering a great level of maturity and perspective on what has obviously been a rollercoaster last 12-18 months.

“It will be good that he can be on the outside, he won’t be telling me what to do footy-wise and just be that [father] figure.

It’s a good opportunity to be uncomfortable. Whenever you’re uncomfortable, it’s a good opportunity to grow and get better.”

Jakob Arthur, to SMH

On the field, I think there’s a lot to like about Arthur’s game if given a chance, with his size as a playmaker lending himself to great utility across multiple positions, as well as a strong running game, although perhaps lacking any real refinement or nuance in some of the finer aspects of halves play given his stop start career and relative lack of match practice given his status of perennial reserve or 18th man for the Eels.

Given Manly’s revolving door of halves partners to Daly Cherry-Evans (who himself is no spring chicken at 34 years of age), with Josh Schuster, Cooper Johns and Kaeo Weekes all shuffling the deck chairs on that particular Titanic, the path to regular first grade football is less crowded on the Northern Beaches.

After a couple of years in the hellfire, it must be nice to feel the sea breeze on your face again.