ONLY the most grizzled cynic could watch Akuila Uate front a media scrum at the Sea Eagles’ Narrabeen training base on Tuesday morning and not feel even a shred of empathy.

Little more than 12 hours after news broke regarding six more Manly players facing fines that would drag the Gladstone fallout into a second week, Uate was one of four players scheduled to stand and face the media firing squad.

A week ago when the club declared that Jackson Hastings’ position within the team had become untenable, coach Trent Barrett stepped forward to address the issue head-on and was lauded for it.

Round 20

Those who spoke on Tuesday would have been praying for similar intervention.

The pre-presser pep talk would have centred solely on focusing on what has been going wrong on the field, a script that fullback Tom Trbojevic largely followed first up without faltering.

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But Uate eventually broke.

After trotting out the predictable platitudes of sticking together and “teamwork” being central to rectifying the fortunes of a club currently lurching from one crisis to the next, Uate gave a refreshingly human take on the pressure that the Manly players are currently under.

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“You guys can actually help us,” Uate pleaded with the assembled members of the media who had made the trek to Sydney’s northern beaches for the 7.30am press conference to continue their coverage of the biggest story in the NRL right now.

“From a player looking in, we get dragged down by you guys. To stay positive you guys can actually help us.

Source: AAP

“With this situation, I feel for whoever gets involved because we’ve got feelings as well. If you drag us down of course we’re not going to be the best player we could be.

“We wake up every morning, social media, technology is everything these days.

“It’s not a good look when we know the real story and there’s a different story out there.

“We look bad from our family. We’ll get asked every time from our family and fans and we get put down. The last two weeks I got called disgraceful.”

It was raw honesty rarely seen in a press conference setting but at a time when the NRL is asking its constituents to #NRLTalkTheGameUp, it is the players themselves who are providing the supposed ‘firing squad’ with an unending cache of ammunition.

An indisputable truth of modern media is that we know what stories people are reading.

If you click a link, we know about it. We know exactly what kinds of stories you like reading.

That might be hard to hear, but that’s the truth, and until that pattern of consumer behaviour changes, these are the stories impossible to avoid.

Whenever a new scandal breaks in the NRL — which feels like every second day sometimes — the convenient scapegoats for players and the fans of the team at that week’s media storm are the faceless people reporting it.

The fingers instead should be pointed squarely at those responsible for the story even existing in the first place.

Manly has all sorts of problems. Source: AAP

On Monday night as I went to bed I watched two very prominent NRL players engage in questionable — but certainly by no means illegal — behaviour live on Instagram, broadcast to between 80 and 90 people.

If I’d recorded what they were doing it may very well be a big story today.

But just like the Manly players in Gladstone who refused to heed a curfew imposed by team officials, went to a strip club and then fought among each other back at the team hotel, the story doesn’t exist without highly paid professionals making inherently poor choices.

They are not the first. The list is long and perhaps the failings of a few and the attention it generates in some ways helps to feed the beast that is the NRL.

Perhaps if our weekend heroes were squeaky clean the rest of the week we would in some ways struggle to connect with them and the game wouldn’t generate the billion dollars that it does.

But it is so hard to know because of the endless tabloid fodder that they — and by the manner in which they manage them, their clubs — provide.

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I’m under no illusions that the players I looked up to in my formative years following the game in the 1980s were saints but they were men who knew that there were consequences to their actions, whether the public was made aware of them or not.

The vast majority of players within the NRL right now have never written anything on their passport under ‘Occupation’ other than ‘Footy player’, their teenage years full of high praise and excuses at the ready.

By shielding these young men from responsibility and accountability for anything other than catching and passing we have created a generation of footballers who believe the world owes them nothing but adulation, regardless of the way they perform on and off the field.

Akuila Uate was brave for standing before a bank of cameras and expressing how he genuinely felt at a difficult time but the message he gave is endemic of the problem with the modern player.

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