Neitz

It is always sad to watch a footballer finishing off his career. Particularly when the heart and mind are there, but the body just can't do it anymore. More so when it is your own team captain.

David Neitz has been an excellent footballer and a strong leader. Under his leadership, the Melbourne football club has had a quiet strength and stoicism that has served it well through the ups and downs of the seasons and got the job done with a minimum of fuss. I do hope that if he wants to return after this injury he will get that opportunity but if he is forced to retire he can begin his life after football proud of his achievements.

Chris Connelly described him thus:

"I have never come across a player who loved his football club or would do more for his football club than David Neitz," Connolly said. "He is the most passionate club man I think I've ever met."

I don't think there is any higher praise.

Trial by Media

Helen’s comment on my last post about Barry Hall posed some very interesting questions, which are more than worthy of a post in and of themselves. It has taken me several days of pondering to venture a response.

Helen wrote

"How do you think trial-by-media relates to sport, given sport's symbiotic and mutually dependent relationship with media? Would suppression of media reports verge on censorship? Is the media capable of controlling itself and resisting reporting on such events? Or is sport outside the realm of natural justice, given it writes and adheres to its own set of laws?"

I suspect I am likely to tie myself in knots of contradiction on this topic, but here goes…

I think trial-by-media is absolutely an important issue in sport, and has been for as long as someone pointed a camera at a game. I will focus my attention on its role in football, but pretty much everything to be said can be applied to all sport.

Football and media have a mutually dependent relationship that has grown more important, and more dangerous with every passing year and every passing dollar. Just ask the staff of the Age who argue the independence of their journalism is a threatened by The Age’s cosy relationship with Melbourne Victory. Journalistic integrity in football reporting at the Herald Sun has long gone out the window, though I hazard to guess few of its readers noticed.

Is the media capable of controlling itself and resisting reporting on such events? Sadly the answer is no. A few years ago now, newspapers and nightly news programs noticed that articles about sport sell. And big. So sport sections, grew and grew to the point where now, the weekend papers (and Monday, and Friday) are all about the sport. Not that I’m complaining, its all I ever read. Oh no, wait, I am complaining. I complain almost every weekend as I open the paper and read another bullshit article cobbled together to fill column inches around some really good photography.

Actions on the field are now replayed ad nauseum (literally in the case of Nathan Brown’s broken leg) until any infringing player cannot possible get a fair hearing at the tribunal, nor at the local bar or around kitchen table one imagines. This is made easier and more impressive thanks to the instant replay and the numbers of cameras now around the group. But it is the product of the need to fill air time and column inches. We hear everyone’s opinion, get every angle, discuss every scenario before it reaches a tribunal and while our nation’s courts may still have the capacity for impartiality, the football tribunal certainly doesn’t (and I don’t suspect it ever really did). Pressure from public opinion, and indeed from an AFL more interested in protecting its brand that anything else cannot help but influence the tribunal.

Having said all of that, in the case of Barry Hall I think the tribunal did well to hold firm to its decision of 7 weeks, rather than 9 because of Hall’s guilty plea. It was correct within the laws of the game, and showed they were able to resist the pressure of the media, and various members of the Staker family. So maybe I’m wrong.

I don’t agree with suppression, but I suspect that even if the AFL could suppress media reports about an incident, it would be less than effective. There is more gossip, and more loose lips in football than anywhere else I have come across, and as people like Bomber Thompson can probably testify, the truth is never as dangerous or damaging as the rumors that will abound in an information vacuum. I would rather see a glut of uninformed commentary on actual events/facts that a handful of articles made up of innuendo laden speculation. In conclusion, Suppression just wont work – how many episodes of Underbelly have you seen?

So well, what’s the answer? I’m not really sure. I don’t think newspapers and nightly news programs are going to give up the cash-cow that is football lightly and tribunals will always face outside pressure when making decisions. I just hope that editors have enough freedom, ability and integrity to make a reasoned judgment about each story they run, and whether it contributes anything further to a discussion.

7 weeks - then we'll dredge it up again

Well, Barry Hall got seven weeks and all I have to say is, whatever.

Frankly I’m not quite sure what everyone got so hot and bothered about. As far as I can tell a player infringed the rules of the game- yes it was really really bad, and very dangerous and could possible have killed the guy* – but it was against the rules of the game and Hall has now been punished under those rules. Where exactly did the system fall down? We have already eradicated that kind of violence from the game and this is proof positive.

There will be those that say he didn’t get long enough, there will be those that say he got too long, there will be those that say he shouldn’t start serving the penalty until he is fit to play (though how the game could police this is a pretty big questions). But I think that on the whole the AFL has handled the whole thing with composure while the media worked itself into a tizz.

