Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Footy Fourth Estate

This post is going to be a whinge. Maybe even a rant. I’m not entirely sure, but I think a rant is a whole level above a whinge. Yep, let’s call it a rant then.

And the subject of my rant? Well, its footy journalism. AFL journalism to be precise. It’s a not profound subject matter then. No existential ponder on the really big things in life. But a rant with quite some justification nonetheless. By my reckoning anyway.

I’ll start with the nature of my rant then. Basically, there’s so many footy journalists (maybe reporters is a more apt description) out there that they all need to justify their existence by creating controversies and making everything out of absolutely nothing. All in the name of showing their editors that they have an important contribution to make and that a large ‘team’ of footy reporters is needed to cover such an intrinsically complex segment of the community. That’s sarcasm by the way.

Yes, there’s only so many football related stories every week aren’t there. What do we have? Results. Yes. Injuries. Yes. Team selection. Yes. Performance speculation. Yeah. There’s not a lot else that really matters therefore but there’s media space to be filled people and it will be filled no matter what. No matter if it’s silly and vexatious. No matter if it’s simply untrue. No matter if its mindbogglingly irrelevant.

This matter has particular resonance for me as I am a long suffering Melbourne Demons supporter. I’ve been waiting for a Premiership my whole life and it seems like I will now have to live through another ‘rebuild’ in our quest for success. With performances being so lowly, you have to expect the media coverage to focus on the bad and quite a bit of it is actually true and hits the nail right on the head. My own opinions on the Dees situation can be read in other recent posts but at least I talk from some knowledge and some relevance as a diehard fan.

A big part of the footy press though can be relied upon to talk shite basically and run any and every story they can on the most minute of issues. And then claim they know all and are ‘on the inside’ just because some troll on twitter told them so. A fine example being just on the weekend when all of a sudden there were reports that the Melbourne Football Club Board were meeting to discuss Coach Neeld’s future. It was crap from the beginning but the story was reported as fact across all forms of the media and given a profile it did not deserve.

And then today, The Herald Sun runs a report that David King, ‘a respected commentator’, is scathing of Neeld’s appointment and called for the Dees to sack him after only eight games because ‘he had lost the players’. Not sure why or how the ‘respected’ tag came about, because King has a history of trying to create controversy and doesn’t have the best form in terms of predictions for the future. All last year he told anyone and everyone that Geelong couldn’t win the flag. Wow. I wonder how that turned out.

On the ‘he’s lost the players’ claim, as a Dees supporters I can say maybe that’s not a bad thing. The senior players at Melbourne have never been challenged before and some of our young high draft picks have never had to work hard for their position before. So to me it’s not a bad thing if some of them have their noses out of joint about being asked to work harder and perform better.

Mediocrity has been excepted for too long and only the ones that take it on the chin, knuckle down and work harder should remain. The ones that don’t, well, maybe it’s time they thought about doing something else. What I’m trying to say then is that Neeld should not be sacked for doing exactly what he was brought in to do. Restructure the place. Sweep a broom through the list. And institute a game plan that is required to play tough, hard finals-type football.

And it’s not just Melbourne either. I’m just raising these examples because they’re most prominent to me. This week has also seen a massive outpouring of derision against Josh Hunt of Geelong because he hesitated and didn’t crash headlong into a marking contest.

Ex-players in the media jumped on it straight away and he’s had to cop suggestions that he’s weak and feeble-minded because of it. Coming from some of those ex-players, it’s the height of hypocrisy. Matthew Lloyd, I’m looking at you.

Yes, footy journalists want more and more ‘controversy’ so they have more and more to report. But they don’t want to look at some of the more complex matters in the footy world or come up with anything new to get an exclusive or highlight something none of us already know. Instead, they trot out the easy stuff and give it to us ad nauseum day after day. A team suffers a 100 point loss so the coach must be sacked. A player baulked in a marking contest so he must be dropped. A club administrator doesn’t host a game show so he must be hiding from the media.

Would we get all this if we didn’t have ‘teams’ of footy reporters sitting around trying to find something to write about or something to film? I doubt it very much. Very, very much. So we get this situation where minor issues are turned into major ones and all manner of rumour, innuendo and just plain lies are reported on and presented as educated opinion or fact. And the phrase ‘a source close to’ should never be used anywhere. If someone won’t put their name to it then maybe it’s not worth reporting at all. Yes, even you Grant Thomas.

It’s not a great situation for us footy fans then is it. We get the sensationalism of the tabloid press and television or we get so-called ‘exclusives’ from the AFL themselves on their own website. I don’t know about you but I’m craving something different. Sometime new. Something real. But I reckon I’ve got as much chance of that happening as Aaron Davey winning the Brownlow. Yeah, not going to happen.

So herein ends my rant. It’s being brewing for quite some time and I must say I feel better already getting it off my chest. I just better get back to my life so it doesn’t look like I’m sitting around here trying to justify this blog’s existence.

EDM.

 

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