THE Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs player who was 12 minutes late to training was made to wrestle against eight different players over the course of a four minute window.
Too strenuous? Not the way we see it.
Professional footballers are elite athletes and we’ve never encountered a champion athlete who didn’t train hard.
It’s like the old line about what comes first – talent or confidence? The answer is hard work.
We’re old enough to remember going to Canterbury-Bankstown headquarters when Steve Folkes was steering the Bulldogs to the club’s last premiership in 2004.
Back then the three staples of the way the Bulldogs did business were train hard, play hard and party hard.
We can still recall watching Mark O’Meley, Willie Mason, Braith Anasta, Andrew Ryan, Sonny Bill Williams and Johnathan Thurston running coathangers around Belmore Oval in the pre-season.
It was a brutal culture built around hard work and winning was simply part of their DNA.
Today Canterbury-Bankstown is a very pale imitation of what the club stood for 20 years ago.
You get the feeling head coach Cameron Ciraldo and general manager of football Phil Gould will be making some major changes over the course of the off-season as the Bulldogs look to rediscover what the club stands for.
The old saying about defence being an attitude rings true.
The Dogs of War forward packs of the 1980s coached by Warren Ryan were some of the most brutal defensive sides in the history of the game.
Today the Bulldogs’ defence is simply embarrassing, leaking an average of 32 points per game.
In the NRL it’s simply not good enough.
ROBBO’S STERN WORD TO JWH AFTER BRAIN SNAP
WHEN you talk about the greatest front row forwards of the last 40 years names like Steve Roach, Glenn Lazarus, Petero Civoniceva, Shane Webcke, Paul Harragon, Ian Roberts, Sam Burgess, David Gillespie, Mark Carroll and Matt Scott inevitably enter the conversation.
That’s our top 10 in no particular order of the best of the best who plied their trade in the toughest position on the field.
After 15 years in the rough and tumble of the middle of the field Sydney Roosters enforcer Jared Waerea-Hargreaves has earned the right to enter this discussion.
Three premierships, 298 NRL matches, 33 Tests for New Zealand, Jared’s never taken a backward step.
As much as we’ve long been big fans of the way the Roosters enforcer plays his brain snap in round 26 against Wests Tigers was unforgivable.
Which explains why Roosters coach Trent Robinson called JWH in on Monday for a sit down and a debrief about how it’s unacceptable for the alpha forward at the Roosters to let the red mist descend and allow his head to fall off so spectacularly.
Robinson and JWH share an extremely tight-knit rapport but the Roosters coach has every right to be fuming about Waerea-Hargreaves failing to put the team first leading into the pointy end of the season.
The Roosters showed how much they respect Jared by granting him a one-year extension to suit up for a 16th straight season in the NRL earlier this year.
But JWH let the club, his coach and his teammates down badly by losing his cool against the Tigers.
Instead of playing in one of the grudge matches of the season against arch rivals South Sydney on Friday night when the Roosters need him, JWH will be serving the first game of a seven match suspension.
Jared got this one horribly wrong.
