Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Greg Bird

OK, this post won't mean much to foreign readers (and that includes people from Victoria) but there has been an unsavoury incident in which Australian League player Greg Bird 'allegedly' glassed his American girlfriend in the face causing her to have a cut eye and a fractured eye socket.

Then Bird told police it was his flatmate and apparent life long best mate that did the damage and not him... (he's a nice guy huh!)

Now he has appeared before the courts and will be on trial in October after the Grand Final. His Cronulla club has stood him down and I am sure they will sack him if proven guilty.

My point of this post though is that not only because of this incident, Greg Bird would have to be one of the biggest grubs in rugby league... or even in society. He is under investigation for punching a woman in a nightclub in the off season and he also was suspended for 10 weeks in 2006 for kicking a rival player in the head. Not a tap... a full on kick.

Looking at Bird, he was a skinny kid who played in the halves but looking at him now he has bulked up tremendously and alongside his equally grubby team mate Paul Gallen, they have the nickname as "the Bruise Brothers". These two guys have gone from skinny nobodies to big angry men in a very short space of time and I am now questioning as to whether they're on the steroids.

Both have anger management issues, both have been in off and on field incidents that are unsavoury and both have bulked up markedly in the past couple of seasons.

And then it dawns on me that we havent heard a peep from the NRL on drug testing players for steroids for ages... there used to be alot of stories about the drug testers trying to catch drug cheats but that all seems to have stopped hitting the press.

Has the NRL got a steroid problem?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

good point you make about the steroids. i was loking at todd carney play a few months ago and the same thought occured to me then. he's another skinny kid who's bulked up tremendously in the off-season. you've really got to wonder, haven't you? that would certainly explain the "rage" alot of these guys obviously feel towards people, particularly women.

Chunky said...

I'm absolutely certain there is. Last time I played, there was a prop in our first grade side who got player of the comp. He was tall and big, but his biggest strength was his mobility and stamina.

He got picked up by Manly, then went to Cronulla. He played a couple of first grade games there, and he'd put on 15-20kg, and was a completely different (and nowhere near as good) player. Now this bloke already worked out quite a lot with weights and such when he was with my team, so IMO there's no way only natural methods could have worked, and its a bloody shame IMO.