Clubs who conceal injuries are plague on the game
Sydney Roosters’ duplicity around a key player’s fitness is typical of a troubling trend, writes Daniel Schofield
There is little to no tactical advantage to keeping your cards glued to your chest
There is something about players pushing through the pain barrier that particularly appeals to the Australian mindset, perhaps linking to that tenuous notion of “Aussie Grit”. And so you would expect the revelation that Cooper Cronk played for the Sydney Roosters in the NRL Grand Final win over the Melbourne Storm with a broken shoulder blade to have been lauded up and down the country.
It was in a lot of quarters. No one can doubt the bravery or toughness of Cronk and team-mate Blake Ferguson, who played most of the second half with a broken fibula.
And yet the nature of Cronk’s injury has left a sour taste. For the Roosters had told everyone that Cronk had suffered a far less serious grade-three rotator cuff injury in the preliminary final victory against South Sydney Rabbitohs.
When one reporter got wind that all was not as it seemed, he rang the Roosters team doctor to confirm whether he actually had a fractured scapula. “Laughable,” he was told, and the original prognosis repeated.
As it turned out, the reporter was right and the doctor had lied or, as he put it, “I just didn’t tell the truth” in a manner of which Donald Trump would be proud. Andrew Webster, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, did not pull his punches on the smokescreen.
“The coach [Trent Robinson] and half-back [Cronk] are geniuses, no matter how you swing it,” Webster wrote.
“How much the lies and subterfuge around Cronk’s injury helped them is a question for them. What it does, though, is treat everyone outside their club as mugs ... fans who pay through the nose for tickets, especially to Grand Finals, deserve to know who is playing.”
Yet the opaqueness and duplicity regarding players’ injuries is not limited to Australia. There are wonders of the ancient world which are easier to discover than ascertaining the exact nature of the latest Manu Tuilagi setback.
Case in point came after the Leicester centre withdrew just before the last England training squad. It took an exchange of a dozen-plus messages with various press officers to be informed he had suffered a “niggle”. A “knock” is the other favourite catch-all term for unspecified absences.
Sometimes, the explanations can have troubling consequences. Last season, Leicester’s Dominic Ryan appeared to be knocked out trying to tackle Northampton’s George North. No head injury assessment was conducted because, we were told, he had been winded. Ryan has retired through concussion and admitted the North tackle effectively ended his career.
Why the evasiveness? Sometimes, injuries can be of a sensitive nature. One leading England player missed a game this season after undergoing a colonoscopy. Other times, coaches fear certain injuries could be targeted by opposition.
But the vast majority of injuries fall into neither of these categories. What is more, there is little to no tactical advantage to keeping your cards glued to your chest, with team announcements coming out at least 24 hours before matches.
So, it comes down to a combination of paranoia that everyone outside the changing room is out to get them and the power of being able to control the flow of information.
All this achieves is to create a vacuum into which speculation pours and a corresponding distrust of any official announcements, a situation which serves no one’s interests.