THE WEEK RUGBY LEAGUE TIED ITSELF IN KNOTS
Blunders galore follow the crass decision to sign Folau
THEY’VE been putting out fires in Wakefield this week. An industrial bakery went up in smoke, which blanketed the city.
But that’s nothing compared with the attempts to extinguish the controversy attached to rugby league’s decision to allow Israel Folau, a player drummed out of Australian rugby union for posting homophobic comments, into their fold.
Wakefield Trinity, where Folau’s new club Catalans Giants arrive this weekend, do not need to answer to anyone on diversity.
When prop Keegan Hirst was growing up on a council estate in Batley, near Bradford, he wondered how he would survive in rugby league, the sport he loved.
Wakefield embraced him in his 18 months there. That he was the professional game’s first openly gay player did not even enter the conversation. ‘People wanted to see you doing what you were paid to do, turn up, play, work hard, have values, have principles,’ says Hirst (below), now at Halifax. ‘ They weren’t remotely bothered about the rest.’
Yet Wakefield coach Chris Chester found himself in the bizarre position on Thursday, of having to shut down questions about the importance of diversity because Super League had told clubs not to sanction any conversation relating to Folau. ‘I’m not here to talk about that,’ said Chester, who is known as an amenable, articulate manager.
The excruciating awkwardness in Wakefield’s little press room encapsulated a sport which has been tying itself up in knots for two weeks now.
The Rugby Football League (RFL), who govern the game, knew things could get incendiary when they met two weekends ago to consider the Catalans’ request to register Folau.
His fundamentalist Christian views that homosexuality is a sin are, needless to say, an abhorrence, though the legal paper the board considered that day made the idea of refusing to register him a highly complicated one. Where, for example, did
Folau’s tweets sit on the scale against cases of criminality? ‘Equivalence’, as the lawyers call it. There are a number of players freely playing in Super League with criminal cases in their past, domestic violence among them. It is understood that the RFL board’s deliberations did not venture into a discussion of the need to guarantee religious freedom of speech. But barring Folau did create a risk of a lawsuit from a litigious player who went after Rugby Australia with a £7million unfair dismissal suit and won a substantial amount of that sum out of court, after they sacked him over his tweets. To say that RFL, who registered a loss of £327,000 in their most recent results from 2018, cannot afford to go to court is an understatement. Folau’s registration was accepted with the caveat that any further public utterance of his homophobic views would see him drummed out. It would have helped if Australia’s vastly wealthier National Rugby League (NRL) had deregistered Folau, as there is a reciprocal agreement in place by which the RFL could have followed suit with a degree of protection. But the Australian clubs quietly reached an agreement between themselves that none would take him on.
None of Super League’s English sides would have done so, either, and one senior executive has told
Sportsmail that a loose agreement was actually struck between all clubs at a board meeting three months ago.
It came after discussion around the table turned to the possibility of Folau seeking Super League sanctuary. ‘It was informal. Nothing was agreed,’ says the source.
Catalans’ crass decision to sign him — to the detriment of a competition looking desperately like ‘ the league of last resort’ according to one executive — reflects a lower moral threshold.
They signed Greg Bird, who was sacked after standing trial for domestic abuse though later acquitted on appeal, and Todd Carney, dismissed by three clubs because of his behaviour. What happened after Folau was hired reaches to the core of rugby league’s existential crisis.
The need for a lucrative TV rights contract from 2022, when the current Sky deal ends, led to Super League breaking off from RFL late in the summer of 2018.
So they, rather than the RFL decision-makers, have assumed the lead role in communicating the Folau story this week — and, in the process, heaped a lot of fuel on the fire.
First, Super League chief executive Robert Elstone said he was powerless to veto the decision but was satisfied by the RFL’s ‘due diligence’. Then Super League issued an amorphous declaration that they had put in place measures to prevent ‘controversial signings such as this’, whatever that means.
On Thursday, Elstone flipflopped, saying that after ‘sleepless nights’ he concluded Super League made ‘ the wrong decision.’ But the decision was not theirs to make.
It would have helped if he and the RFL had informed the clubs of Folau’s move far sooner.
Wakefield chairman Michael
Carter had known about it for 10 minutes before the announcement. Any duty of commercial confidentiality to Catalans goes out of the window at a moment like this.
Super League’s demand that the clubs shut down all talk — communicated to journalists on Thursday — was the last of the mis- steps in a week when the sport should have been shouting out about diversity and seizing higher moral ground.
Theirs is now the league of Sonny Bill Williams, signed by a unique side, Toronto Wolfpack.
Initial attendances in the new season are strong. There’s a World Cup in England at the end of the year, with Prince Harry involved. Such a song to sing.
Though Folau’s career will begin at home to Castleford next weekend, Wakefield have shrewdly designated tomorrow’s match a Pride Day. Wigan Warriors will do the same when they host the Dragons on March 22. ‘It’s a small sport and it doesn’t look down on people,’ says Hirst. ‘It’s all about community. I think that’s where the tolerance comes from.’
‘None of Super League’s English sides would take him on’