Good point, also, the weather is hotter in Aus, maybe it's all that thirst quenching. I know I drink more in hot weather.


Tis no excuse for bad behavior from the NRL players though.

Drinking is also on the decrease among young people in the UK. This could also be a factor.

It's the level of celebrity involved that is the key factor. League players in Australia are at the top of the food chain sports-wise. they have more money, more media attention and more fans. This means that their behaviour is under the microscope to an extent that far exceeds what our players have to live with. It also means that there is the potential for more of an entitled "don't you know who I am attitude" that can lead to young men making fools of themselves. There is an extent to which young sportsmen believe they get a free pass on bad behaviour because their talent allows them to do so. It probably protected them a lot through school and early adult life and by the time they are highly-paid professionals they believe that this is the natural order of things.
The comparison really should be with NFL players in the States and footballers over here. These people live similar lives, in which they are told time and again throughout their early lives that their talent entitles them to anything they want. They are then put in an environment where they are constantly scrutinised by journalists who know that some of them will slip up and create a headline story.
None of which is to excuse the players involved for their poor choices and bad behaviour.

And there was me thinking that Cricket was the national sport of Australia and Australian Rules was the biggest footie code......34,818 was the average attendance at the AFL in 2018, some 19,558 more fans per game than the NRL, with AFL side the Sydney Swans being the best supported team in NSW a state that delivers 12 of the 16 NRL sides and is supposedly a RL state?

You are correct about celebrity being a factor though. Zak Hardaker is the bad boy of English RL, with Homophobic slurs, drunken brawls, assaults, drugs and now drink driving on his CV, yet maybe 20,000 people in the UK could pick him out in a line up.

Catalans bound Sam Tomkins, along with his lesser known brother were caught up in a drunken tirade against innocent bar staff to the point the bar staff were offered bribes to not report it. It’s bad enough that bar staff are made to feel scared by Catalans bound Sam Tomkins and his brother but to try and bribe her is utterly disgusting.

Also, a few years ago, half the Catalans first team were arrested for assault in Leeds.

I don’t think SL is too far behind the NRL

Less likely to get caught, I think, as no bugger knows who they are. Plus the NRL players have a lot more cash, which may make them more likely to go out and do daft things with it.

Is alcohol still the drug of choice in the English game?

Jesus how many offences had he committed!!!

Yet the NRL has the biggest TV audience. I don't underestimate the popularity of aerial ping pong in Australia and acknowledge its wider spread but in NSW and Queensland the NRL is king and players face a much higher level of scrutiny, more at a level football players get here.

One other important point about the original article cited, the "prominent columnist" is an unapologetic Yawnion troll who will never miss an opportunity to have a dig at a code that is far more popular and successful than the dying game he favours. There have been more than enough incidents of yawnion players misbehaving on the grog but these receive less attention because, the (a) their chums in the press are better at cover ups and (b) nobody gives a rat's cock about them.

NRL bad boy incidents compared to SL are more numerous than SL simply because of the greater number of players there and the interest in them. If we were going on percentages of bad apples in the sport it is probably higher in SL, in addition to our home grown idiots we import those deemed too badly behaved for the NRL.

What is your basis for saying that there are a higher percentage of bad apples in SL? Apart from Zachary Hardaker, who have been the really bad apples in SL, behaving on a similar level of nastiness to the NRL perpetrators described in the article?

Why are professional athletes abusing their bodies with alcohol. You should want to be the best athlete possible.

Maybe the punishment their bodies go through where they struggle to get out of bed the next day or two and constant bodily pain plays a part in using alcohol too much?

Maybe when they finish playing

I think it is just young men with a bit more money than they might normally have living in a male. Macho environment who go over the top.

Probably not dissimilar to how groups of men behave badly in many environments.

I don’t think that they are particularly different from most people of The demographic they come From

for less money than the AFL

This is closer to the right question in my mind - for me, the right question is 'why do rugby league players seemingly go out on the drink/sniff much more than any other professional sport?'.

People saying in NRL it's because of higher money/profile, then why don't we get the same with Premier League footballers over here? (Now it could be that they're that rich, they pay enough to hide it, but I doubt it).

