Kids today

Is there anything more tedious than reading an embittered old sports hack banging on about ‘kids today, they ain’t got no respect’? It’s such a tiresome cliché most media providers don’t even bother with it any more unless there’s a really good hook: a recent series of criminal incidents, for instance, or a cluster of contract rebels. Certainly if a journo is going to waste everyone’s time pursuing the ‘kids today’ trope they will generally need at least some outraged comment from legends of the game tired of seeing its great legacy spurned by blah blah blah.

Not so the Daily Telegraph’s Andrew ‘Pulitzer’ Webster. This fearless seeker of truth doesn’t waste time with such banalities as ‘evidence’ or ‘some kind of worthwhile angle for a story’ – he just goes straight for the jugular with “NRL’s new brigade young, rich, selfish”.

[Incidentally, I am aware that Pulitzer in all likelihood did not write his own headline. But it certainly matches his article in both tone and writing style. As a quick aside to the Telegraph sub who came up with the headline in question: what in the name of arse is a “new brigade”? Were you struggling because you’d already pegged “young” as one of the derogatory adjectives for the second part of the headline? Listen, mate: the only thing you have to write is headlines. You must do better than this effort.]

Back to Pulitzer. Leading off the article are no fewer than 13 paragraphs breathlessly outlining the latest outrage committed by one of the NRL’s new brigade, Penrith’s Michael Jennings. This particular crime against humanity was having two drinks on Anzac Day, while injured.

Now let’s get this straight. It is more than possible that Michael Jennings is a selfish dick. He’s got a record of alcohol-related incidents as long as Pulitzer’s good contacts list (two?), the last of which cost him a reported $44,000 and public humiliation without appearing to change him for the better.

But seriously, is a spectacularly minor Jennings incident really an adequate launching pad for “But why would Michael Jennings, humming along on $600,000 a year, do that? Maybe it’s because he couldn’t care less. He’s not alone.”?

Of course he’s not alone. Some people, and especially some relatively well-paid young men, have a tendency to be, y’know, cocks. Jennings may well be one. That’s not good enough for Pulitzer, though: according to the old windbag Jenning’s two public holiday beers are enough to condemn a generation.

Here’s the pay-off: “There’s an unspoken and unwritten problem in the game that coaches and officials and senior players will tell you about privately but dare not speak publicly. As one NRL coach said to me recently: ‘I’ve never known a group of players to be so selfish. It’s not about the team, it's about themselves. What’s in it for me? What can I get out of the game? When I played, the team and my teammates were everything.’”

I’d like to take the opportunity to throw in a little journalistic tip for Pulitzer: if something is “unspoken and unwritten” then I’m afraid you don’t have a story. Your job is to get people to speak things, and then write them. What follows does not fulfil those basic principles.

According to Pulitzer, while not all young players are selfish – ta for that, by the way – the kids today are definitely different from ones in the past. “The problem is, coaches are beholden to them. Because as Whitney Houston might have said, they are the future.”

Nice Whitney reference, by the way. But surely a better 90s star with a drug problem to bring into an article about how today’s NRL players ain’t got no respect would be Andrew Johns?

The “beholden” argument is an interesting one to make, and by ‘interesting’ of course what I mean is ‘ridiculous’. Why are today’s coaches any more “beholden” to players than ones in the past? So far as I’m aware rugby league teams have always had to pick 13 players so if all the blokes decide not to turn up there’s still going to be a problem. If Pulitzer is trying to suggest that the star players are somehow starrier nowadays then surely he also has to acknowledge that the old players were fundamentally more replaceable. If Reg Gasnier had turned up five minutes late to training he could just have been sacked and replaced with some quick lad from the pub (not that players ever took a drink in those days, of course).

Having set forward this nonsense, Pulitzer starts to back it up with the predictable Telegraph standbys: quotes from unnamed sources, quotes that don’t actually support what the article is trying to say, and irrelevant material.

Example number one: the unnamed source. Speaking about Manly half-back Daly Cherry-Evans’s demand for a release or a new contract, Pulitzer claims the Manly “senior playing group” was unhappy. One unnamed player supposedly told Pulitzer “Here he was asking for the world – after one [year in the team].”

