The Fittler Files

By Brad Fittler and Ian Heads

A true insider's look at the 2011 rugby league season from hugely popular former player Brad Fittler, featuring all the action from on and off the field and complete with trademark Fittler insights and humour. Includes over 100 photographs.
Brad Fittler - aka 'Freddy' to most in rugby league's world - is ranked as one of the greatest players of all time. In the pages of the Fittler Files, Freddy, in his roles of media commentator, expert observer and keen photographer - sets out to tell the boots 'n' all story of a rugby league year as never before, from the inside. Probably no-one in the game's past has been as consistently up-close and personal as he has been each week through the 2011 season. Fittler has been there shoulder-to-shoulder with players, coaches, referees and officials on the sidelines, in the dressing room and at closed-door training sessions. From the man who lives and breathes rugby league, the Fittler Files tells it as it really is through razor-sharp insights and photos that present the game in an original and bright new light.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780730499503

Brad Fittler

Brad Fittler is the ex Penrith and Roosters playmaker, NSW Origin's most capped player and former captain of the Australian team. He is now a regular on both editions of The Footy Show, provides sideline commentary on all the big matches, and recently coached the Sydney Origin team. HarperCollins published his 2005 autobiography, Freddy, with great success.

Book preview

The Secret Time

Everyone loves a good mystery. And as far as the general rugby league public is concerned, the period from October to March each year is just that: it’s the secret time. Apart from the occasional big story that breaks in the media (some of them, almost invariably, of the wrong kind), the players who have been so much in the public consciousness for eight months of the year pretty much disappear from view. For a lot of fans this is a time of loss. What the hell are the players and clubs really up to? Somewhere around February the newspapers might begin a countdown – only 44 days to go, and so on – building a sense of anticipation, but the true football fan is downhearted. Feeding the hunger even more in the 2010–11 off-season was an uninspiring Ashes cricket series.

But through the long hot summer days, a great deal is taking place. Essentially there is no such thing as an ‘off’ season any more. A year has finished, another is on the horizon and, free from the glare of the media, the players are working fulltime to get ready. The formula for a modern professional rugby league team is pretty well established. After a guaranteed six weeks holiday following the ‘traditional’ Mad Monday (whatever you may think of that), the clubs are back at work and lock in around six weeks training before Christmas, then are treated to anything from one day to two weeks off, depending on the player’s progress, after the festive break.

The routine between seasons is somewhat dislocated, with no football but much to be done. Players who have held back on surgical procedures during the season are attended to as swiftly as possible so rehab can begin. Knees, ankles, shoulders and various other parts of the anatomy are repaired and ‘clean-outs’ done so that the show can go on. It is a chance for coaches to scientifically assess their squads, consider individual needs and, if it’s felt necessary, give some of the more senior players a rest, those affected by the wear and tear of years in the game. With the input of the many experts who make up a club coaching team these days, there is a vast amount of individual study of the players who make up NRL squads. Players seen to be deficient in particular areas – speed, strength, recovery, whatever it might be – are handed specific programs.

Often there is a general ‘tweaking’ of a team in a broader sense in the off-season work. At St George Illawarra under Wayne Bennett in the 2010 season, for example, there seemed to me a strong emphasis on fundamentals and attitude. Then in 2011’s off-season I saw a team that seemed to have built up physically and become a slightly bigger outfit across the board. This no doubt would be due to coach Bennett’s opinions on how the game might pan out this year, in view of the new guidelines brought down by NRL refereeing co-coaches Bill Harrigan and Stuart Raper.

These guidelines would mean that this season, rules on such facets as play-the-balls, scrums and restarts would be more carefully scrutinised to bring them closer to a true reading of the rule book. Penalties handed out in the first round gave an instant indication that the ref bosses were fair dinkum in their mission statement. As the season kicked off I felt confident that under Harrigan the referees would go back to the ‘old’ ways, and that was terrific. There is no doubt that disrespect crept in last year via some players’ attitude to referees – and, sometimes, the attitude of referees towards players. There had been unnecessary anxiety on the playing fields in 2010 affecting both players and referees, and bringing back some respect would improve that situation. For the refs, living up to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) had also seemed an impossible task.

Just another football team, training on an open park, flanked by blocks of units. It just happens to be the NRL defending premiers, the St George Illawarra Dragons, doing what has to be done in the ‘secret time’.

