THE forces that snatched Sonny Bill Williams in the night have been building for some time and are still a long way from peaking.
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French rugby is hungry and getting hungrier for NRL players. When I first went to play for France's Brive club in 1985, I was the first foreigner to don their colours. This week I was back there and was told that of the 40 players in the squad for next season, four will be French. The rest are an amalgam of players from the Six Nations, together with Argentinians, Australians and New Zealanders.
In a fiercely competitive market that is now a nascent version of the English Premier League, where money is no object and nothing matters but getting the best available footballers, NRL players are viewed as a wonderful new source. (Much as league once viewed amateur rugby union players.)
Across France, even run-of-the-mill players are on a wage nudging $30,000 a month, while the All Black Dan Carter, who is to join the Perpignan club in a couple of months, will be on about $1.5 million for six months.
The money is coming from three sources. Primarily, the big cheques come from French multimillionaires who like to boast about having their own club in a manner similar to American squillionaires with baseball, basketball or football teams.
The second source is the sporting sugar-daddy to beat them all: television. When I was in France, we were on TV once or twice a season. Now, every first division game, every week, is on the tube and achieving good ratings, so the networks are happy to pay huge amounts for the broadcasting rights.
Finally, sponsorship dollars are pouring in as never before. The game gets constant exposure across Europe and the best teams are often involved in hugely watched European Cup games.
The lure of huge money was no doubt paramount to the French signings of Williams, Mark Gasnier and Craig Gower, but there is another undeniable factor: it is a delightful way to live. In Williams's case he will be right on the French Riviera, with Cannes, Nice and Monte Carlo up the road, playing with some of the best players in the world, training at superb facilities and heading off to Paris, London and Dublin with some regularity. The games will be tough and demanding, but not as gruelling as the NRL. And instead of his fish-bowl existence in Sydney, should he desire to get lost in France, in love, it won't be hard.
How can the NRL compete? It can't. A bare beginning would be doing away with the salary cap, which conspires to pay players way below their market worth, but there is not a lot else that beckons.
Calls for the International Rugby Board to do something are naive. Why would union step in to save the same league that has systematically and without apology pillaged its ranks for the past century? And what authority would it have, anyway?
Could the Federation Francaise de Rugby step in and tell Toulon to stop being so mean to the NRL? Uh, no. French rugby views our league players with respect but the game itself as a hopeless joke and will feel no allegiance whatsoever to the NRL. The NRL runs a professional provincial competition; the FFR runs a professional national competition, with international exposure. France has more money. France wins.
Legal injunctions? Good luck. Extradition treaties for criminals are one thing; a legal process to bring back runaway footballers quite another. Canterbury will no doubt pursue Williams to fulfil the terms of his contract, but the man Phil Gould called "the Messiah of Rugby League" has gone to union and won't be coming back, and many, many NRL players will pursue the French connection in his wake.
All up, the best that rugby league can do in the face of being pillaged for years to come is to do what rugby union did for years when the roles were reversed - bleat loudly and learn to live with it. At least, as long as it can.
pfitzsimons@smh.com.au
