Did you hear the one about....

Did you hear the one about...?

By far the most entertaining thing about catching up with footy players from the ‘good (bad) old days’ is listening to the tales they tell through the ears of a 21^st century, politically correct point of view. One of my favourites revolves around two first graders being caught in the ladies toilets at an opposing team’s ground standing on a lavatory with a tape recorder and pair of binoculars spying on the other team’s backline tap plays.

Of course a story like this today is as likely as Wayne Bennett starring alongside Siro in a Lowes commercial. For starters as every match is videoed the art of rugby league espionage has faded to a fragment of its former self, and secondly thanks to the internet if this event did occur today everyone from Danny Wiedler to David Westley would know about the story before the busted wanna-be James Bonds had reported back to base-so what would be the point of re-telling it?  

Busted!

For many the current level of transparency between modern players and fans via increased community interaction, coverage and social media has been in many ways like finding out the Wizard of OZ is just some nerdy Matt Cecchin lookalike behind a curtain. Fans like to imagine the NRL world as one big beefcake soap opera and when it turns out that they’re just average blokes with bigger houses and quadriceps than you and I some see fit to ‘spice things up’ by fanning the flames of conspiracy theories and rumours.

That isn’t to say that rumours haven’t always existed; it’s just that they’re spreading speed has gone from glacial to bubonic in a few years. Want to tell the world Chris Sandow has a gambling problem? Click, done. Cronulla talking to Russell Aitken?  Des Hasler getting hair extensions? Tweet tweet done.

Tweet!

The strange thing is that by getting emotional at press conferences ala Tim Sheens to deny such rumours it shows that the average blog-happy fan can have a significant impact on his, or more likely an opposing teams, fortunes by inventing such scuttlebutt. The interactivity of fan and the game itself has long been viewed a Holy Grail of sports, but has it turned out to be a poisoned chalice?

I couldn’t say but some of the blokes from the good old days, despite their bung knees and smaller pay packets, certainly seem to think so.