Please don’t ask Barry Hall why he did it. He wasn’t thinking when he hit Staker and I can just about guarantee you that no clearer or more rational explanation is going arise over time. It’s pointless to ask and Hall’s lame excuse of a ‘mind snap’ is somehow even worse than not saying anything at all.

A fuss will now be made about whether players should be able to be sent off during a game. Call me old fashioned, but leaving players on the field after they have been reported is one of the few rules that distinguish Australian Rules from other forms of football around the world, and it is one of the few rules that hasn't been fiddled with over the game’s 150 years. So I think we should leave it.

In conclusion, a guy hit another guy on the footy field. It was ugly and it was not within the rules of the game. As a result the guy got suspended. Can we all calm down a bit now?

And while we are calming down, can we perhaps discuss the fact that a player broke their arm on an advertising barrier on the side of the ground and will now be sidelined for weeks? I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty keen to make sure that didn’t happen again.




*Anyone who disputes that a single punch can kill or permanently brain damage anyone (I’m looking specifically at the male panel members of Footy Confidential) is flat out wrong.

The Misogynist and the Dummy

It has been a week and a half since the episode of The Footy show where Sam Newman in his inimitable manner demeaned women in general and Caroline Wilson in particular and offended anyone on the planet with half a brain*. I know this is an almost weekly occurrence, but this segment did not just step over the line, it left it several miles back in the distance.

I think I might just be able to speak about it without losing my cool.

I didn’t see the incident. I long ago gave up trying to watch The Footy Show - it is too dull, too stupid, and too unrelated to football to hold my attention. But I did see a very unhappy Caroline Wilson fronting up for work at Footy Confidential the following Monday night and taking Garry Lyon to task. For anyone who did not hear about it read Sam Lane’s excellent article for the full details.

Over the days that followed I discussed these happenings with many people and had a pretty tragic back and forth with my partner about the lack of interested the football community had in setting things right.

Partner: why don’t the AFL do something about it?

Me: Well the footy show is made by Channel 9 so the AFL can’t control it.

Partner: But couldn’t they boycott and tell the players they’re not allowed to go on the show?

Me: The players aren’t contracted to the AFL they are contracted to their clubs, so the AFL would have to get all of the 16 clubs to agree to the boycott. And even if you could get 15 of the teams, the president of Collingwood is Eddie McGuire and he sort of works for Channel 9 a bit. And even if you had a few of the clubs boycott, some of their players have individual contracts with Channel 9 so they wouldn’t boycott anyway.

Partner: That’s shit.

Me: Yep.

The truth is that while a boycott is a extreme response there was nowhere near the amount of interest in this story and community outrage that there should have been.

The only vaguely prominent article written about it was by another female journalist and Andrew Demetriou gave a bullshit, “check out how much good we’ve been doing with our rights and responsibilities stuff over the last few years” answer when asked about it on Offsiders on Sunday morning (Caroline Wilson was sitting on the couch opposite him while he said it too). Where were the articles from the men of the game and the media who do respect women? The deafening silence leads me to doubt there are any at all.

Caroline Wilson levelled a lot of her criticism at Garry Lyon. As the host of both The Footy Show and Footy Confidential he didn’t even have to courtesy to stick up for his colleague. I am a loyal Melbourne supporter and have long defended Lyon as he has compromised and embarrassed his way into a successful media career. I have little doubt that he apologised off-air, but his miserly on-air apology and the lack of any attempt to make amends for his part in allowing the segment to happen at all, let along continue, has saddened me.

On-air was where an example needed to be made for all those viewers that thought Newman was funny or that the segment was appropriate. The response from Lyon, Craig Hutchison (who was on The Footy Show at the time) and Channel 9 was far from adequate. I doubt I will be so vociferously defending Lyon from criticism in future.

The reality is that until individuals like Sam Newman (and there are many more than just him in the game and the media – including, it appears, Garry Lyon and Craig Hutchison) are publicly held to account for their behaviour and for their unacceptable attitudes towards women nothing will really change. I doubt whether they even realise why what happened was inappropriate and offensive.

Watching Before the Game on Saturday night a friend asked whether I thought they might have considered replacing Peter Hellier with another woman on the panel instead of Mick Molloy. Sadly, I doubt it. A token woman on the panel is seen as all that necessary for television programs and the game to claim that women are equal in the game.

There is no women’s round this year – not that the AFL ever put any effort into promoting it or recognising women as anything more than mothers and taxi drivers anyway.

Sorry, I may have lost my cool anyway.

* Not The Footy Show’s target demographic to be sure.