And not a moment to soon as its been a sporting desert out there since october 2010. Sure you might point out that there has been a cricket season in between but what a fizzer that was. Australia picked its best team for the one day series and got smacked in the tests as a result. Still at least the Poms have some recent achievement to talk about now, I'm sick of them banging on about World War II.
Sure there has been the rugby to keep us occupied for the last few weeks, but once your start following it closely it starts to hurt your head as you wonder - so what was that for? I was watching on Saturday and the Brumbies thoroughly dominated the Reds scoring four try's to one but still lost.
Anyway enough of the inferior sports and back to the main game, and god bless the NRL for reminding us all that the season was about to start with the traditional season launch.
AFL is desperate to consolidate some public interest in its expensive loss making gamble into Western Sydney by having a NRL style season launch. If you recall, thats where you call on the press together to view the upcoming advertising campaign and the main star of the add gets drunk on the day of the launch and ends up in jail. This effectively means the NRL is on the front and the back page of the paper at the same time. Brilliant.
This year the AFL has the same approach but it decided to sacrifice a player manager to the wolves by assigning him Nick Reinwalt's cast off. While he might now be so embarrsed that he will never work in Melbourne again, I am sure he will be welcome at the Sharks. Who knows, they might find a spot for him next to the trophy cabinet.
This solid gold publicity doesn't happen by accident this is a deliberate approach by the NRL. But lets face it if they didn't want their players disgracing themselves in order to generate pre season publicity they wouldn't force feed them copious amounts of alcohol in the same room as all the media hungry for the inevitable story.
If they wanted to keep the actions of the players quite they would hire Charlie Sheen for the season launch, load him up with cheap booze and then let him lose on Sydneys adult entertainment sector. There wouldn't be a photographer in Sydney not assigned to the case of stalking out Sydneys strip clubs - thereby leaving Benji in peace.
Still I have to have some sympathy for NRL players. Its all well and good when some 20 year old groupy is following yuo everywhere. But when your stalker is a bloke its not as much fun especially if its Madi Gras week.
