The Melbourne Storm are about to rejoice their twenty fifth 12 months as a member of the NRL throughout Friday night time’s conflict with Parramatta at Marvel Stadium.
Nothing fallacious with that, proper? It’s a stable quarter-century milestone any membership can be proud to rejoice.
But a element within the poster the membership has produced to rejoice the night time has been rightly savaged because it was placed on social media earlier on Friday afternoon.
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Among the promise of a 25-year montage, a dwell guitarist and an previous boys guard of honour on the night time, the membership has posted six NRL Premiership trophies with the years ‘99, ‘07, ‘09, ‘12, ‘17 and ‘20 alongside them.
The only problem, of course, is that those 2007 and 2009 titles were stripped by the NRL for one of the biggest salary cap rorts the game has ever seen.
To add just a little more spice to the extraordinarily tone-deaf and cocky post, they are celebrating it on the night the team takes on the Eels, the team they beat in the 2009 NRL grand final.
You will only see an asterisk in the NRL record books alongside those 2007 and 2009 premierships, much to the chagrin of the Eels and Manly, the team vanquished in the 2007 decider.
Discovered in 2010, the Storm were found to have been cheating the salary cap between 2006 and 2010, ultimately stripped of two premierships along with three minor premierships and a World Club Challenge title from 2010.
After initially denying the claims, the club eventually admitted it was running two sets of books, with the NRL stating the club had spent over $1.7 million more than the cap allowance during that five-year period.
They were also stripped of the competition points they had won to that point in 2010 and any further points for the remainder of that season in one of the blackest sagas in the sport’s historical past.
And now they’re proudly celebrating these supposed “premierships” on their anniversary advertising.
The response on Twitter was swift and predictable.
“Absolute grubs of a club!” wrote one person.
“Here you go you putrid bunch of flops I fixed it,” wrote one other above a doctored picture of the celebration plans with the label “We cheated, so we don’t get these ones” superimposed over the 2 stripped titles.
There had been plenty of quips made about two units of books being on show at Marvel Stadium on the night time.
Another Twitter person certainly summed up many individuals’s emotions when he wrote: “Surely this isn’t real. You can’t possibly be that arrogant.”
At the time of writing the publish remains to be on the membership’s official Facebook and Twitter pages, though it has been left off their TikTook and Instagram accounts.
Source: www.foxsports.com.au