Question marks over NRL All Stars game

Correspondent

With Billy Slater having already withdrawn, and NSW skipper Paul Gallen now considering following suit, there is rising debate about the future of the NRL All Stars game and its viability in a schedule that already places extreme physical demands on the Southern Hemisphere’s top players.

Initiate by diminutive five-eighth Preston Campbell, the All Stars game has been embraced by the players and the public alike. Seen as a chance to promote not only the game of Rugby League, but more importantly as a celebration of indigenous life in Australia, the match-up has quickly become the first key milestone of the NRL calendar.

But, as is always the case in professional sport, the cold hard facts are that the players are employed by their individual clubs to do a specific job – to win that club a premiership. To do that they must be fit.

The nature of the NRL, which operates under a salary cap system that generates an incredibly competitive and even competition, is such that teams simply have to hit the ground running, winning from the outset. To do that they need their marquee players on deck from the very first game. For how long will coaches and the powers-that-be at the individual clubs put up with their players competing in a high intensity clash before the season has even begun?

There is already passionate debate about the scheduling of State of Origin and the other representative clashes throughout the year, with every season producing one or two sides which seem to get disproportionately affected by these games as the added intensity of representative football inevitably claims a number of victims each season.

As much as the fans may enjoy the chance to have their say in the selection of these ‘Dream Teams’, and as much as the players may love the honour of being chosen by the public to represent an undeniably worthy cause, the fact is, none of them are the people paying the bills.

How long will the feel-good factor that the clash represents prevail before the goodwill of the owners of the clubs runs out and the All Star game is consigned to the scrap heap?