David Gallop admits he has no grand plan for a game in a state of transition. Andrew Webster speaks to the NRL boss whose leadership is under close scrutiny.

David Gallop attended a schoolboys carnival at Granville Park last week and was mobbed by Polynesian Year 7 students. "Eh, Gallop. Sign my ball will you, bro?" they implored, sounding like Sonny Bill Williams.

Later that day our interview is no more than a minute long at a cafe at Fox Studios before a courier walking by asks to take a photo, which he does with his mobile phone.

"Who do you support?" Gallop asks. "The Bulldogs," the courier replies. That the NRL chief executive had docked his side 37 competition points for rorting the salary cap six years earlier seems to be a distant memory.

These Kodak moments are in stark contrast to the one played out at the Clovelly Hotel last Saturday afternoon when a drinker walked past Gallop and launched a tirade of abuse, calling him a "disgrace" and a "hypocrite" for talking about the "sanctity of the contract" during the Sonny Bill saga despite being a News Ltd lawyer during Super League.

"What happened in the pub the other night has never really happened before," he says. "It's only in the last few weeks that Super League has come up. I think it's relevance is limited. It's a cheap shot. Consider the alternatives: I could've come out and said Sonny can go because 13 years ago players were endeavouring to get out of contracts."

Gallop didn't take the bait and merely smiled at the fuming drinker but it highlights the polemical opinion he attracts these days.

After bringing stability in his first few years in the game he's now either the perfect man for the job or a broken leader hamstrung by a structure that beholdens him to News Ltd, the 50 per cent owners of the game.

He cannot escape the reality that the departures of Williams and Mark Gasnier to French rugby union has brought his leadership acutely into question. There is fear for the future.

It's become apparent, to the press at least, that Gallop has become too concerned with perception. When the NRL fired out a media release claiming comments from Souths co-owner Russell Crowe were out of line, it confirmed to many that Gallop had become uber-sensitive to criticism.

"If you're the CEO of the organisation, of course you take that personally," he says. "If you live and breathe it, and you agonise over it, when the criticism is ill-informed or based on some personal agenda you get frustrated by it. Even when it's well informed it stings. I don't apologise for that. The people who criticise you are often the ones who are worst at taking it themselves."

Gallop has dodged the bullets all season. Salary cap. ANZ Stadium. Crowds. TV rights. Gasnier. Williams. But where some believe rugby league resembles Colin/Colette the Baby Whale, Gallop sees hysterics.

"This year there's an element of the skies falling on rugby league," he says. "I don't see that. There are certain issues in the game; when you distil them down, they're only interesting to the inner sanctum. The actual thousands of people who follow the game are primarily concerned with how their team is going. A lot of things happen in rugby league that are not really that relevant to the fans but it gets column space because it's built on some long-held grudge that someone's had or some agenda that they're running."

That comment will irk the thousands of discerning fans who have supported the game for decades; those who want something more than the "patter" Sun-Herald columnist Phil Gould referred to when he gunned for Gallop on radio last month.

"As I said in that radio interview, it is easy to rattle off the game's problems; it's far harder to address all of them with a satisfactory solution," Gallop says.

Can he understand why the man on the street doesn't buy that there are no answers? "No I can't. It's a fact."

So everything's sweet in the game? "No it's not," he says, his voice rising. "If there were obvious solutions, you'd take them."

Gallop admits the loss of Williams and Gasnier has hurt the game.

"I don't trot out the statement that we've got lots of young talent coming through. That doesn't wear with me either," he says. But ask him what the masterplan for rugby league is - "the vision", so to speak - and his response hardly engenders unbridled enthusiasm.

"It's just sensible growth," he says. "It's not outlandish statements about having teams here and there when we've got problems with the 16 we've got. If the answer for a business was that we're going to have sensible growth, that would be a sensible answer. But for sport people want more than that. They want some grand vision that's going to take over the world.

"I was part of Super League when we advertised for Mandarin commentators. I'm not prepared to make grand statements."

There is little doubt that league is guilty of too much navel-gazing. Point to the recent forum on The Footy Show exploring the game's ills and he shoots back that a two-hour gabfest was held last year.

"There's a great thing in Nick Hornby's book [Fever Pitch] about being an Arsenal fan where he can't understand journalists who call the game boring. He says it's like saying King Lear's got a sad ending. That's not the point … it's not supposed to be beer and skittles every week."

Gallop reluctantly took on the chief executive job in 2002, spurned offers from Football Federation Australia and has dropped enough hints in recent interviews that he won't be in the position in the long-term.

"There's speculation you will be gone before Christmas …"

"Really?" he says, genuinely surprised.

"That the independent commission to take control of the game is not going to happen unless you stand aside …" "Nobody has suggested that to me."

"Would you stand aside if it was in the best interests of the game?" "Everyone's susceptible to the selectors dropping them … I feel better at this job than I do in previous years because I do have the experience under my belt," he says. "I know where the landmines are."