Quote jonh="jonh"very good signing but do not try to claim him as a Saint. The lad is was and always will be a muppet. The fact he signs for you or anyone else should not cloud your judgement of him as a person.
newsflash, a lot of rugby players are prats and not very nice people when they have a drink, the sad fact is he is one of the worst of the bunch currently knocking about.
To claim he is simple is offence to simpletons.'"
Could not agree more, the people who use terms like scum bag etc really don't get the mentality of sport at this level. For every David Beckham there is a Joey Barton and for every Paul Sculthorpe there is a Danny! People are people and the attempts to make them all saintly is pathetic IMO. RL is a tough game and as such attract it's fair share of thugs, loons and morons - some of those end up being it's finest players.
If we judged players based on their personalities we'd have very few legends in the game. Neil Fox is a genuine legend of the game and his reputation is beyond reproach. Derek Turner is also a legend but he has been airbrushed into respectability. In reality and even by the standards of the day he was border line psychotic , yet a great player and from what I gather far more of a force in the dressing room than Fox. He reamains rightly so a Trinity legend and hero. Again from what I'm told Turner was not a guy you wanted as a friend you just wanted him on your team and not theirs - even then you were not safe from him. Maybe as a family man he was great, maybe out of RL he was OK I don't know but as a RL player he was a bad man.
Turner is an old man now and never ever attends any reunions despite always being asked. My theory is because he enjoyed being the hard and enforcer, put simply he liked scaring people - he can't do that now. Yet despite that not being a great advert for him as a person you'd have a young Turner in a Trinity shirt any day.
What saved Turner and most of the other old time RL players from becoming trouble off the field was society at the time and the fact that they all needed a job outside the game. What would Rocky be like now in the modern game, assuming he'd even get a game - all that money and all that time.
The game will always attract a cross section of society and the nature of the game means that some of it's least likeable players will be some of it's best - reality check folks. Having heard some of the stories about players through the years Cockaynes biggest offence as far as I can tell is getting caught because he's far from the worst in the game.
I'd have Cockayne play for my team any day but I wouldn't ever invite him home for tea. All this moralising about players and them being role models makes me laugh - don't get me wrong we want role models but we have to accept that not all good players are or ever will be.
