It's the old coach's mantra that there's no 'I' in team and that any sporting unit can succeed only if every player pulls his weight. You might expect the guiding philosophy to extend the egalitarian approach to making all players equally accountable for their errors. But there is an 'I' in individual and it's almost inevitable that within any team, some players will be cut more slack than others if they break the law or cross whatever dotted lines their team or club may have drawn.

Take Andrew Johns, for example. At his worst, Johns was a menace, running amok in the Steel City, continuously embarrassing his club and continuously proving himself the best and brightest player on the park whenever the Knights played.

So what did the club do as the black marks piled up against its halfback's name? Nothing. Johns would cop a fine, a talking to, and would promise to behave.

"But it would never last," he wrote in his autobiography The Two of Me . "They've dealt with things over the years and swept them under the carpet because of who I was as a footballer, which makes my behaviour even more intolerable, because if I was a fringe player I would have been sacked years ago."

Just as Johns did in Newcastle so too did Ben Cousins in Perth and Wayne Carey in Melbourne, their clubs unable or unwilling to confront their stars over their behaviour. You don't have to watch the Raiders long to find a Joey parallel. Cocky kid. All the confidence in the world. Playing on a different level from his colleagues'.

You don't have read too much of the sport pages to think halfback Todd Carney might be as far out of control as Andrew Johns ever was. And you don't have to listen to Raiders chief executive Don Furner for long to realise Carney has been receiving most-favoured son treatment at the club time and time again.

Last year Carney was warned another driving offence would have him sent to jail after he ignored the sirens and flashing lights of a police car while driving while unlicensed.

"It was my third time in trouble with this sort of thing, so I was actually thinking they were going to [sack me], and so was my family," Carney admitted.

The person who was in the car, winger Steve Irwin, copped that one - although his only crime was being drunk. The club dispensed with his services, and Furner was upfront about the differences.

"Sometimes there are double standards and sometimes there are different qualities of player. Sometimes exceptions are made for better players or players that have been at a club longer. That's a fact of life," Furner told the Canberra Times .

Yesterday, with the halfback in the news for the wrong reasons, accused of deliberately urinating on a patron at a nightclub and caught up in a startling allegation by Irwin that he (Irwin) had lied to keep Carney out of jail, Furner repeated his position. "Talent will [help] out," he acknowledged, when questioned on 2KY.

"Probably it is true whether it's Ben Cousins of whoever, without a doubt, that's taken into account. It's not the only factor but it is a factor when you're looking at spending a lot of time rehabilitating somebody and putting time and effort into their welfare and their life and turning things around," he said "Without a doubt, I'd be lying if I said it isn't a factor but it isn't the only factor."

Former premiership winner and Kangaroos coach Chris Anderson acknowledged the practice but, as Johns has done, questioned its usefulness.

"It does happen but it's not a way to run a business," he said. "If you're putting your results in front of educating young kids and trying to make good people out of them, it's pretty poor leadership. But it does happen - and not just in rugby league but in cricket, in Aussie rules, in any business, probably."

But the impact can be corrosive. "It's not just the individual," Anderson said. "If one person can get away with it, then everyone else at the club thinks they can, too. You're really setting a bad example. If you're going to win a premiership it's going to be your weakest link that wins it for you, so you need to treat them the same as you treat your best players."

Paul Dunn, a former player at Canterbury and Parramatta and chief executive at Souths, says any culture of cover-up is over as the public takes an active role in policing the off-field behaviour of sportspeople. "You're guilty before you're even convicted in some cases," he said of the rush to judgment. But tough decisions do have to be made to defend the integrity of the club. "It's not just what they do and how they impact on the club, it's how they impact on teammates," he argued. "Sometimes you just have to think about what sort of message you're sending out."

No footballer is ever innocent in the court of public opinion, perhaps a consequence of the years when the dirt files piled up with no action. Not any more, argued Manly chief executive Grant Mayer. If it happens - and sometimes even if it doesn't - there's someone on radio complaining or taking photos.

"The mobile phone has changed everything," he warned. "I guess it's part of the price you pay of being a high-profile athlete: when you're out in public, anything that you do can now be filmed."