Images of summer’s secret time: Parramatta skipper, Nathan Hindmarsh, after a tough session;

A member of the Roosters support team, Steve Kelly, studies a GPS reading on a player;

Panthers captain, Petero Civoniceva, wears a Hypoxico mask as he works out, where oxygen-reduced air is breathed in to improve performance by increasing strength, power, maximum speed and endurance.

Harrigan as a referee (and beyond) was always ego-driven, but I was happy to see him get the job as referees’ boss, especially so with the balancing influence of Stuart Raper alongside. Fundamentally, it was good to see a referee in charge of referees again. I had the sense that the former incumbent, Robert Finch, did the best he could, working hard and installing a strong work ethic within the referees. But during his time in the job the decision was made to allow the coaches a say in the way games would be arbitrated, and from that point there was a persistent feeling that the coaches were running the refs’ boss. Finch was trying to please too many people; the coaches could sniff a weakness, and in for the kill they went. The very best advice I offered Finch last year was to not answer the coaches’ phone calls. ‘They’re not paying your salary – you’re not answerable to them,’ I said. I’d love to have a tally sheet of how many calls he would have taken from coaches – all of whom, of course, have their own little agendas, beliefs and pet hates. Refs looked a nervous lot last year; hopefully there will be less angst among them this year and the game will be better for that.

Meanwhile, as off-field assessment, change and adjustment goes on, the players who are of sound mind and body gather for early-morning training sessions, and sometimes in the heat of the day too. (I even remember a series of midnight hill runs at a 2004 preseason training camp in Coffs Harbour.) At these sessions the long haul of preparation work starts all over again. A dietary watch is also put in place, the fact being that some players can put on five kilos at the drop of a hat – and some as much as 15 to 20 kilos!

Teams start work on lines, fitness, defensive structures and the all-important strengthening of the mind. This is a difficult time in a young footy player’s life – the ‘restless time’, I call it. You’re training hard and feeling good about yourself…but with weekends off. There is no end point to each week, just an empty pause, and then the hard work starts again the following Monday. But it is the way it has to be. Players are getting ready to play perhaps the toughest game in the world at its highest level.

And to sustain a career in rugby league at NRL and Origin intensity requires a huge amount of putting in: the weights programs, the hill sprints, the constant testing of your body. People who watch it exclusively on television know it’s a tough game, but I’m sure they have no real idea of just how tough. Television, with the game compressed to a small screen, has the effect of sanitising the play to some extent. To watch a match up close where you can hear the smack of the tackles and the oomph of the wind being knocked out as 110-kilo giants collide really brings it home. I still recall very clearly the ‘morning after’ experience from my playing days. My missus used to laugh at me; on some days after a game I’d be so sore I couldn’t get out of bed. But you’d gradually drag yourself up, pack your bag and head off to training.

If the pain of Monday mornings is unknown to most of rugby league’s huge army of followers, so too I imagine is the toughness of what the training itself has become. In earlier days a training session might have been a road run or a several laps of the ovals, a few set pieces and moves up and down the oval under flickering lights, and maybe a game of touch to finish it off before a beer or three at the local watering hole…Not so today. Every training day in the era of professionalism is a contest: against yourself (weights, time trials), against past heroes who are alleged to have run some amazing time in a drill or beep test, or against your teammates in such drills as wrestling. Everything is competitive, and in the days of spring and summer players are relentlessly pushed along by coaches and trainers through the 14 weeks of off-season training. Players are constantly having their characters tested and judged. They are criticised, encouraged, belittled – whatever it takes to strengthen character. On top of the traditional teamwork there is, of course, all the other stuff that is part of the off-season program: the ‘horror’ runs taking in sandhills and endless steps, the gym work wrestling with mechanical monsters. Come March the boys are finally ready – and the emotion of fan and footballer is identical: Thank god! The football has arrived…

At any regular NRL training session these days there will be up to a dozen support staff surrounding the head coach, who is generally posted midfield with three or four different sessions going on around him, and the injured players doing their work over to one side. All the assistant coaches have labels: there are probably two physios, a bloke in charge of drinks, a bloke in charge of equipment, and so on. Cronulla, struggling with money worries and maybe even survival, is one club that has to make do with a smaller training staff. Their set-up is good, but the fact is that all the coaches have to do more, which makes them arguably less effective and more susceptible to stress and the wear-down factor. In the case of the Sharks, time will tell. So it is at Penrith, with a limited medical staff and a budget considerably lighter than some of the big-gun clubs.

