'It's our house': The working bee that has prepared Sharks for season opener

Ronaldo Mulitalo climbed on the roof to remove leaves from the gutters, Braden Hamlin-Uele washed grime off the grandstand steps with a pressure hose, Dale Finucane cleaned gym equipment, Nicho Hynes dusted shelves and Briton Nikora swept out the dressing sheds.

Ahead of Saturday night’s opening round clash with South Sydney, Sharks players, coaching staff and officials ensured their home ground was ready to welcome fans for the 2023 season with an old-fashioned working bee at PointsBet Stadium.

Players filled skip bins with rubbish and unwanted items, while team-mates and other members of the club, including coach Craig Fitzgibbon and CEO Dino Mezzatesta, scrubbed, mopped, swept and washed down every nook and cranny of the stadium.

It was a sign of pride in their home - the place the Sharks train and play – and an example of Fitzgibbon’s ethos that everyone who comes to PointsBet Stadium is made to feel welcome by the Cronulla players and staff.

The willingness of the players to take part in the clean-up without complaint also showed a sense of humility within the Sharks squad.

“It's our house, and we are the ones who reside here day in and day out so, driven by Fitzy, it was decided as a group approach that we should clean up our house and look after our house,” Mezzatesta said.

“We get people to come in and clean, as we should, but we thought ‘let’s start off the year by giving it a good cleanse on the basis that it is our backyard and it is our home’.

It was pretty unique to see boys swapping their boots and jerseys for mops and brushes and gurneys.

“There was not one player moping around saying, ‘do I really have to do this’. In fact, it was the exact opposite and I think they got a lot out of it.”

Fitzgibbon acknowledged that the working bee was a good story for the Sharks, but he said the players and staff didn’t do it for publicity.

Instead, their motivation was to ensure that fans who come to PointsBet Stadium have a good experience and want to return, while having a good environment to train and prepare in.

Cronulla are the only club in the NRL who own their own ground and it a double-edged sword.

While the Sharks are able to have some control over hospitality and ticketing, they must also carry the cost of maintenance and any losses incurred if attendances are impacted by weather or form.

Since Cronulla won their inaugural premiership in 2016, most other NRL clubs have either opened a Centre of Excellence or have received government funding to build one.

“If the State Government is going to ignore us every time we ask for improvements, yet they fund everyone else, well the very least we are going to do is take care of our own backyard and make it presentable for ourselves and our fans,” Mezzatesta said.

That shows what this ground means to us and how proud we are to play here.

“But it would also mean a lot for our facilities to be on par with the rest of the competition, especially with us having an NRLW team, because at the moment we don’t have the facilities to play a double-header.”