Billy Slater Autobiography by Billy Slater

Author:Billy Slater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

TEN

A year in limbo

Thursday 22 April 2010. It seemed like business as usual. We were completing a scheduled training run at Princes Park in the early part of a promising season. Only one thing was unusual. Craig Bellamy was not there. Craig did not miss many sessions. But his absence did not arouse any suspicion. Maybe he had been called to a meeting or was suffering a genuine bellyache. Whatever the reason for Craig’s absence, we were oblivious to the tsunami that was about to engulf us. There had been no media reports or locker-room whispers. Nothing to suggest this was anything other than a routine day for a team that had won four of its first six games and was, despite narrow losses in our last two matches, heavily favoured to retain the NRL title.

We had done a weights session in the morning, held the usual team meetings and had almost finished training on the field when Storm football manager Frank Ponissi walked onto the ground. Frank gathered the players and staff and told us we had to go straight to the meeting room. ‘Don’t go to your lockers, don’t talk to anyone and don’t get your phones,’ Frank told us. That’s when the alarm bells went off, although we still we had no idea what was going on. Had someone died? Had someone been sacked? In the short walk to the sheds we had little time to share our half-formed thoughts.

The meeting room at Princes Park was small with a very low ceiling. There were about forty of us crammed in there shoulder to shoulder: football department officials, coaches, and players still wearing their boots. Craig walked in and even before he spoke you could tell he was extremely emotional. Craig wears his heart on his sleeve on match day when we score a try or get a bad call. But this was different, more personal. You could hear a pin drop when he spoke. Craig told us the last four years had been for nothing and this season was over. He might not have used those exact words. But that’s how I remember it.

Craig said the club had committed salary cap breaches and the last four years had been wiped out. The 2007 and 2009 premierships had been taken away from us, we had lost all our points from the current season and we could not accumulate any more in 2010. I can’t clearly remember the reaction or whether there was even a murmur from the players. My mind went blank. It was just too much to take in. The idea that all we had worked so hard to achieve had been taken away was an incredible body blow.

Craig did not speak for long, maybe ten or fifteen minutes at most. There were not many questions when he finished. We were too shocked to know what to ask or say. All our thoughts were colliding: How had this happened? What does it mean? What have we lost? What comes next? Before we left the room, Frank Ponissi told us not to talk to the media.

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