Steve Price refutes Warriors rumours

Warriors stalwart Steve Price

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FIONA GOODALL/East and Bays Courier Zoom

BOWING OUT: Warriors forward and former captain Steve Price announces his retirement from NRL at end of 2010 season at a press conference.

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On Thursday, Steve Price's cellphone went "crazy" as rumours raced around Auckland that he'd had enough. He was quitting the Warriors – immediately – and would finish his career at the Brisbane Broncos.

Bemused, Price rang the Brisbane captain Darren Lockyer to find out if he knew where the story had originated, and then his agent George Mimis to see if there was some offer he didn't know about. There wasn't.

"It's quite funny, but I don't understand why someone would start it." Deep breath. Steve Price is staying, he wants to stay and he will be a Warrior in 2010.

But Price is less relaxed about the other big rumour unsettling his off-season: that the real reason he lost the Warriors captaincy to Simon Mannering wasn't because it was time to blood Mannering while he was still around, but because Price was no longer popular with his team-mates.

The suggestion that other players don't like Price was first aired by radio broadcaster Dale Budge, who is close to several Warriors. Price rang Budge to ask if it was true. After that conversation, he still has doubts, but it's definitely concerning him.

"There might be one guy said something, it doesn't mean it is everyone. I don't know ... if the people supposedly involved said it, why not have the balls to come to me and say it?" Price says.

"Because if it was an issue, couldn't we have sorted it out properly instead of being gutless and going to the media and telling them?

"It's really weak, mate, whether the people are still at the club or no longer at the club, it is really disappointing if something as big as what's been spoken about, you would think they would feel strong enough to let you know, rather than someone externally."

Price says he hasn't aired the issue with team-mates, and nor does he plan to. "I don't think it's worth it, mate," he says. "If whoever it was is gutless enough to talk about you behind your back, I don't want to go wasting my time on them anyway."

He says he was told the "exact same reason" as the media why he lost the job. "Word for word ... so either they're very good liars or it was the truth. You've got to respect and trust the whole truth has been told to you and move on and get over it. These decisions are made every day in business and in life. I don't know why we keep going over it."

But, still, he still opens up about the captaincy. Normally, a garrulous interviewee, he's been relatively subdued until now about the issue.

He doesn't think the club handled the situation properly – it despatched a bland press release, then after unexpectedly high media interest, threw Mannering and coach Ivan Cleary (but not Price), before the jackals.

"They [the club] thought it was making a bigger issue of the situation, but what I said was 'I think you will find it is a big issue, and if you don't think it is, I am glad I haven't got the job any more because I hold it in fairly high regard'," Price says.

"I was a bit disappointed at losing that responsibility, but if you're talking about it that way, you obviously don't see it being that important a role. They said it wasn't that all, but they didn't want people to make a bigger thing of it than what it was."

He was gutted. "It was a tough couple of days," he says. "But I would be disappointed with myself if it wasn't, otherwise it wouldn't have meant much to me."

Price completed the final exam of his MBA in the week of the grand final in early October.

His degree was with Southern Cross University of Lismore, in New South Wales, but was facilitated by the Manukau Institute of Technology. That gives him two possible graduation days. If everything works out for him this season, he'll attend neither: Lismore's clashes with the May trans-Tasman test, and the MIT graduation with State of Origin I.

If he plays both, it means Price is in good form, the Warriors are travelling well and the critics who say he's simply too old at 35 to play rep footy are hanging their heads.

Price speaks with passion about what rep football means to him, how it makes him a better player, how he "hates it, hates it" that he missed the Four Nations. He's fuming that anyone would deny him that buzz.

Other big names suffered bigger injuries last year, but he says he's singled out as the "easy mark, the easy target" because of his age. He says Mannering, Jerome Ropati and Manu Vatuvei all suffered form slumps from the intensity of the 2008 World Cup, but didn't face the same scrutiny. "Does that mean the club tells them to stop playing for the Kiwis?"

Price says Origin cost him two club games last year – the rest were from injuries sustained on club duty. "So what's the big issue? It always comes back to the age thing and I get really disappointed about that," he says.

Price isn't in full training yet due to a foot infection but will be fit for trials in February and by then, ready to make a decision on retirement. The Star-Times understands 2010 is likely to be his last season. The club is "pretty open-minded" about whether he continues on, but he admits that view could change and force his hand. "I have to think my days are getting shorter and if it's this year, or the next two years ..."

Meanwhile, he has already spent enough time talking about those rumours. "There have been plenty of [other wholly untrue] things that have been much more difficult to deal with," he says. "When you hear that you're gay, you've moved out on your wife and are living with your lover, that you're a rapist ... I don't look at them as challenges but things that make you able to adapt and understand things a lot better. At the end of the day, not everything goes your way."

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