The Finktank

Broncos prop Joel Clinton gets fined $50,000 for meeting a woman at his Parramatta hotel room before his team's match against Wests Tigers. Andrew Symonds gets sent home from England for having a drink, is practically forced into retirement, then gets photographed at a league game on the Gold Coast sipping a glass of "what looked like a spirit mixed with Coke", according to the Daily Terror.

How the moral peabodies have flapped over that! And all this on top of the outrageous $10,000 in fines copped by Richmond's Ben Cousins for flipping the bird to the cameras in the dressing sheds at Subiaco.

What is going on with Australian sport? Since when did this part of all our lives that was so rich with characters, personality, larrikinism and dubious but (mostly) harmless behaviour become overtaken by stick-in-the-muds and do-gooders with the sense of humour and tolerance level of a council of Iranian clerics?

The rewards of being a professional sportsperson in one of our big codes might be great – fame, attention of beautiful women, good tables at restaurants, plenty of cash in the bank – but the catch is being treated like a five-year-old child for however much time you spend at the top.

There's a great passage in a book by Mark Schwarzer, the Socceroos goalkeeper, where he describes being at the team's 2006 World Cup HQ Wald-und-Schloss hotel in Friedrichsruhe and sitting out in the courtyard with some of his teammates and ordering an iced coffee. Guus Hiddink, sitting nearby, overhears the order and cancels it. Schwarzer is left to fume.

Schwarzer might have been taking a liberty but an iced coffee was hardly going to derail the Socceroos' World Cup campaign.

And it appears Hiddink's successor as World Cup coach, Pim Verbeek, is cut from the same cloth.

The Socceroos are in town, have comfortably qualified for South Africa 2010 with nothing to play for but to put on a good show and "thank the fans", but a media ban has been instituted on players preventing them from, well, thanking anyone.

Right or wrong, it does make things a little duller for all of us – and who gains from all this straitlacing anyway?

A successful sporting team that connects with the hearts and minds of the public isn't just contingent on on-field success. It also comes from showing some humility and fallibility, being open and honest about their failures, demonstrating a measure of that all-important humanity.

Above all, sports fans understand that their sports heroes are human beings too. They need sex. They like to drink alcohol. They swear. They occasionally screw up. Our hearts go out to those who can show that they might be paid millions but they're still, at the end of the day, one of us.

So if the administrators who run the NRL, AFL, ARU, FFA and CA are really concerned about the marketability and image of their respective sports they will allow the athletes who perform for them some licence to be normal.

If they can't see the benefit of that, then they're better off contracting some robots.

Who knows? They might get to win a few more games out of it, but I sure as hell won't be watching.


:: For more Fink musings on the big issues in football, check out Half-time Orange on The World Game.