"League's darkest hour"

It's gone very pear shaped for rugby league here - Melbourne Storm, who won the title (Grand Final, twice, in 2007 and 2009), won the league three times, and have pretty much been been the dominant team for the past five years, have been cheating for years and have now been stripped of their titles and hammered in fines and points.

They were fiddling the books so that they could spend more than the salary cap and therefore afford a better team than anyone else. The salary cap per team per year is $4.1m. They were generally spending about 400k more per year, which is what a star player would be on, or it'd be spread amongst a few to keep a team together.

At the end of every season there's always a lot of transfer movement because if you got a new player in, you'd have to get shot of someone (or two, or three, depending on the quality of the player coming in). They'd go to other clubs, who in turn would have to release players to be able to remain within their cap. Alternatively, if a young player blooms into a star over the course of a season and his contract is up for renewal, then he either goes to a new club that can pay him more, or his current club has to get shot of other players to be able to raise his wages to keep him.

Melbourne got away with it for so long because they got shot of some of their stars the same way everyone else did - teams like the Brisbane Broncos used to raise more eyebrows by being more successful at keeping their teams together.

With Melbourne and Victoria as a whole being an Aussie Rules state and only having the one League club, there's talk that this will be the death of Rugby in Victoria. It's aknowledged that the players and coaches had nothing to do with it, but their medals now mean nothing, and the teams they beat don't want to be awarded a tainted title by default (which they're saying wont happen anyway). They've also had millions of dollars in sponsorship deals cancelled.

As champions the odds of them coming bottom of the table this year were about 250-1, and bookies knew something was up when they started taking big bets on that outcome recently. They've been stripped of their points and been told that even if they win their games this season, they won't be awarded points so will automatically come last.

As silly as the wages are in the Premiership, at least it means that couldn't happen there, but imagine if it turned out Man Utd or Chelsea had been somehow cheating for years, by bribing refs or summat? Stripped of their titles and docked so many points they couldn't help but come last. It'd almost be worth the damage to the game just to see the look on John Terry's mooey. Mental.

The lad at the centre of it (Brian Waldron) has resigned as the top boy of the Melbourne Rebels Super 15s rugby union team, six weeks into their first season as a new club, and as he used to be chairman St Kilda in the AFL between 2001-4, which also has a salary cap, they're now getting their books looked at very closely.

In other news, Thailand's looking like it's going to go off properly, I reckon I could have called it right by saying this weekend could be when the laksa hits the fan. The reds and the yellows are shaping up for a big row, the army's in there and there's now pink shirts who are getting the hump at all the commotion that the others are causing. Someone's got to give the airport a tickle surely? That's how you get the world to notice, non? Excellent. If I was supersticious I'd think I wasn't supposed to come back, there's been the odd sign here and there...