Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Mama. In that interregnum of Big-Time sport that always follows the tide changing between muddied oafs and flannelled fools on the nation’s playing fields, it is to be expected that the spectre of R360 should have garnered so much attention.

What I don’t get is the sudden change in tone from NRL supremo Peter V’landys.

Only a week ago, the ARLC chair was completely dismissive of the upstart rugby competition. “Any competition that comes out of a cornflakes box, I’m not really concerned about,” V’landys said. “That’s what it is. It’s a completely unprofessional [concept], they’ve got no business plan, and any player that goes is really risking their career.”

No worries, then.

This week, though? Bulk worries.

The NRL was taking it soooooo seriously that it issued a statement warning any player or agent who even looked sideways at R360 would never darken the NRL’s towels again. They mean it, dammit!

Peter V’landys with NRL CEO Andrew Abdo.Credit: Getty Images

Ten-year bans, hard labour, no right of appeal, stay out of Dodge!

What to make of it? I thought you’d never ask. The cornflakes line was completely underdone, the threat of 10-year bans overdone. For, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, it doesn’t matter how ludicrous the concept is, if it really does have a billion dollars behind it, it means that – just like LIV golf – games will take place and players will go.

You think they will be put off by the prospect of a 10-year ban? Yeah, nah. It is not quite an empty threat but, for starters, it appears to be on shaky legal ground. At the conclusion of the Super League/ARL case 30 years ago, a lawyer told me that the purport of the judge’s ruling was that “it is quite permissible to open a chocolate shop right beside another chocolate shop.”

Ditto this case, I suspect. The NRL runs a football comp. Who are they to tell players and agents they can’t engage with another comp – at least when they are off contract? How can they say, “If you go, you can’t come back” without it being a classic example of a restraint of trade? An off-contract footballer must be free to sell his wares where he sees fit.

And besides all that, angry fulminations about bans never hold when the player is talented enough. Two decades ago, when Sonny Bill Williams left the Canterbury Bulldogs to go and play rugby in France, there were all sorts of noises about him never being allowed to play NRL again. When he did come back, after being signed by the Roosters, there was so much hoopla that some pundits were........

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