Blame Maloney… and Mabo!

June 3, 2015June 3, 2015 Ryan

I’ll state straight up that I am a Manly fan, and have an obvious bias here.

Regarding the DCE backflip, there is one key element that has been missing from all of the reporting. Everyone has been coming out of the woodwork to slam the Round 13 rule, but no one has given any thought to why the rule was created in the first place. Many don’t even seem to remember.

The ‘Maloney Rule’ as I like to call it was brought in after James Maloney, then with the Warriors, signed a deal for 2013 with the Roosters in November 2011. This meant he signed 460 days before he would play and was a lame-duck player for the Warriors for all of the 2012 season. Fans were outraged and demanded change, not happy with being asked to cheer for a player who had declared his interest elsewhere so early on in the piece. The NRL reacted, creating the round 13 rule in an attempt to discourage the early poaching of players by rival clubs.

Which really brings me to this: Why is Daly Cherry-Evans the one being slammed here in the media? DCE is the one who has acted within the NRL rules which are designed to give clubs the change to retain their own players.

The party who has acted outside the spirit of the NRL rules is the Gold Coast Titans. The Titans are a floundering team struggling to maintain a fan base in what seems to be a dying market. They knew full well the ‘contract’ they had signed with DCE wasn’t legally binding until after June 10^th. Yet it was the Titans who decided to publicly spruik the deal both in contrast with the spirit of the rules and before it was set in stone.

Sure, DCE played his contract out in public. Sure, his management found a loophole that helped net him a bigger deal. But this was all not only within the letter of the law, but also within the spirit of it.

What the Titans have done flies in the face of the ‘vibe’ of the rules. It was not only disrespectful to Manly fans, but to the Titans’ own fans given this was always a strong possibility of happening. Make no mistake: no one comes out looking good from this saga, but the Titans are far from the ‘good guys’ in all of this.

Maybe it is just me being biased. Ok, it is probably me just being biased. But I have no qualms with how this situation has played out.

In summing up it’s the constitution, it’s Mabo, it’s justice, it’s law, it’s the Vibe and, no that’s it, it’s the vibe. I rest my case.