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.
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.
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