The path to redemption is steep. Unless you’re gifted and good looking.

Poor old Johnsy. Amusing to mungos, one of the lads, married to a surprisingly articulate woman, possessed of a bob or too, on the tele and then, all of a sudden, shafted (poor choice of words, perhaps) by a Kiwi bird dug up by the ABC sisterhood.

Mind you, a few smacks around the nut and a trip OS(!) to play footy might cause a smarter man to act like he was invisible. How many an Aussie bloke on his first business trip has been one minute face down in a Thai hooker and the next awake, starkers, on a stained Bangkok mattress with no passport and a vague memory of a surprising appendage? Next thing Bruce knows, he’s nursing his conscience as tenderly as a Don-Muang pre-flight Bloody-Mary trying to remember where to get a blood test for cash.

Cleary Johnsy is no genius - if you’re going to cheat on your wife, perhaps doing it in front of 12 witnesses isn’t a good game plan. And here's the problem at the centre of THE GAME. The code of silence - the stock in trade of simpeltons the world over, from the police to the Freemasons. What goes on tour stays on tour. Ha, ha, wink, wink - or, in this case, wank, wank. Johnsy knew his exposure wouldn’t be exposed by his mates. But what kind of mates want to have sex together? None I know.

Annabel Crabb, damn her, has already nailed the homo-erotic weirdness at the heart of this tale. It’s been on display for some time. Long has The Footy Show been dripping in camp and man love. But this kind of tribal primitivism was described much earlier in the brilliant but deeply disturbing Alms for Oblivion Series by Simon Raven. In one novel, Fielding Gray (or was it Sabre Squadron?), Raven describes two men indulging in a competition of sexual prowess, in front of half their regiment, many of whom watch in silence, masturbating, solo or in expedient pairs.

What the hell has that public school creepiness got in common with the working mans’ game?

Let’s see how fast Johnsy gets back on the box. His better looking and more talented brother, Johns-e, was sent to Rugby League Coventry for an alarmingly short time.

Mind you, all he fucked in front of his mates was his brain.