Hardman scoffs at 'burnout' pretext for duo's withdrawal

Willie Mason says better reasons are needed to explain players' absence. Picture / Dean Purcell

Controversial league hardman Willie Mason has laughed at suggestions that two of New Zealand's best players are too fatigued to take their places in the Kiwis Four Nations squad.

Mason, in Auckland to promote the launch of ticket sales for the 2015 NRL Auckland Nines, says it is obvious other factors are behind the late withdrawals of Sydney Roosters pair Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Jared Waerea-Hargreaves, with "burnout" and "season fatigue" reasons given by Kiwis management.

"Well one's a winger and I don't know how you can get burned out if you're a winger, and at 21, with Tuivasa-Sheck," Mason said.

"And Jared's played a fair bit of football in two years but he's only 25 and he loves playing footy.

"So you'd have to expect that it's come from a bit higher than them two, with the [Roosters] coaching [staff] or maybe the owners, or board, not wanting the New Zealand players to play."

The Roosters had 16 players involved in last year's World Cup, including both Tuivasa-Sheck and Waerea-Hargreaves, with the former suffering a leg injury in the final which affected his pre-season.

The 2013 NRL premiers had a slow start to the 2014 season which Mason says might have encouraged the club to impose restrictions on their Kiwi players. "They probably look at that as a problem with how they started off the year and how they came back a little bit unfit.

"The Roosters are a professional outfit, they're not dumb.

"You can see where they're coming from but they probably could have used a different excuse than player burnout because there's no way they're burned out."

Mason is sympathetic to Australia's representative stars, who he believes have genuine claims to feeling overworked, while better reasons needed to be found to explain New Zealand's absent stars.

"If a player's going to burn out you've got to be playing Origin, players like a Nate Myles, Billy Slater, Cameron Smith, Johnathan Thurston, they've played eight years of Origin, they haven't missed a game, they're playing continuous tests, and that's player burnout. Not two years of first grade.

"Just come up with a different excuse, like 'I'm injured' or something like that, don't disrespect the New Zealand jersey or anything like that."

With calls for the NRL competition to be shortened and to reduce the number of games the elite players are asked to take part in, Mason says the Four Nations features too regularly on the international calendar.

"They're never going to shorten the NRL competition, I know that for a fact.

"But they can surely brush some tests," he says.

"Don't do a Four Nations at the end of the year and give the guys a couple of years' break so that people actually want to see New Zealand and Australia play.

"You see it every year."