Over the years they have used hotel corridors and teammates’ shoes as toilets, poker machines as urinals, driven home drunk, brawled with the best of them and shown little respect towards women, including their own girlfriends. Welcome to the ugly side of rugby league. Let’s be clear that we love the game and most rugby league players are decent fellows. But the game does have its share of bad boys, as history shows. So the question is, have the bad boys of league hit bottom yet, or they still on the way down? This week we look at the Top Five things the bad boys of league may do this and subsequent seasons:
Number 1: Lying about which code they play. So if someone in the street says to them, aren’t you X player from team Y, they will reply: Nah, mate, I’m the goalkeeper for Brisbane Roar!
Number 2: Book into hotels under an assumed name, maybe a rock star, and then proceed to trash their room. Never been done before, I believe.
Number 3: Keep swapping codes every year or two to confuse everyone when you’re caught being naughty at something. Nobody’s yet played all four codes, league, rugby, AFL and A-League soccer, not to mention the American version, gridiron, so come on all you bad boys, what’s holding you back.
Number 4: To avoid scrutiny, bad boys stop going out for drinking, doing it instead in their own back gardens, but getting so sozzled they keep the neighbours awake all night with loud music and backyard games of footy and cricket.
Number 5: The really bad boys blare their music at 4am AND trash the neighbours’ gardens as a lark when they get bored playing cricket and footy in the backyard.
