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Club a victim of its isolated culture
Wayne Smith, Rugby Union Editor | February 13, 2008
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...012430,00.html
IT'S an entirely artificial and extremely alarming construct, the Western Force, a rugby club made up almost exclusively of young, blokey east coast imports hastily assembled and let loose in Perth, unconstrained by parental supervision or any peer pressure save that of their team-mates.
It may well be true that the family that prays together stays together, but the pseudo-family that does nothing but play and play up together is headed for a bust-up. That's precisely what befell the Force on Sunday when Matt Henjak slotted his team-mate Haig Sare, breaking his jaw.
Ever since the Force squad came together in mid-2005, the players have had no family networks to tap into, no old friends to catch up with, no-one to socialise with but themselves. That's a situation fraught with potential problems in any setting, let alone an isolated city renowned for its hard-drinking culture.
It's not that the Force's original chief executive Peter O'Meara was caught unawares. He would have been well acquainted with the ultimate failed experiment in a football code, the Western Reds, the Super League team dumped in Perth more than a decade ago.
But perhaps O'Meara looked at the Reds' player list, including Julian O'Neill, Rodney Howe and Daio Powell - the player acquitted of killing a young father-of-two in a fight outside a Perth nightclub - and figured the club was just dead unlucky. That not since Lee Marvin pulled together the Dirty Dozen had so many misfits all landed together in the one outfit at the one time.
He did, however, hedge his bets, engaging a psychologist to run the rule over his squad. Back came the report that there were no systemic problems within the club but that a couple of players did have a problem with alcohol.
O'Meara isn't one to name names, but let's take a wild stab: Henjak, who three times now has assaulted people while under the influence of alcohol - one of them O'Meara's son, Liam - and Scott Fava, who three times has been stood down from the team for breathalysing over the club's .05 limit, all this before he was fined $11,000 for mistreating quokkas on a recent pre-season team trip to Rottnest Island. So it was bewildering, not to mention alarming, that Force coach John Mitchell would acknowledge yesterday that not only was Henjak being taken to South Africa for the start of the Force's Super 14 campaign but that he would be starting early on Saturday morning (AEDT) against the Sharks because "he deserves his selection".
Perhaps he does in a purely rugby sense although in a purely rugby sense perhaps he needs to be flogged instead for breaking Sare's jaw and costing the Force the services of one of its frontline wingers for half the season.
But at the very least, it demonstrated an insensitivity on Mitchell's part that suggests he has not fully absorbed the lessons of his own coaching past. As director of rugby at English club Sale in the late-1990s, Mitchell is rumoured to have once ordered his players to front up early the morning after a particularly appalling performance in the Premiership. The players arrived full of trepidation but instead of punishing them on the training field, Mitchell allegedly pointed to a barrel of beer and told them to get stuck in.
Six years later, former New Zealand captain Anton Oliver would accuse Mitchell of fostering a booze culture in the All Blacks during the three years he coached the side leading up to the 2003 World Cup, claiming the situation "spiralled dangerously out of control" under the head coach.
It's a claim Mitchell emphatically denies but it's difficult for him to deny that there are at least the makings of a trend here.
It's impossible not to sympathise with Mitchell for the situation he now finds himself in, courtesy of Henjak and Sare. He can cover the loss of a winger, barely, but if Henjak is suspended, or worse expelled from the club, the Force can kiss its season goodbye.
No disrespect to James Stannard, the back-up halfback, but he is uncapped at Super 14 level and not ready to play a starting role.
The situation is anything but fair to his innocent players and potentially career-wrecking as far as he himself is concerned.
After all, who can forget the persuasive Mitchell pitch of 2005, when he was doing his darndest to entice players to come to Perth: "A winning team with an exceptional culture."
So far the results have fallen well short of the rhetoric.
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CHEERLEADERS ROCK!!! 
is the cause of all the ills in Australian rugby and they suck too"
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