CANTERBURY chief executive Todd Greenberg says he has no idea when Ben Barba will return to rugby league. Barba, the Dally M player of the year, was due to launch the NRL season on Wednesday night but those plans were thrown into disarray today when the game's pin-up boy was stood down by the club. Greenberg declined to outline the reasons for Barba's suspension other than to say the 23-year-old was struggling with several issues in his personal life and had breached the club's code of conduct. Barba recently split with his long-term partner Ainslie Currie - the mother of his two children. It is understood alcohol and gambling also played a part in the Bulldogs' decision. "I don't know when he will come back to playing footy - it could be six weeks, it could be six months," Greenberg said. But he has a lot of work to do before he can get the opportunity to play football again. And he knows he has a lot of work to do before he can play football again. Ben Barba is dealing with issues that go back since he was a little boy. These aren't issues to do with football. These are life-changing issues that are hard to confront for many people. The difficulty for Ben is he is confronting them in the public eye. His stardom shot within 12 months last year. He has had great difficulty dealing with that issue. He is a role model in the game of rugby league but he may not be equipped with all those skills and tools to be the role model we need him to be. Greenberg said the club had been speaking to Barba recently but those talks escalated over the past 24-48 hours. "He will be having significant expertise applied to him - expertise way beyond my level of power," Greenberg said. It will be a long and detailed process. He needs professional help. I am not going to go into the type of professional help he needs because I don't think that is fair to him. It's like I am not going to go into the details of some of the issues he is confronting. He needs real help. He is not alone in the rugby league world or sporting landscape of those that need help. The professionals tell me the most important and difficult step is to first acknowledge you need help and then to actually ask for it. Yesterday he did those two things. He acknowledge to me he needed significant help and then he asked me for it. There is a multitude of issues. You can talk about alcohol, you can talk about gambling, you can talk about personal relationships, you can talk about etiquette, you can talk about simple values. There is a multitude of issues and that is why I am not going to break them down. Don't think for one minute this is nothing other than drastic action. We have just suspended the Dally M player of the year and the pin-up boy for the game for 2013. He will not be playing when we open the season and we're disappointed about that. But we have to put his welfare first. In a statement released through the Bulldogs, Barba said:"Today is a very difficult day for me as I feel I've let my family, children, club and supporters down. Greenberg, who addressed the playing squad this morning, asked that Barba be given some time and space to deal with his issues. He also defended the club's decision to stand by Barba despite the code of conduct breaches. "We thought termination was the easy way out and simply throwing him out on the street is not the way we do our business," he said. We thought we had a duty of care to try to help him. If he helps himself, he will be a Bulldogs player for a long time. Be he needs to help himself. What we're trying to do is put people around him and support around him, to help him individually off the field. That's the sort of club we are. We help ours when they need it. But they need to step up and help themselves. He needs to take a big step up here. And if he doesn't take that step up, he won't play. The NRL, meanwhile, has endorsed the Bulldogs' handling of Barba and called in North Queensland captain Johnathan Thurston to launch the season. "The club [Bulldogs] has kept the NRL fully briefed on the matter and it is clear that this is a case of everyone wanting to put Ben's interests first," NRL chief executive Dave Smith said.