In other professional sports, the athletes seemingly take things much more seriously and are far more disciplined with diet and drink etc.... you just hardly ever hear of athletics folk, footballers, golfers, boxers, even bloody darts players being on the grog. There is only really cricket and rugby league where the drinking culture still exists.

I'm sure there are a while host of reasons, but think there are a couple of main factors (and I appreciate this explanation is going to rely on some stereotypes);

1 - The typical social background of RL players. Most players come from very similar backgrounds and are of a similar mentality. The very physical and aggressive nature of RL means the sport attracts kids who are tough and enjoy the confrontation. Inevitably, often they come from tough backgrounds where confrontation/aggression/violence is a regular occurrence. What would be a really interesting study would be to see what percentage of pro-RL players in England were brought up on rough estates - it will be high. Cricket I believe has the issue for a different reason that is because of the culture around local cricket clubs - they're a social hub usually, and again, kids will be brought up going to the cricket club and seeing their parents drinking their regularly. In both sports, it's learned behaviour from generations of families.

2 - RL is a sport where natural physical strength/toughness alone can get you relatively far - it's possible for players to be a bit loose of the field and still perform on it (maybe if there was a bigger pool of players to choose from, those with natural talent would need to be more professional) - but this is probably because the sport as a whole is built on the same foundations. It's no coincidence that Melbourne, the most disciplined amd professional team in the game are the benchmark.

Ultimatelty, throw groups of young lads together from these similar types of background, who enjoy physical confrontation, who have been brought up around drinking, and then give them a pocket full of cash, an element of profile and a culture where drinking is not only acceptable, but is the norm, and you've got your answer.

As a far fetched example to kind of prove the point, I could ask 'why do so many weddings of travellers always end up finishing with a massive fight, compared to normal weddings?'

Not in SL but I see Scott Moore is back. In addition to people like Ben Barba, Todd Carney, Albert Kelly, Joel Monaghan amongst the higher profile players who had to relocate to SL for behavioural reasons there have lower level bad ones as well. Adam Walker would be a good call for a home grown idiot and Joel Tomkins didn't exactly cover himself in glory last year.

And I repeat the author of the article is an anti-League knob. I wonder if he will mention the 2 wobblies who were dropped from the yawnion game against England this weekend for disciplinary reasons?

For pulling birds

whatever next!!!!

Take out the Aussie bad boys and you are left with Zachary Hardaker and Scott Moore who have committed serious offences. Those two are very few compared to the large number of NRL delinquents. It seems to suggest that the SL players are better behaved than the NRL players.

Are you seriously telling me there is no drinking culture in rugby union?

Of course there is a drinking culture in Rugby Union. The difference is thst their player pool generally comes from well-educated, private school, middle class backgrounds. What you don't see or hear is the RU lot getting leathered and heading to their nearest Yates, Walkabout or other dung hole bar trying to pull the 18 year old local slappers - they're too busy guzzling champers and eating foie gras in private clubs with the bankers and politicians.

Read into what Greg Johnson did who plays for Salford, proper scumball.

Bar SOO, AFL gets better tv numbers and also bigger attendances at games. It truly is the number 1 sport in Australia

Or not with regards to TV. [urlhttps://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/nrl-trumps-afl-in-tv-ratings-war-20180910-p502u1.html[/url

And why exclude SOO - arguably the pinnacle of the game down there?

I'm not demeaning the importance of AFL and realise that the likes of Thurston, Inglis and Slater could wander around Perth and Adelaide largely unrecognised but NRL is very high profile indeed in the more civilised Eastern States.

Either way, the consensus seems to be that networks are overpaying for both sports [urlhttps://www.crikey.com.au/2018/10/01/grand-final-ratings-afl-nrl/[/url

The AFL schedule their games for the fans, not like TV for the NRL. Hello sunday night grand final and monday night matches whilst the AFL schedule their games so more people can attend.

The respective semi finals saw the AFL trounce the NRL on free to air TV ratings, even when the NRL scheduled their games so TV viewing would be higher and over 100k more turned up to the actual semi finals. 100k!

AFL truly is australias game