One of the more baffling deflections that did the rounds last week when the Gerbrandt Grobler business started to blow up was the notion that because a bigger deal hadn't been made of his doping past when Munster signed him last summer, it was somehow out of order to bring it up now.
As if a two-year doping ban for anabolic steroids came with some sort of statute of limitations whereby not only is the chap welcome to come and play but mere mention of his past is somehow regarded as being out of bounds.
What’s the window, do you reckon? A couple of days? A week? Grobler got done for taking drostanolone which according to some studies can take anything between two-to-eight days to clear an athlete’s system. So maybe that’s it – maybe we should have an athlete-appropriate period in which to talk about these things, decided on a case-by-case, drug-by-drug basis. Makes as much sense as giving out about the media bringing it up six months later.
If it was just some put-upon Munster supporters raising a stink, it wouldn’t be so bad. Fandom carries with it a certain – and forgivable – amount of wilful blindness, regardless of who your team is and where you find your sport. It would be a drab world indeed if sports fanbases consisted only of perfectly reasonable, soberly temperate souls who respected the opposition and regarded the media as a grand bunch of lads and lassies altogether.
Notion of fairness
Something like sport, with its ability to hurt too much and sting for too long, with its rules bound up in an arbitrary notion of fairness and its survival a direct consequence of the strictures of local geography, something like that can only be a breeding ground for paranoiacs. If your Twitter handle is @MunsterFan1978 and you don’t see a media conspiracy in the Grobler signing becoming a big deal just when he’s about to start playing for the first team, then you’re probably just not trying hard enough.
But it wasn't just Munster fans. Eddie O'Sullivan brought it up in the midst of a long segment on Wednesday night on Newstalk. The piece was bobbling along perfectly well until O'Sullivan drifted off into a tangent over why this was coming up now. Presenter Joe Molloy tried manfully to steer him back to the issue but he needed a couple of swings to get him there.
“This is a big stink now and we’re all trying to deal with it,” O’Sullivan said. “This debate should have been front and centre when the guy was signing. The notion that it slipped under the radar, I don’t accept that really. I mean, due diligence? If anyone read about this guy when he was purported to be signing for Munster, they would have seen the evidence and then was the time to put up your hand.
“If you want to make a big story about now, it’s a bit late – that’s my point,” O’Sullivan continued. “There’s nothing you can do about it now. It’s done and dusted. If you made the case about it at the off, Munster may have reconsidered, Irish rugby could have reconsidered and maybe they could have and should have reconsidered. But to make it the biggest deal in the world now is a bit late. The horse has left the stable.
“I think this should have been kicked around when the guy was signing, when his name came up. I mean, I don’t think he just parachuted into Munster and nobody saw him coming. So there’s an element of responsibility there with the media. It’s all very fine to make it a big story today. But there must be some element of responsibility when it comes to the media, if the media want to be the group who oversee the sport.”
Well now. The ins and outs of whether or not the media want to be the group who oversee rugby or any other sport needn’t detain us for very long here. Nor is there much percentage in examining the irony of a pundit talking about the media as if he wasn’t part of that self-same media himself.
Mistakes
For what it's worth, Munster signed Grobler on July 6th last year, just before the third Lions Test against New Zealand. O'Sullivan was on Newstalk three days previously but just like every other member of the rugby media, he was – not at all unreasonably – elbow-deep in the compelling series that was taking place on the other side of the planet. It's not ideal that Grobler's past didn't get a full airing that week but it's entirely understandable.
What’s much more difficult to fathom is why anyone should care about that aspect of the story. All it does is take attention away from the substantive fact at hand. And of course, Munster are doing enough of that by themselves.
Note the language used by Johann van Graan when talking about Grobler last week. “I believe life is very simple,” he said. “All of us sitting here, everybody in life makes mistakes. I believe life is 10 per cent what happens and 90 per cent how you react to it.”
Dropping a ball in a lineout is making a mistake. Knocking on with the line at your mercy is a mistake. The difference between a mistake and what Grobler did is pure intent. When Grobler has spoken about his decision to take steroids, he has made clear that it was a deliberate act, done in the full knowledge that it was against the rules.
If we apply van Graan’s equation to this case, the 10 per cent was the ankle and shoulder injuries that wouldn’t clear up, the 90 per cent was the drostanolone Grobler took as his short-cut.
The point is, deflection is everywhere. When doping is dressed up in the euphemism of mistake-making, bit by bit the taboo around it crumbles away. The same goes for making a big deal of when the media choose to cover it.
A story becomes a story when it becomes a story. And Munster have a distance to go before they get to grips with this one.