I covered a lot of miles early in the year, setting out to get around to the training sessions of all the clubs. I certainly made it my business to watch the progress of both Souths and the Dragons – with Greg Inglis joining Souths and Saints being the defending champions, there had been strong media focus on both clubs. There was a notable difference between the pair of them – early on, at least. The St George sessions were far busier and more businesslike, with constructive work going on all over the field at all times. At Souths it was not like that, although they upped the tempo as the season neared in the second, post-Christmas phase of the preparation. The absence from training of gun players like Inglis, Sam Burgess and Issac Luke early on was the key to it. Once that trio joined the squad there was a noticeable rise in intensity at the Rabbitohs; the fact is that match-winning players such as these make a massive difference to teammates by just being there.

Snapshot: I’m at a Roosters training session and Braith Anasta is practising his kicking. For just one aspect of the game, such as the kick-off, a strong professional like Braith will practise his skills again and again. The perfect kick-off for any team is one that lands in the right-hand corner and is fielded halfway into the in-goal area, followed by a big chase. The chance is there to nail the ball-runner five metres out and then keep the team in possession within the 20 metres in the six tackles. A perfect start! In Round 1 there came a pay-off for Anasta and the Roosters via a brilliant kick restart when the team had slipped behind against Souths. The kick was no fluke; it was something he would have worked at and thought about over and over.

Anasta, the Roosters’ skipper, was the centre of a storm of publicity and unwelcome attention when a story broke in early January suggesting that he had been secretly shopped to Parramatta after negotiation with the Roosters had broken down, and that there was every chance of him being squeezed out of the club at the end of 2011. I was aware of talk as early as 2010 that the club may let him go after 2011, but this was not well handled by the Roosters and there was much speculation in the ensuing weeks. Would he stay or wouldn’t he? It was an unfortunate and protracted diversion surrounding a popular player. Finally, at the Roosters’ season’s launch on 7 March, it was announced that Anasta had been signed for a further year (2012). After two months the dust had finally settled and everyone could get on with the season. But it had been a messy business.

The game’s young men are just young men

The Todd Carney and Benji Marshall early-season dramas added up to the NRL’s worst nightmare. In succession the pin-up boys of rugby league 2010 were plastered all over the media: Carney when he was charged with drink-driving early one morning after a late night out, and Marshall, by then the official ‘Face of Rugby League’ for 2011, when he allegedly punched a young bloke at The Rocks at three o’clock one morning in response to an alleged taunt. Both incidents were bound for court. The headlines were huge and sustained and ran day after day, the one (Carney) segueing neatly into the other (Marshall) for the press, giving any league-hating media person an absolute free kick.

So much has been written and said on the two incidents that I’ll do my best here to save the further felling of forests by being reasonably brief. The first thing to say is that because of rugby league’s extraordinarily high profile, such events will always attract enormous media attention. That truth is drummed into the game’s young players again and again, but young men – and in rugby league’s case, high-profile young men under pressure – being what they are, will sometimes go off the rails. Marshall and Carney are truly outstanding young players, and what their futures hold is entirely up to them. I just want to make the point that both were victims of the game’s ‘restless time’ that I wrote about earlier in this chapter.

Todd Carney (right foreground) can only look on and wonder as the media attention switches to Roosters CEO Steve Noyce, ringed by media people and under the focus of a battery of cameras. Not one of the gathering pays attention to Carney, the young man at the eye of the storm.

Carney, from the working-class country town of Goulburn, is one of those kids whose earlier life revolved around football, alcohol and going out. It’s what young blokes do – play football (whatever the code), go out, drink beer and chase birds. That probably sounds familiar to most readers, and it’s certainly my own story. Whether you think that’s right or wrong, it’s just the way it is. All of Todd’s dramas have been related to the drink – that is his personal issue (and we all have one or two of those). He is now back where he was at the start of season 2010 and effectively he has to begin again and move forward. It’s a big test. I wish him well, and think he can do it. My observation of the way it is after watching football and football players for plenty of years is that a player’s decision-making on the field will almost certainly be a replica of his decision-making off it, that is if a bloke makes bad calls in his life off the paddock, he’ll probably make them on it too.

