How a bond with Jason Demetriou saved Taane Milne’s career from drugs ban and ACL tear

Todd Greenberg and Peter V’landys are ashen-faced and holding a grim court at Rugby League Central, telling the NRL world that Covid-19 has stopped it indefinitely.

Across town, the phone of then-Rabbitohs assistant Jason Demetriou lights up. Just as it had every day for at least the last week.

Taane Milne had already found his way back from a drug ban that threatened his career, only to now be laid up on a surgeon’s table with a busted knee, a Warriors contract that would lapse before he got back on the paddock, and idle hands.

“I reached out to Jase and said, ‘If there’s a chance for me to come over I’d love to trial or whatever’,” Milne, 26, recalls of his self-sourced road to Redfern.

“Jase said, ‘Yep, sweet, leave it with me and I’ll get you here’.

“I was so worried though. I’ve done my ACL, I’ve got all sorts of thoughts going through my head, I don’t know if I’m going to run again, and I ended up pestering him every day.

“‘What’s doing? Do you think we can make it happen?’ It was the day the comp was called off, I’d peppered him for a week straight and he just comes back and goes, ‘Mate. Relax. I’ll get you here. Just stop texting me, there’s a bit going on at the moment!’”

Such has been Milne’s limited life in first grade rugby league, rarely has there not been “a bit going on” in just 31 NRL games.

Case in point, a bad bout of Covid-19 that left him struggling to breathe and checking into St George hospital this summer is almost forgotten by the end of a 20-minute chat in the Redfern Oval stands.

Milne’s been through worse, much of it self-inflicted. Which makes where he’s got to now all the more rewarding.

His could easily be a cautionary tale told at NRL rookie camps and backroom bars. The schoolboy star who knocked back the Waratahs to play with Latrell Mitchell and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck at the Roosters, who then torched chances at the Dragons and Tigers and swapped a promising NRL career for carpet-laying.

A second positive test for illicit drugs in 2018 saw Milne serve a mandatory three-month ban and a reported $300,000, two-year Tigers deal torn up.

Then 22, Milne had struck up a relationship with Demetriou a few years earlier when they were both at St George Illawarra. Again, the phone call stays long in the memory.

“Jase was one of the first people to call me,” Milne says.

“He was at the Broncos by then, he hadn’t coached me for years since the Dragons. But I stuffed around, I put my career on the line, I was in trouble and he gave it to me.

“He was calling first off to check I was alright, but he was angry and disappointed, and I knew he cared.

“He didn't have to call me back then, he had nothing to gain by making that call.

“He said, ‘You’ve got to stop making stupid decisions, think about who you’re hanging out with and what you’re doing.’

“He could‘ve flicked me pretty easily, but he told me to get my head screwed on and to stop pissing my chances away. It’s always stuck with me and I’m still learning a lot from him.”

For Demetriou’s part, the rookie Rabbitohs coach didn’t see that barrage of enquiries as the NRL shut down as Milne making a nuisance of himself.

Not when he has long-known what the Auckland-born, Sydney-raised flyer is capable of. And significantly, given Milne’s rocky early years in the game, not when he still trusts him.

“It’s been a long journey for him to get back into the NRL, but he’s someone I’ve put a lot of trust in because I know what kind of person he is and I know what he can do on the footy field,” Demetriou says.

On that 2020 stream of text messages: “I didn’t see it as him being a pest, I thought, ‘Here’s a bloke who’s really keen to come here’.

“He was out at the time with the knee so there would’ve been a lot more pressure on his end, and more time too, but for me it was always a matter of time before we’d get him here.

“There’s a maturity to Taane now and he understands the opportunity he has now. He values that and you can see it in everything he does.

“He’s always been good to coach footy-wise but you can tell how stable he and his partner are off the field now and it’s showing in his footy too. He played some great footy for us last year and he’s really in the mix because he can play in the centres and on the wing.

“This game has the ability to make a difference to people’s lives and help them through some of the situations that come up. Taane’s a good example of that.”

The ‘great footy’ Demetriou calls out amounted to 12 games for 12 wins and eight tries in a white-hot Rabbitohs backline last year, a turnaround well beyond Milne’s expectations given he had managed just one game – in which he tore his ACL – in three seasons prior.

Milne’s off-season has been hampered by a quad strain and the Covid symptoms that left him “rattled and struggling to breathe,” eventually sent to hospital on doctor’s orders before three weeks of bed rest.

Jaxson Paulo shapes as Dane Gagai’s most likely centre replacement to start this season, but Milne’s versatility and experience has him well-placed to feature in a season when squad depth will be more critical than ever.

All in all, it’s a long way from lugging carpet up flights of stairs for $150-200 a day and the uncertainty of 2018.

Milne doesn’t “like thinking back to then much”, but he is willing to share his story in the hope it helps someone else.

He’s just as quick to rattle off the people who helped bring him back. Demetriou. His long-time partner Casey O’Hare. Mum Shannyn and step-father Manu. And to his surprise at the time, opponents he had never met, not even on the field.

“I've grown as a person since then, and I can’t take back what happened,” Milne says.

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“It's all on me, what happened was my fault and I admit I stuffed that up. But the thing for me was who was behind me when I did that. My family, my partner and friends. I dragged them through the mud and they stuck by me.

“When I was in that position there were a lot of players that I'd never met before who were reaching out to me too. It’d just be out of the blue, and man it helped.

“One was Jordan Rapana, I'd never met him but he messaged me out of nowhere just saying, ’Keep your head up, you’ll be OK and you’ll get another chance’. I met him last year and got to thank him. That was pretty cool, I remember that one specifically, I was sitting at home doing nothing, feeling shit and the phone pinged with a message that really helped me at the time.”