KEY POINTS:
So Ricky Stuart has apologised for his behaviour in the wake of the rugby league World Cup final.
Apparently, he sent two apologies to referee Ashley Klein and British referees' official Stuart Cummings for his comments in a Brisbane hotel the day after the greatest 80 minutes of
Kiwi league, which condemned Stuart's Kangaroos to a thumping at Suncorp Stadium.
Stuart conceded his conduct was "inappropriate and offensive", that emotion inside him had not eased by the following morning when he bumped into the referee he blamed for the 34-20 defeat, and his boss.
Stuart's reputation has long been that of a poor loser, not a pleasant man to be around in times of stress. He's not alone in that to be fair, but does his contriteness six days after the match mean he should be off the hook? Absolutely not.
Stuart's was a disgraceful piece of behaviour, more befitting a hoon stumbling in from the public bar next door than the coach of one of Australia's highest-profile sports teams.
You would have thought it was a simple decision for the Australian Rugby League to dispense with the man's services forthwith. But this is where it gets complicated.
While the Queenslanders would get shot of him pronto, the New South Wales part of the decision-makers see it differently. Bow to the views of the Banana Benders from up north? Forget it. Time to stay solidly behind "their" man. But is he "their" man or Australia's?
Two Sydney newspapers are poles apart. One backs Stuart as a passionate man, cut him some slack; one wants him gone. That's all about newspaper politics.
An official investigation into the incident where Stuart is alleged to have shouldered Cummings aside to get at Klein in the hotel lobby is expected to conclude late next week.
What Stuart's behaviour amounted to is this: a coach, who has enjoyed abundant success, saw his team tumble at what should have been the hour of their greatest triumph, and couldn't handle it. He went looking for a fall guy and found him in Klein.
The Kangaroos had marched unimpeded through the World Cup. It should have been a formality. Hadn't the Kiwis been brushed aside four weeks earlier in pool play?
It's unlikely Stuart is familiar with Rudyard Kipling's If.
If he is, he'd know the line about "keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs", and about meeting triumph and disaster "and treat those two impostors just the same", the outcome being "you'll be a man, my son".
Stuart's apology was too little, too late and smacked of having to be wrenched out of him. If he had put his hand up later on the day of his outburst maybe, just maybe, he might have avoided an inquiry.
Sport is full of poor sports. That doesn't make Stuart's performance any more forgivable; just another example to add to a long list. For a New Zealand context, try a shoving, snarling Graham Henry confronting Wayne Barnes in the lobby of a Cardiff hotel on the morning of October 7 last year, the morning after THAT match.
You think Henry would have survived had he done a Stuart? He'd have been gone before the plane touched down in Auckland.
If Stuart stays, it won't necessarily tell us much about Australia's idea of good sportsmanship. Plenty of Aussies will be appalled by his behaviour. It will tell us plenty about the moral fibre of Australia's league administrators.