What a fantastic way to kick off the season. Preston Campbell’s brainchild of the Indigenous All Stars v. NRL All Stars game has quickly grown into something very special, the spirit of it captured in this fulltime photo of the happy gathering at Skilled Park, season 2011.

In considering young men in football today, I think back to when I was 20. It’s not easy if you happen to have a bit of extra talent to suddenly have these high expectations placed on you; there is a huge intensity to life in the spotlight and to get through it is a balancing act. It took me a long time to find the right path. There is no doubt that practices such as meditation and yoga can help players wrestling with the dilemmas such as these. I’ve started yoga myself and love it. I was already heading down that track when I coached the Roosters and introduced a yoga teacher and a counsellor to the club to support the players.

I just wish that some of the rip’n’tear critics who salivate over the chance to attack the game and the players involved when an issue arises would make the effort to look beneath the surface for the reasons and try to understand them.

"League alive and kicking

despite swift boot to guts"

Sydney Morning Herald

In Bed With the Devil

League’s biggest problem – and you can bet on it! Above and beyond all the issues that have peppered rugby league’s progress now and then – including alcohol and highly publicised player (mis)behaviour and drugs – one stands out in my view: gambling. As I told a journalist not long ago, I think the NRL invited the devil into the room by getting into bed with the gambling industry. By then major investigations were underway into two highly publicised events: the matter of the early penalty in the Cowboys v. Bulldogs game in Townsville in 2010 and its repercussions; and the taint of bets being placed on the Melbourne Storm to be the wooden spooners in 2010, before the NRL had made its decision to strip the club of points.

Well before all that, back in late 2009, I found myself as Roosters coach having to defend a match against North Queensland which we lost by 16 points after leading 18-nil. Sportsbet had suspended betting on the match that morning after a rush of money on the Cowboys to win by 13 or more. It was Craig Fitzgibbon’s last game for Easts and I will never accept that teammates would run ‘dead’ in a game that meant so much to a warrior like Fitzy. But the rumours hung on. I don’t suppose I will ever know whether there was any substance to them, I’ll just say this: I know that rugby league has a history of an occasional ‘hot’ match dating back many years, and the NRL, the Independent Commission or whoever is to run the game will need to be very, very vigilant considering how firm is the grip that gambling has been allowed to take on the game.

ROUND 1

(11–14 March)

The Journey Begins

The Scores

Roosters 40, Rabbitohs 29; Cowboys 16, Broncos 14; Dragons 25, Titans 16; Raiders 40, Sharks 12; Eels 24, Warriors 18; Storm 18, Sea Eagles 6; Knights 42, Panthers 8; Bulldogs 24, Tigers 14

Freddy’s Fearless Ratings

Roosters 8, Rabbitohs 6; Cowboys 8, Broncos 7; Dragons 9, Titans 8; Raiders 7, Sharks 4; Eels 8, Warriors 5; Storm 7, Sea Eagles 6; Knights 7, Panthers 3; Bulldogs 9, Tigers 7

What a kick-off! The spirit across the board of the eight matches was great, and the skill level of teams and players picked up noticeably now that all was deadly serious. The aggregate first-round crowd figure (201,212) was an all-time premiership record across 104 seasons. I watched every game from kick-off to final hooter, and afterwards many observations crowded in on me.

First up, some clubs seemed to have stayed stationary while others have evolved (although I’m not into snap judgements on the evidence of a single round!). With St George Illawarra, rightly the marquee team of the competition as premiers, it was apparent in their efficient win over the Titans that coach Wayne Bennett had shone a fresh light into several areas in recent months, including: a) Jamie Soward’s short kicking game and his defence (three times the once-criticised Soward stopped Greg Bird dead with great tackles), and b) Ben Creagh’s involvement. Look for more of Creagh this year at a ground near you – what a game-breaker he is when he cuts loose.

There was no fluke in the brilliant kick by Braith Anasta (pictured here at training) that helped carry the Roosters past the Rabbitohs to a first-round victory. Practice makes perfect.

Within the Roosters, one of the triumphs of 2010 was signs of a young side evolving – notwithstanding the fadeout that saw Souths get back from dead-in-the-water to 29–28 before Brian Smith’s team steadied. The Roosters’ players would surely have learned something from that about how hard it is to stop momentum once a team gets on a roll. Coach Smith has added to the team’s tactical approach; directional switches from blind side to open are working well. The late Braith Anasta kick-off that regained the initiative for Easts was like a hooked seven iron that kept skewing left, but it’s a skill that would have been worked on studiously. It was a kick that bamboozled Souths and gave the Roosters the ball – and, effectively, the match. Braith’s kicking kept me glued to the action. In the modern game, kicking has become a highly entertaining feature: the bananas, the raking sideline kicks, the sometimes brilliant goal kicking, the corkscrew ‘bombs’ that can be such a nightmare for full-backs.

