IN the battle of the codes, score this one as a significant victory to rugby league.

Sure, the Penrith players might have used - demeaned is probably a better word - women wearing nothing but their underwear to serve their drinks on Mad Monday.

But, as far as we know, they didn’t set fire to them.

You can hear the predictable yelps and screams. The bleating of those who believe we gave too much ground to the women’s rights movement when we allowed them to leave the cave unaccompanied.

“Just a bit of harmless fun.’’ ‘’Boys being boys.’’ “The women are happy to do it.’’

The same excuses, incidentally, made for the sadly dated and demeaning practice of having scantily clad women cheering on the sidelines at NRL matches. A ritual that emphasises and entrenches the ornamental place of women in the manly world or NRL.

Fortunately, most of us have moved on. We’ve grown up.

Is it time to scrap Mad Monday? Leave your comments below

We conduct public gatherings where alcohol is served, a good time is had and yet no one feels the night is incomplete without a healthy serving of dwarf flambé. We don’t generally harass blokes in wheelchairs. We don’t feel the need to have our snacks served by pretty women in their undies.

Indeed, as strange as it might seem to those who have put the madness into recent AFL and NRL Mondays, we invite women - and dwarfs and those with disabilities - along as participants, not amusements. Or they invite us.

Maybe this would take the madness out of some post-season Mondays. Replace Mad Monday with Family Monday. Bring the wives and kids. Provide a civilising influence.

Cue the cavemen again, this time with their fingers pointed at the ‘’keyboard warriors’’.

‘’But this is about the blokes who’ve gone to war together.’’ ‘’It’s about the bond you share with your teammates that no one else can understand.’’ ‘’It’s about mateship.’’

Which, the past week has revealed yet again, is self-justifying nonsense. Mad Monday is, for many, just an excuse to drink themselves into a blind stupor while finding the most bizarre way to demean and abuse others.

No, not always. Perhaps hardly ever. Certainly the media highlights the few incidents where the supposedly ‘’harmless fun’’ gets out of hand.

But those few publicised incidents betray a retrograde mentality that continues to infiltrate the ranks of top level football of different kinds.

The question is not whether a St Kilda player set fire to a dwarf. But why, at a gathering of highly paid and supposedly elite AFL players, a one-joke routine like performing dwarfs was even contemplated. Why the lingerie waitresses?

Harvey Norman, once a significant contributor to rugby league, will this season sponsor the A-League’s marquee Friday night fixture.

Harvey Norman’s managing director Katie Page, a former NRL board member, continues to support the NRL’s Women in League round. But you wonder if it is coincidental that the company has shifted its focus to the increasingly family-friendly world of football.

But you can’t kill Mad Monday. Ricky Stuart cancelled the day for his Eels, yet forward Mitch Allgood still managed to find a pub and, later, his car keys.

Sadly, his name represents the attitude to what happens on Mad Monday. Flaming dwarfs? Semi-naked waitresses? DUI?

Don’t worry about the standards the AFL and NRL and their clubs claim to represent, or the responsibilities that come with an out-sized pay cheque.

For one day of the year, it’s all good.