KEY POINTS:
Thank goodness for the end of the silly season.
Yet again, the rugby league year has opened with supposedly elite players in large amounts of strife. Each year the incidents seem to get worse, this time the Eels players Jaryd Hayne, Weller Hauraki and Junior Paulo being shot at after leaving a Kings Cross nightclub.
It beggars belief that these three young, rising stars were out drinking past 4am just one week out from their opening game. Where is the commitment to their club and to those who pay the wages, from sponsors to fans?
It's time people stopped looking up to these young men as role models. They are full of testosterone, with money readily available, and fame to varying degrees. Throw in alcohol and you have a potentially lethal mix.
For my money, the clubs and the NRL are not doing a very good job of educating the young players about their social responsibility nor about alcohol and drugs. But more importantly, the players need to understand that their job comes with responsibility, especially to themselves and to the clubs that pay their very large salaries.
For their own sakes and to ensure that they maximise their earning capacity in what is a short career span - maybe just 10 or 12 years - they need to knock off this behaviour.
The Warriors' season-opener against the Storm is an extremely tough ask for the Auckland club. But I do not agree with the sections of the media who have written their season off because of the injury to fullback Wade McKinnon.
Fullbacks do not win games single-handedly, no matter how good they are. Games are won up front.
I'd like to see McKinnon's replacement Aidan Kirk play a safe game, rather than an adventurous one. He must provide a safe pair of hands in covering the kicks and provide solid and smart defence as the last line. I think the Warriors have plenty of firepower in front of Kirk and plenty of ability to score points.
The addition of Brent Tate turns the backline into a real attacking force. He is a truly world-class player and I also rate the Warriors other centre Jerome Ropati. He's strong and capable of breaking the line too.
It was refreshing to hear coach Ivan Cleary saying this week that he only had 17 spots in the team and had difficulty cutting his squad to that.
That means he's of the opinion that he has plenty of depth, and player depth is essential. Every club will strike injury problems, it is a matter of how they cover those that counts.
The Warriors have left Wairangi Koopu out of their 17 for Monday's game against the Storm and he was one of the players who finished 2007 very well, yet he can't make the team. They have another good secondrower in Sonny Fai who is in his third year at the club but is still just 19. Fai is 192cm and 105kg, he's raw-boned and could be a devastating force. He likes to be quite adventurous with the pass and this part of his game needs to be tempered. I would like to see Fai thrown in, sooner rather than later.
I believe the Warriors will make the top-eight this year and could well improve on their fourth-placed finish of 2007. It is ridiculous that the Aussies don't expect them to be a force just because McKinnon is out - the rest have improved, the young players have more experience and the team showed more mental toughness towards the end of last season. They should win plenty of those close matches that they used to lose by a couple of points.
I agree with what former Kangaroos prop Steve Roach said about those Aussie critics at the Warriors' season launch this week - the Auckland club is "out of sight, out of mind" for them.
* Dean Lonergan is the Herald's league columnist for 2008