With the Tigers’ loss to the Bulldogs there was the sense of some disagreement at high levels within the camp, notably through Benji Marshall’s edgy after-match words on the tactics as laid down by coach Tim Sheens. Five times he kicked the ball dead; a pattern like that is game-changing. In fact, there were a lot of kicks running ‘dead’ in this first round and I put it down to adrenalin – it’s so different kicking in the high emotion of a match to kicking at training when the adrenalin is not racing. For Benji Marshall it had been a tough week in the aftermath of his involvement in that late-night ‘incident’ at The Rocks. Events off the field can certainly influence the way a footballer plays and sap a lot of energy. Had he been reading the newspapers, I wondered. As a general rule my own advice to players is that it’s better not to. In my career I tended to avoid them after the first couple of days of the week, and I certainly wouldn’t read them when they were talking about me (especially if it was intensely positive or intensely negative!).

In their resolute win over the Warriors, Parramatta looked a totally different side to 2010, as if a breath of fresh air had swept through the team. Under new coach Steve Kearney they were organised, controlled and high-spirited. But sustaining that sort of effort is what successful football is about, and after the bitter disappointments of the previous year the spotlight will remain on the Eels. Were these 80 minutes going to be a marker post of exciting things to come for their fans in 2011, or would it be a hard act to follow? For the team they beat, the Warriors, and the other huge underachievers of the round, such as the Panthers and the Sharks, the same sort of question hung in the air: was this the way it was going to be? For them, their reaction in the second week rather than the action (or lack of it) of the first was now the key question.

Within my old club, Penrith, it was quickly apparent how much Frank Pritchard will be missed. The bloke is nothing less than a massive loss evidenced by his battering-ram try across town for the Bulldogs. Was it that someone at Penrith hadn’t done an accurate reading of his huge importance to the club? The Panthers paid big money to retain Michael Jennings, a player of thrilling skills and great potential, and he began the season with a game in which he was penalised three times on offside plays, despite the warning of the referees’ crackdown. The words of coach Matt Elliott after the heavy trial loss to Parramatta still resonated after the first-round game: ‘I didn’t see that coming,’ Elliott had said. Were there now clear signs of a tough year coming? Elliott was also quoted as saying during the off-season that he wanted to ‘relax the boys’. If such a tactic doesn’t work, it can be very hard to get the players ‘back’. But that will be the seven-day challenge after a real drubbing at the hands of the Knights, who were excellent.

I thought that the referees – a bunch of blokes who have one of the most stressful jobs in the sporting world – were fantastic in Round 1. I like very much Bill Harrigan’s words that have hopefully laid the foundation for the season, that his men would be ‘getting back to refereeing by the rule book’. Players were given credit for effort while, on the other side of the ledger, others were penalised for being lazy or dumb or deliberately going against the rules (for example, the in-front-of-the-kicker penalties). It was an encouraging start from Harrigan, who has broken away from the Robert Finch/David Gallop approach of talking to the coaches about everything to do with refereeing.

Bill Harrigan’s worthy drawing of a line in the sand for 2011, firmly reconnecting with the rule book, claimed an unlucky victim in the Manly newcomer with the imposing name, Daly Cherry-Evans. Cherry-Evans was pinched (along with a few others) for straying over the line with a drop kick. Late in the game, it was a mistake under pressure, but it took nothing away from the potential of his performance. For me he was debutant of the 2011 opening round, an old-style half-back pitched into a tough game and looking very much like he was made of the right stuff. I will watch his progress with great interest.

The moment of a lesson learned by a special young player on his first day at ‘work’: the Sea Eagles’ new half-back Daly Cherry-Evans strayed over the line with a drop-out against the Storm – and was pinged for it. My immediate thought watching on: that won’t happen again!

Moments to Remember

In the first tackle of the Cowboys–Broncos game (and the first of the season, effectively), Ashton Sims and Matthew Scott smashed Scott Anderson who was left shaken and sore. Ah, welcome to