The Cherry-Evans case is one of the most stupid examples anyone could possibly come up with in an attempt to demonstrate player greed. Cherry-Evans was the playmaker on a premiership winning team at the age of about six and subsequently got called up to the Australian national team, all while on a salary of $85,000 a year. His manager asked Manly to either pay him something closer to what he’s worth or let him earn it elsewhere. Manly agreed to do the former, problem solved, everyone happy.

Incidentally, I don’t think Pulitzer would survive pre-season training at Manly, and if he could be persuaded to give it a go I expect he’d want a bloody sight more than 85 grand.

Example number two: the quote that doesn’t support the argument. Two options here, as Pulitzer leads off with Gorden Tallis saying: ‘“I don’t care how different [players] are: I don’t care what he owns, what tattoos he wears. If you’ve got a great culture, it doesn’t matter. If they don’t fit in, you find someone else that fits in. You can’t cheapen your culture.’”

Not totally beholden to the players as it turns out then, hey Pulitzer? Seriously, you spectacular half-wit: what possessed you to include a coach saying he is not beholden to players as a supporting statement to the claim that coaches are beholden to players?

Then there’s Roosters coach Brian Smith, who Pulitzer quotes saying: ‘“In our place, the younger blokes are as sensitive to and aware of the team’s responsibilities as any of the older players.’”

This is quite astonishing: Pulitzer is actually managing to lose an argument in which he gets to pick all the content. Oh hang on, there’s more: “Mastercoach Wayne Bennett has regularly dismissed the Generation Y theory, saying it is not an issue for him. He treats them all the same.”

And here’s another “prominent NRL coach”: ‘“The older [players] get, the more self-centred and less club-orientated. They expect everything for nothing, and they won’t do anything for nothing. Younger blokes are grateful for their opportunity. They don’t expect people to fall at their feet to do everything for them.’”

Fortunately, Pulitzer fights back with example three: the irrelevant material. In this case he has assembled some damning evidence from rugby union. This consists, in its entirety, of the fact that an Australia team with a lot of (boo!) young players didn’t do very well at the last world cup, that James O’Connor once referred to himself as a “brand”, that Quade Cooper only signs one-year deals, and that there is “a yarn doing the rounds” that a Melbourne Rebels player may have acted like a dick during a team meeting.

Throwing in the claim of terrible coach Brad Fittler that young players are more likely to question coaches nowadays (which one would have thought more than likely to be a good thing in the case of Fittler, with the questions in question perhaps starting with “have you been drinking, coach?”) Pulitzer happily concludes with the suggestion that coaches ought to sack more players.

I suggest that this approach to staff management might also be gainfully employed by tabloid newspapers.

Zzz’s latest revelation: bad teams may be less popular

Congratulations to Phil “Zzz” Rothfield for penning an early contender for most pointless article of the year, in the ever-dreary Daily Telegraph. In this earth-shaking missive, Zzz scoops the world by pointing out that the three NRL teams in Sydney’s west have, so far this season, not been very good.

Of course, Zzz being Zzz it’s not enough simply to point out the bleeding obvious. Instead our fearless correspondent attempts to crowbar in some implications about the state of the game or the supposed battle between the NRL and AFL in western Sydney. Here’s the (abridged) dramatic intro: “It was supposed to be the most competitive battleground in Australian sport…Instead, it’s become nothing but a battle of the also-rans with crowds falling and merchandise down by 50 per cent.”

Let’s look at Zzz’s shocking evidence. First up: “crowds falling”. Scanning the article for crowd figures I am shocked to discover that Zzz actually doesn’t mention this assertion again; perhaps the truth is so self-evident he doesn’t feel the need to back up the claim? Surely more plausible than the idea that he just shoved it in there without bothering to check?

Well, it’s obviously too early in the season to make a fair comparison of average crowds year-on-year. But I’ve taken the time to make one quick – and, I think, especially relevant comparison. Last season, Parramatta played the Wests Tigers at home in July in front of a sold-out crowd of 19,654. In 2012, the two underperforming sides met in late April… in front of a sold-out crowd of 19,654.

