Can we just take a moment to appreciate the wordplay in the title? That took me far longer than I care to admit to come up with.
Ok in all seriousness, you may have seen the news today that former Bulldogs utility forward Jackson Topine, who played 16 NRL games with the Belmore club between 2021-2023, has launched legal proceedings against the club following a training incident last year during which it’s alleged Topine was made to wrestle all of his teammates consecutively as punishment for being late to training.
Whew.
According to the lawsuit, the session represented a “deprivation of liberty” and caused Topine’s “ongoing incapacity to play the game.” Furthermore, following the session, according to the court statement, Topine, as a result of completing the performance of all wrestling match-ups required under the wrestling direction, “required assistance in performing limited physical functions, including, standing and walking.”
Now I’m not going to sit here and say I know what is and isn’t normal in the four walls of an NRL dressing room, because I don’t have the first clue. There are practices and habits that occur in the sanctity of a change room that are not commonplace in the rest of society, explained away as necessary sacrifices and duties of elite athletes.
Sure, fair enough, being an elite athlete requires a level of dedication, discipline and focus that 99% of humans simply do not possess.
However, I wouldn’t have thought part of the deal for signing up to play a sport for money was to be treated as a blood worm dropped into a tank of hungry turtles (not my snappiest or fiercest metaphor but we had a class turtle in Year 5 and I wanted to shout him out).
Of course, this isn’t the first time hearing about this incident, as it was reported at the time (July last year) and quickly explained away by coach Cameron Ciraldo under a broader banner of improving performance, culture and habits at the struggling club.
We’ve gone through a range of different ways of talking about holding standards.
Some of that’s been monetary related, some of it’s been spinning a wheel and then some of that’s been trying to find ways to change behaviours.
The reality is we need to change behaviours here, and I think we’ve done a good job of that throughout the season. And I feel really sorry for the fans that we are where we are.
It doesn’t seem like we’ve taken steps forward this year on the same wins as last year. We definitely haven’t taken steps back.
- Cameron Ciraldo
Again, I don’t know the first thing about high performance coaching. But it feels like the best way to get the optimum out of players isn’t through methods that may have worked forty years ago before the advent of modern witchcraft like “sports science” and “nutrition” and “not working a second job to pay bills”.
There’s a certain element of one size fits all ruthlessness to the approach taken here by Ciraldo in my opinion. Coming from a successful club like Penrith, a team over the course of many years and failures, it was only natural that Ciraldo would try and lift everything he could and transplant it into the Bulldogs.
And frankly, a lot of the narrative coming out of the club from people affiliated is troubling but not unexpected from a bygone generation that can’t seem to grasp the state of the modern game.
When I played with Des, we would wrestle non-stop and you would pretty much go until you couldn’t breathe.
- Josh Morris
They’re not running a forced labour camp, the players have a decision whether they want to be a footballer or not.
- James Graham
Yeah look, what the fuck are you on about?
There’s a difference between a tough training session where everyone is flogged in unison to an act of systematic physical humiliation in front of your begrudging peers. It was reported players felt the punishment was “a bit ordinary” and they “felt like monkeys.”
It’s the same bullshit when defenders of this dredge up the preseason boot camps that lots of clubs now consign their players to in order to build unity, trust and work ethic, slogging through army style courses in the middle of nowhere, isolated from everything but your teammates and your own thoughts.
A consensual training camp as a team is not the same as negligence onset by embarrassment. Topine couldn’t walk unassisted after the session according to reports, and he apparently broke down once he returned home in front of his family and partner.
You wouldn’t accept corporal punishment in your own workplace because of the harmless error of being a few minutes late. And by the way, not a few minutes late to training, a few minutes late to the agreed arrival and strapping time. Topine was allegedly on time for the start of the actual session. He didn’t know he had infracted until the drums of war began beating and Travis Touma (the Bulldogs physiotherapist who administered the punishment and is named as a defendant) ordered the hounds to unleash.
At the end of the day, a footy club is a workplace. You may not like the comparison to the everyday man because of the salaries and fame these players garner, but since when did being fortunate and privileged enough to play a game for a living come at the cost of basic human rights?
We talk about how footy players can be arrogant and entitled, it’s true, and we’re quick to jump down the throat of any delinquent. But it never goes the other way, we never stop to think about the human behind the contract, the extended family that rides the bumps and bears the pressures of the sport away from the limelight.
And you can take this as some soft “kids don’t want to train” whinging from an entitled millennial all you want, but imagine how you’d feel if you were outwardly disrespected in front of your peers. There’s a time and place for harsh punishment, being eight minutes late to get your shoulder strapped isn’t it.
Considering the sad tale of Keith Titmuss and the coroner’s findings into that incident (it was unnecessarily and inappropriately tough), why are we so quick to lick the boots of these institutions under the guise of '“standards of success.”
Clubs have punishments for infractions, but most of them are more jovial in nature, like posting a shirtless selfie or talking about your family in front of the team, maybe a menial job like groundskeeping or cleaning or running a junior training session.
You shouldn’t have to fight for your job like a slave in the Great Pit of Meereen.