Paul Lewis: As funny as Blackadder

The horror story that is the Cronulla Sharks and their former CEO, Tony Zappia, is so bad that it almost ventures into the ridiculous.

Zappia has now been caught up in an alleged fraud where a Cronulla fan is accused of pretending to be dying from a rare disease so that he could accrue millions of dollars in insurance payouts and then re-direct them to various charities and good causes.

One receptacle of this intended largesse was the Sharks. Zappia - already disgraced for giving a female employee a black eye, then showing her porn and offering to let her spank him as penance - has allegedly become embroiled in this by accepting cheques for $30,000, part of a $500,000 insurance payout.

If you're talking judgement calls, this was a doozy. The fan involved doesn't half look dodgy (he has green highlights in his hair) and, for a dying man, looks pretty well.

Well-fed, even, although his mum says he has a disease like Parkinson's. His story was also full of holes, as insurers discovered when they checked him out and doctors revealed he wasn't dying of anything.

Quite how Zappia didn't see the hooks inherent in all this is puzzling, to say the least, and the Sharks must be thankful he has gone, even though he appears still to be delivering new truckloads of ordure to the Sharks' back lawn daily.

The whole episode reminds me of that brilliant prolonged insult delivered by Rowan Atkinson's Edmund Blackadder when dismissing the ineffectual fop Lord Percy from his service and being asked why:

"Because Percy, far from being a fit consort for a prince of the realm, you would bore the leggings off a village idiot. You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would. Your brain would make a grain of sand look large and ungainly. And the part of you that can't be mentioned, I am reliably informed by women around the court, wouldn't be worth mentioning even if it could be. If you put on a floppy hat and a furry cod-piece, you might just get by as a fool but since you wouldn't know a joke if it got up and gave you a haircut, I doubt it. THAT is why you are dismissed."

Zappia acknowledged his error in not telling the Sharks board about the Beyond Sharks Foundation - the body Zappia set up and to which some of the fan's money was allegedly channelled.

Zappia reportedly believed the Foundation, and thus the Sharks, would be the recipient of millions more dollars once the fan actually died (the $500,000 was gained from an insurance company on the basis he was about to die...). But he hadn't told the board about it. They found out when he made the fan's offer public through the media.

Zappia has insisted he had not misappropriated any monies but the cheques he was sent could ensnare Cronulla in a police investigation into whether the club benefited from the proceeds of crime.

But we haven't got to the best/worst/funniest bit yet.

You'll recall the Sharks miseries go back to the multi-player sex romp in Christchurch in 2002 which re-entered the atmosphere recently and cost league icon Matthew Johns his TV job.

Then came Zappia's fall from grace. He claimed it was an accident when he was "shadow boxing" when he caused the black eye to a female employee. He tried to mollify her by showing her dodgy photos online and making his spanking offer. As you do.

Meanwhile, it was also alleged that prostitutes and sex toys had made appearances in the Sharks' dressing room and that players had been encouraged to take the sex toys home - leading to consternation by their wives when they realised the club had kept a log of which toy went where...

Are we getting a picture of very small brains at work here? Okay but we still haven't got to the best bit.

Reni Maitua was banned for taking performance-enhancing drugs and captain Paul Gallen resigned after making racially loaded remarks to an opponent and the Sharks, unsurprisingly, are playing crap (though they still beat the Warriors...).

Nope, still not there...

When Zappia finally, reluctantly, resigned, the Parramatta Eels signalled they might like to employ him. Eels chairman-elect Roy Spagnolo was quoted as saying: "Tony Zappia did a good job at the club as football manager. He seems to be doing a good job at Cronulla and he's highly regarded. If he applied for the [CEO] position and it was vacant, we'd have a close look at him."

There ... that's the thing. The NRL has reeled from player-fuelled scandals over recent years - sex, drugs, alcohol, and physical and sexual abuse of women.

It's possible to write these things off as the actions of meatheads who don't know any better. Until you reflect that this is a guy who actually heads one of the NRL clubs.

Spagnolo made his employment noises before the alleged fraud came to light and it is important to note that Zappia hasn't faced any criminal charges. But what chance do the players have if the bosses are like this?

The NRL is desperately trying to improve its image and CEO David Gallop must feel like he's trying to hold back the waters from the Three Gorges Dam with a teaspoon.

There are, of course, good people aplenty in the NRL but, when you read of people like Zappia and Spagnolo, you wonder (to again steal the words of Atkinson) if you can trust any of them to sit the right way round on the toilet.