Incidentally, the Parramatta home game against Penrith did drop 2,000 in crowd between 2011 and 2012. Though I suspect the fact that it was arsing down with rain on the night of the 2012 game might have been a factor – what do you reckon, Zzz?

Anyway, let’s be fair and call “crowds falling” an unproven claim (actually that’s bloody fair considering no evidence is offered). Also, frankly, even if crowds were falling what would be the big deal? Teams playing poorly don’t pull as many fans shocker? Is Zzz somehow surprised to discover that in sport occasionally there are teams that don’t win very often?

Next up: “merchandise down by 50 per cent”. That doesn’t sound good, does it? But let’s look at Zzz’s evidence which, in its entirety, consists of the observations of “former legend Peter Wynn” who runs a sports shop in Parramatta which is “normally thriving at this time of year”.

According  to Zzz, Wynn says: “It’s [Ed: no explanation of what ‘it’ is here – presumably underperforming western Sydney teams but the previous paragraph in the Telegraph article is actually about competition with the AFL so who knows, really]  had a huge impact on retail sales….The Eels and Wests Tigers are our most popular clubs but their jersey sales are down by 50 per cent. They played last Sunday and it should have been our busiest day but it was nothing like it.”

So the 50 per cent decline in merchandise sales is in fact the (claimed) experience of a single shopkeeper. Zzz, please allow me to throw some other thoughts into the mix here. Firstly, were you aware that Australia is in the middle of a retail recession, with particularly hard-hit areas including Sydney’s western suburbs?

Secondly, did you know that the Tigers are now into their second season of wearing a particularly nasty jersey, while the Eels are in year two of a moderately average one? Could it be that many people bought the team jerseys when they were new in 2011 and are not buying the same one again in 2012? Could it be that you are a spectacularly lazy journalist who can’t be bothered to string together a vaguely coherent, structured or backed-up argument?

But wait! Here’s Zzz getting one over on me with some really good quoted material to back up his case: “A punter on Twitter @jamiec06 summed it up well by tweeting: ‘People of Sydney’s west spoilt for choice this year – eels [sic], panthers [sic], GWS. No wonder A-League fast tracking [sic] a team.’”

I stand corrected! Man do I feel a fool for spending all this time asking what the hell Zzz is on about when he’s got the globally-renowned anthropological insights of @jamiec06 on his side! And what wisdom is this contemporary prophet bestowing on us? Here it is, parsed for clarity: in 2012, there are a number of professional sports teams in the greater western Sydney area.

(By the way, Zzz old boy, you might want to pick your tweets more carefully next time: the phrase “spoiled for choice” suggests that having all these teams is somehow a positive thing, whereas I’m fairly sure your article has a largely negative flavour).

Next up, Zzz tries – half-heartedly, quite frankly – to stir up an NRL v AFL angle to his non-story. All he can really muster is “the NRL hoped to combat the AFL invasion by winning footy games,” but quite frankly it’s limper than Zzz’s own winkie after a heavy evening in the Cronulla Sharks’ hospitality box (post Gallen exit). He’s forced to acknowledge that the new GWS AFL team’s less-than-impressive zero-and-five record is unlikely to be grabbing the attention of the punters.

Which leaves me wondering what the point of all this is. Does Zzz think it’s newsworthy to point out that the Panthers, Eels and Tigers haven’t been very good this season? The Tigers’ poor performance is surprising to most, but the other two outfits were right up there in the wooden spoon odds before the season started.

Writing rubbish like “Penrith hired Phil Gould and Ivan Cleary to restore pride but they’ve gone backwards” is spectacularly disingenuous. The Gould/Cleary project may or may not work but all concerned acknowledged before the start of the season that a rebuilding period would have to take place before the Panthers became challengers again (and the team has been injury decimated). I don’t believe for one second that Zzz isn’t aware that rebuilding a mediocre playing list takes time so I can only conclude that once again he’s shit-stirring for the lack of anything actually insightful to say.

