All dressed up with nowhere to go: welcome to the life of a modern day rugby league star, writes Andrew Webster.

Good old Butts. Falling into his seat on the team bus, someone throws him a can, and the sound of the pull-ring pierces the air. The full-time siren blasted hours ago but that pssst signals to him and his teammates the job is done.

They'd shed and spilt blood this day. Like every afternoon when they walk on to the field and represent the region that fetes them like superheroes but embraces them as equals. That's how they see themselves, too. One of them.

"You know, if they stopped paying me, I'd still turn up to training," he'd say. Then he would turn his eye to the can. "But if they stopped me drinking, I'd give it away."

This how Matthew Johns remembers the scene and the ethos of former Knights front-rower Tony Butterfield. "He loved it so much," Johns recalls. "Because he enjoyed it."

Would Butterfield have lasted in the current era of curfews, grog bans and media scrutiny becoming akin to that of an NBA superstar? Not a chance.

Rugby league has changed forever, baby, and it happened long before Wests Tigers star Benji Marshall was lured into a fight at the Sapphire Lounge nightclub at Kings Cross on Sunday night like he was stepping into a venus flytrap.

Too easily is it assumed our footy elite lead charmed lives, pulling in the coin, scoring all the chicks, walking into nightclubs like they're stepping onto a yacht.

In truth, it has evolved into a relentless grind of playing injured and maintaining form in a ruthless marketplace where loyalty counts for little in a club's pursuit of a premiership.

And then, when the game is done and the final icebath complete, the player ventures into the night where a public awaits with a one-liner, a king-hit and a phone-camera. Perhaps it's why NSW and Knights captain Danny Buderus told the Herald last month he was glad he had started playing 10 years ago when the game was far more enjoyable and felt "sorry for the modern-day footballer".

"I hear a lot of people say you've got to enjoy your football," Eels hooker Mark Riddell told Inside Sport last month. "But honestly, I watch today's footy and I wonder if many of them do enjoy playing first grade. These blokes played footy in the first place because they were with their mates and they were having fun. They're still doing that now, but some blokes just don't seem to look as though they're enjoying it."

Said Marshall in the aftermath of last Sunday's episode: "I just want to feel like a normal person."

This game has never been an easy craft, which is easily forgotten by those who simplistically claim elite players are overpaid and overpampered.

"Mini car crashes" is how South Sydney high-performance manager Errol Alcott calls the collision between players, hundreds of times per match. "They play injured, play needled up until the end of the season when they spend the six weeks they do have off being operated on," says Rabbitohs chief executive Shane Richardson. "They do it tougher than many realise."

Kangaroos captain Darren Lockyer reckons the pain in that knee that won't come good is nothing on what the injury's doing to his state of mind.

"The mental thing has been the toughest part," he says forlornly. "I never expected to miss so much football. I've had four off-seasons I've been coming back from. I'll eventually get out there …"

The grind tinkers with the sharpest minds. Andrew Johns - the halfback of the century - has been a "completely different" man since his retirement with a serious neck injury last year. "It's like he's back to the person who first started playing when he was a teenager in those first few years," his brother Matthew reveals. "The responsibility he took on the field with every game took an enormous toll on him."

Many cocked an eyebrow when Parramatta halfback Tim Smith abandoned the NRL earlier this year citing the pressure to perform, bipolar disorder and an alcohol problem. But Johns believes Smith's situation, as a young highly paid halfback at a proud club, was underestimated.

"Being halfback at a footy club is like being its chief executive," he insists. "It's a very powerful, influential position - and it comes with a hell of a lot of pressure. Imagine that for a kid who's 20 years old?" The pressure has to be released somehow and it can't always be achieved via a thrashing of the Playstation. League considers itself the people's game, a blue-collar code that embraces its characters. Yet the sight of a group of footballers with an alcoholic beverage in their hands is met with scorn and admonishment and a quick email to the gossip columnists.

Or goaded into a situation that could illicit the type of image splashed on the front page of Tuesday's Daily Telegraph. Players whose basic instinct is to be aggressive on the field are expected to turn their backs and walk away.

It's why many drink at the Sapphire Lounge, which is run by the family of former Tigers, Dragons and Sharks player Hassan Saleh, because they're likely to find the company of other footballers.

Others have abandoned drinking in very public places because of the type of incident that consumed Marshall and the Tigers earlier this week.

"I just don't put myself in the situation any more," Braith Anasta says. "And if I do go out, it's always on my mind what might happen."

Somewhere, the scrutiny has been skewed. The judgment is off the scale. For some reason, when a gun is fired at Jarryd Hayne and the pressing issue isn't who pulled the trigger but why the Parramatta superstar was in the line of fire in the first place.

"I have a solution for this problem," offers Eels halfback Brett Finch. "Don't ban players from the Cross - ban the public."

Finch, who was once chastised by his club for being photographed smoking a cigarette, and some teammates were at the Sapphire Lounge on Sunday night but says they were oblivious to the incident until they heard about it the following day. "But we're dragged into it because we were at the Cross and the insinuation is that we've done something wrong."

Don't get them wrong. Few players would bemoan their lot. And none of them profess to being angels. But even the best in the world wonders what it would be like on the other side of the chalk. A non-hero, just for one day.

"Sometimes, when you're on the bus on the way to a game, you'll drive past a pub near the ground," says Lockyer. "There'll be a bunch of blokes there having a counter lunch and a few beers before they head to the footy. You think how good it would be to do that. With no pressure. You have those moments."

He pauses. "But I'd wouldn't swap in a million years."