CLICHES dominated yesterday's ARL representative season launch at ANZ Stadium at Homebush Bay, with Laurie Daley's "dream come true" recording most mentions, although Darren Lockyer's "legacy of the pioneers" will certainly be echoed in this centenary year.
Souths' Roy Asotasi, expected to be New Zealand's captain for the centenary Test with Australia on May 9, made the most original contribution. "There is no cotton wool in our game," he observed.
Sitting beside him was Kiwi coach Stephen Kearney, who is also assistant to Craig Bellamy at the Melbourne Storm. Kearney will help prepare Storm players, such as Cameron Smith, Greg Inglis and Israel Folau, while almost certainly opposing them with a Kiwi team including Melbourne forwards Adam Blair, Jeff Lima and Jeremy Smith, none of whom will treat his NRL teammates as if they are wrapped in cotton wool.
Ditto Bellamy, also NSW coach, who will also confront Smith, Inglis and Folau when they play for Queensland at State of Origin time.
Australia's coach, Ricky Stuart, also the Sharks coach, doesn't have any potential Kiwi Test players at Cronulla, nor does Queensland's Mal Meninga have any NRL commitments, but Stuart must choose a Kangaroos team out of the state battle coached by his former Raiders teammates.
Throw in Daley, Country's new coach, and City's boss, Tim Sheens and five of the six representative coaches this season are all ex-Raiders.
Sheens, now with Wests Tigers, was coach during the Green Machine's three premierships, while Bellamy, Stuart, Meninga and Daley played under him.
Our administrators are forever telling us those who drink from the well are obligated to those who dug it. If we marry this cliche with another, it's reasonable to ask what's special about the water in Canberra?
The well dug by the Raiders' inaugural coach, Don Furner, who was also in charge of the 1986 Kangaroos, and later shaped by two-time Australian coach Wayne Bennett, Furner's co-coach in 1987, has been filling the water bottles of some very fine coaches since.
Throw in the Raiders' Neil Henry, Meninga's assistant at the Maroons, and Ivan Henjak, now with Bennett in Brisbane, and there's a Canberra spring from which coaching talent bubbles.
Bellamy says, "Back then, no one spoke about leadership but it was there." While no commandments were codified, nor discipline defined, everyone learnt standards by osmosis. "You knew what you had to be to be a leader," he said.
Today, with these leaders now coaches, it's reasonable to ask where is the loyalty when a coach prepares representative game plans to exploit the weakness of a player he is supposed to nurture at his own club. Fortunately, rugby league has Queensland.
The Maroons provide all the parochialism we need. Bellamy, who admitted publicly yesterday there was no standout Blues half, would love to have Storm's Cooper Cronk as NSW's No.7.
However, Cronk, the incumbent Test half, has ruled it out, declaring himself a card-carrying Queenslander.
He may be ranked No.3 in the eyes of some Queensland selectors, below Cowboy Johnathan Thurston and Titan Scott Prince, but Cronk says there is no point Bellamy even musing for a second about his playing for NSW.
"I was born in Queensland, raised in Queensland and I first played senior football in Queensland," Cronk says. "Dad played for Bondi United and there has been the suggestion I was conceived in NSW and therefore the other team has some call on me.
"But I checked it out and found my parents moved to Brisbane a year before I was born.
"Some, like Greggy [Storm teammate Greg Inglis, who was raised on the NSW mid-north coast] have crossed over but he obviously thinks of himself as a Queenslander. I could never do what some have done and switch between Australia and New Zealand because it suits. I'm a big believer in doing what is right.
"Your actions have a ripple effect on others. Throw a stone in a pond and it not only hits its target, but produces waves which affect everything nearby."
The Australian team will be chosen before the Maroons', meaning Cronk faces the challenge of Queensland incumbent Thurston, who is now fit after missing last October's Test against the Kiwis. Asked the likely outcome, Cronk said, "We'll see," in a very steely, uncliche-like way.