Right down the bottom of the article (well, just ahead of a spectacularly generic and entirely pointless quote from Mark Bosnich about how a new A-league team will do better if it wins games) comes a comment from “NRL marketing boss”, Paul Kind, who points out to Zzz the stunning revelation that good teams tend to be more popular. “While all our clubs work hard to build membership and their supporter base regardless of results, it helps to win. There’s no question that success on the field brings fans to our games. Like their passionate fans, we'd like to see them winning more often.”

I can’t help but feel Zzz might have been better off making that call first then deciding there fundamentally is no story here.

Five things we imagined last night

It’s been a long, barren off-season during which I thought at times that the Daily Telegraph had the monopoly on crappy rugby league writing. But the NRL is back, back, back and to mark the beginning of the 2012 season the Sydney Morning Herald has launched a new column which has kicked off with a rich seam of bullshit.

In a straight rip-off of similar columns seen all over the world’s sports media, the Herald is running “five things we learnt from last night’s game” after NRL fixtures. Unfortunately, the content of the two columns I’ve seen so far mostly leaves me asking: ‘Did we learn that? Because it sure seems like a cliché that could have been thought up long before the game and is now being recycled with some bland puffery even if it is directly contrary to what actually happened on the field.’

I knew I’d stumbled upon a potential goldmine from the very first thing we “learnt” from the Knights v Dragons five: “It has taken just three months for Wayne Bennett to turn the Knights into premiership contenders.” Apparently, the Knights “showed more confidence and composure than last season when the team limped into the top eight”.

Well, maybe. I mean, that’s certainly what a lot of people were saying would happen before the game. It's just that the evidence of what happened during doesn’t necessarily back that up. What I witnessed was a solid but uninspired Dragons team huffing and puffing to a narrow victory over a Knights outfit that showed creativity in flashes but made far too many mistakes.

Of course an average performance in round one means virtually nothing: there is no reason why the Knights can’t be turned into premiership contenders by Wayne Bennett (well, apart from the whole ‘Kurt Gidley is five-eighth’ thing) but on the other hand there was very little to support the view that this transformation has already taken place.

Incidentally, in round one 2011 the unconfident, lacking in composure Knights side that limped into the top eight at the end of the season played away at a Penrith outfit that finished second in 2010. The Knights won, 42-8.

Anyway, that little nugget was no more than a hors d’ouevre to the five things we apparently learned from the Parramatta v Brisbane game.

If I was asked to come up with five things I learned from the game that would be both vaguely relevant (in other words, ‘watching two people in blue and yellow ponchos clapping their hands and shouting “Parra! Parra!” is not the same as the majestic sight of a 100,000-plus crowd at the Maracana’ does not count) and could justifiably claim to have been learned from the game rather than made up several days or weeks in advance, I might go for something like:
1) If Parramatta thought Chris Sandow was going to suddenly turn them into a team with consistently creative attacking options they might be disappointed.
2) The new NRL season is unlikely to really fire until it stops raining.
3) If Brisbane don’t develop some more attacking options we are going to be hearing even more about Darren bloody Lockyer this season than we did last.
4) Parramatta are going to have to figure something out regarding Sandow’s defence because he was too easy to target.
5) Watching two people in blue and yellow ponchos clapping their hands and shouting “Parra! Parra!” is not the same as the majestic sight of a 100,000-plus crowd at the Maracana.

Ok, so I cheated a bit at the end. But at least my five weren’t:
1) Life after Locky is a work in progress.
2) There’s hope without Hayne.
3) Sandow is the real deal.
4) Brisbane’s attack is an organised mess.
5) Parramatta still don’t know how to close out games.

Let’s deal with these in order. The first and fourth points are, to all intents, the same thing. Brisbane looked clueless with ball in hand against the Eels, wasting a large quantity of attacking sets without threatening the line, dropping the ball frequently, slinging it wildly left to right without looking like finding a gap in the line and generally playing like a team that has recently lost its star playmaker. These things are all true, but really only need to be said once.

As for the Hayne point, well, hmm. Parramatta scored 6 points against a very, very mediocre Broncos side. Their only try came from a nothing kick that a defender did a hilarious bar of soap act with under minimal pressure. In 80 minutes of football Parramatta made a grand total of two offloads and zero line breaks. I am going to say right now that the suggestion that Parra “finally had players at their disposal who could fill the playmaking void and create something in attack” is unmitigated nonsense.

Speaking of which: Chris Sandow. As it happens, I think Sandow went ok. He scored a (massively fortuitous) try, kicked pretty well, only got spectacularly run over in defence once or twice and, well, it probably wasn’t the right night for his ball or running skills. We certainly didn’t see much of them.

The Herald column, however, chooses to emphasise the positives. Namely: “For one who thrives on confidence, he couldn't have asked for a better start than a try in the opening minutes”, and “his kicking game was not only accurate, but smart, finding touch at the right times to give his team a well earned break”.

Wowser. Is it fair to say that one might want a little more out of one’s half-million dollar new half back than the ability to fall on a ball in the in goal and kick for touch? Fair enough, it was a rotten, damp night and there was precious little opportunity to impress with ball in hand. But surely the conclusion there could only be something like ‘we need to see better conditions to judge whether the Sandow signing is a good one’? Simply anointing Sandow on the basis of some reasonable kicking and managing to fall over successfully seems just a touch soft.

Finally, “Parramatta still don’t know how to close out games”, which to me sounds like taking a potentially interesting point – Brisbane looked eminently beatable, but Parra couldn’t do it – and turning it into cliché.

First of all, it’s not based on even the most cursory examination of what actually happened in the game. The Herald article says Parra “dominated for most of the match”, which is simply untrue. The possession figures were 50/50, while Brisbane made more total run metres and Parra made more tackles. Parramatta completed two more sets (32 to 30) but Brisbane had more sets to start with (44 to 40). That’s not to mention the fact that Parra’s best period was at the start of the game, before Brisbane enjoyed a period of supremacy in the second half.

The point is that “closing out the game” wasn’t Parramatta’s problem at all, at least in the sense that “not scoring any points” was so much of a bigger problem that anything else pails into insignificance. “Closing out the game” puts me in mind of a team holding on to a narrow lead or getting a vital go-ahead try in a close game. But Parra weren’t ahead after 54 minutes and were behind on 59. If anything, the only team that even had a chance to “close out the game” was the Broncos, which they did by scoring a game-icing try on 72.

I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on “five things we learnt” and will update as and when I learn anything.

The sound of a tune being changed

Ever since NRL bad boy Todd Carney joined the preferred club of the Daily Telegraph’s propagandist-in-chief, Phil “Zzz” Rothfield, I’ve been waiting for a steady tide of positive coverage of how Carney is a changed man, Dally M frontrunner, leading humanitarian and philanthropist and so on ad infinitum.

And so it begins on February 3, as James “Snivelling Toady” Phelps pens an article in the Telegraph that manages to convert a decent Cronulla debut by Carney in a trial match against a one-third strength Manly into something akin to the second coming.

According to Snivelling Toady, Carney “proved beyond a doubt that he could be indeed the man to save the Sharks” with a two-try performance in a 38-6 demolition of “a near premiership-strength Sea Eagles out-fit [sic]”.

Impressive stuff, no doubt – and that’s certainly a hell of a score line against the reining premiers. However, my doubts started when I glanced down at the list of scorers. The hapless Sea Eagles’ only try scorer was one “M Jowett” – not a player I recall starring in last season’s grand final, to say the least. The successful conversion of said try was knocked over by someone called “S Blanch” – again, not one of the blokes I recall lining up a lot of touchline conversions for Manly in recent times.

So I decided to hold my nose and pop over to the Sea Eagles’ website (don’t worry, I’ve deleted my browser history) to check out this “near premiership strength” side they picked for the trial.

Well, it should be said that Manly did indeed pick 10 of the players who contested the grand final. However, what the Telegraph’s Carney hagiography failed to mention is the fact that these 10 made up less than a third of a 31-man squad (I assume they were all men, though in the case of individuals like “Jason Annear” and “Liam Higgins” I’m afraid I’ve only got first name conventions to go on).

Given Manly are also two weeks out from the world club challenge in the UK, and that their new coach said in advance of the trial “our first grade strength players will only get 20 to 30 minutes”, and that Cronulla scored most of their points in the second half, I’m going to hold off for a little on my own “Carney is back” conclusion.