LIKE EXCALIBUR IN THE STONE, DIGIT REMAINS FIRMLY LODGED
So, from what has been said in the media, Richmond is fully committed to Terry Wallace staying on as coach, but according to RFC president Gary March, has a ‘contingency plan’ in place for Season 2009 in case he goes.
In something that didn’t exactly come as the greatest shock since it was last revealed that ANYONE was having an affair with Senator Gareth Evans, coach Terry Wallace indicated he had no intentions of resigning. Given that an argument could be advanced that Terry’s greatest demonstrated abilities were, respectively, getting a coaching job and keeping one, this is hardly out of character.
So if Terry’s got no intention of resigning, and Richmond is committed to Terry Wallace staying on as coach, why would you need or have a contingency plan allowing for his early departure?
Verily, this is what Yul Brynner aptly described in the motion picture The King and I as “a puzzlement”.
The ever-thoughtful Mr March further allowed that in his considered opinion the Richmond team was playing poorly (four losses from four games, including a stunningly disoriented display against the previous consensus choice for 16th best team in a 16 team competition might, if anything, indicate a degree of understatement in Gary’s chin-stroking, judicious summation there), and that clearly “something” needed to change.
Well, if they’re stuck with the players (and they are), and they’re not going to change the coach, one wonders what he imagines that “something” might be. Incorporating more volleyball in the training sessions, to improve reflexes? Encouraging the players to drive to training via an alternative route to give them a different perspective on things? Sitting around hoping the AFL brings back the old VFA Second Division so that Richmond can find a level of competition appropriate to their currently demonstrated abilities?
All of these alternatives seem, err, ‘limited in scope’, to be kind.
The only more terrifying thought for Richmond fans than the notion that the coach has completely lost the ability to connect with players in any meaningful way (i.e. the “way” that results in improved on-field performances) and has nothing more to offer the club – a notion seemingly not entirely unsupported by the prosecution evidence of “Rounds 1-4, 2009”, especially when compared with results achieved by the same coach and player group in 2008 – is the idea that he IS connecting with the players and that this is EXACTLY what he has to offer the club.
Either way, I’m struggling to find any available alternative to the belief that if you were a fan of this football club – and I am, but I’m trying to pursue this logically, while a skerrick of logic still remains available to a defeat-addled brain – you wouldn’t want the hierarchy to just pull the finger out and pursue the only immediate ameliorative measure available, and replace the coach whose efforts patently aren’t working, with another one who might improve matters.
I might as well be honest and say if it were me, I’d ditch Terrific Terry right now, and put Wayne Campbell in there as caretaker for the rest of 2009, on a suck-it-and-see basis. He’s there already, he did some assistant coaching type stuff at Footscray, he was a smart player – not to mention club captain and a Richmond man, the latter always being my preference re Tiger coaches – who showed a good football brain, he seems a good communicator, and age-wise he’s about right for these days (i.e. in terms of being able to relate to the player group, without necessarily being best buddies). If it doesn’t work out, you fish around for someone else at the end of the year. If it does, you’ve found your new coach, and he’s already had the best part of a season to get up to speed.
Right now, there’s nothing to lose. Literally nothing. As in, wins-on-the-board, points from all available AFL games this season to date, NOTHING WHATSOEVER. Unless he’s the only person there who can operate the office coffee machine, I’m struggling to think of a single rational reason why you’d keep Terry Wallace on as coach at this point, and wouldn’t already have said, “Well, it’s been real, Terry - be careful with that door on the way out, or it can give you a real whomp on the buttock-region.”
Otherwise everybody sits around with their thumbs up their cabooses losing game after game while Gary March and the Marchettes try to come up with that elusive “something” that will turn things around, which going on the usual performance of the Richmond brains trust, will turn out to be “something” along the lines of changing the flavour of the sausages at the sausage-sizzles. Actually, that might be too precipitous for this administration. They’d probably just try to change the sizzle.
(The Hobart Mercury had a somewhat less expansive, but nonetheless pungent analysis of the Richmond coaching situation, as can be seen below.)
REELING IN THE YEARS – THE DENIS PAGAN STORY
Denis Pagan has put his paw up and said he’s ready to be an AFL coach again. Quick imaginary straw poll of everyone who thinks this is a brilliant idea. Likely positive response – 1 (D. Pagan). Size of survey – 20 million.
Denis Pagan is absolutely ready to coach again at AFL level, and to great success as well, provided the side he coaches is full of experience-hardened, high quality North Melbourne players who he’s known all of since pups, and every other team in the league commits to playing late-90s football with late-90s players. Putting a guy of Pagan’s age in charge of a current AFL team of young guys he’s never dealt with on a football or personal level – well this seems to have ‘genius’ written all over it, much like building a multi-million dollar new home and lacing it with asbestos.
How well did he go last time with a team of non-North Melbourne, non-proven, non-star players? How would he likely go now when we’re all a few more years down the pike, and football is as well? The most charitable interpretation you could put on it is that it’s hardly a safe bet.
I know this is the AFL where it’s always “Anything Can Happen Day”, and everyone ignored all precedent to give Carrara a second crack, but if we accept that, even in such a truly Bizarro World kind of context, there must be some sort of limit, I think we might have just about reached it here.
Maybe it’s a coincidence but you may have noticed that in the last five grand finals, there was only one coach even vaguely approaching Pagan’s age, and that was Leigh Matthews back in 2004, and his side lost. This may represent something of a trend.
(Before that, there were three grand finals in a row featuring older coaches, but one of them in 2002-3 was Matthews, arguably the best coach of the last 20 years at that point, and the other was Mick Malthouse, who lost. The odd man out was Kevin Sheedy, and he was in the middle of a dynasty type of situation at Essendon, in that he was on a McHale-plus length run and virtually unassailable as coach at the time. And in football terms, 2001-2003 is a long time ago now.)
I’m sure there are tons of discarded former coaches who would like nothing better than another crack at the top level, but most of them have the sense to keep their mouths shut about it, or more particularly the sense to sense when time has passed them by.
Denis Pagan is known for his work with young footballers (stemming from his very successful days as a coach in the old Under-19’s competition) and can probably coach juniors until he’s just too worn out to do it anymore, and decides coaching the roses in his home garden would be a preferable option. Why he’d even put his hand up to coach in the AFL serpents’ nest anymore is beyond me, but somewhat like the idea of a personal teleportation device to beat that morning public transport crush, it’s just doesn’t seem a realistic option right now.
VALIDITY OF POINT NOW DEPENDENT ON IDENTITY OF SPEAKER – IT’S OFFICIAL
When I went to The Age website early this week (Tuesday, 21/4/2009) I read this, by Caroline Wilson:
“[Eddie] McGuire was quoted in Friday’s Australian thus: ‘It is more a philosophical concern about the future of the game. We are not sure who is in control of the direction in which the rules and interpretations are taking us. Who is in charge? Is it the football department, the commission, the umpires, the laws of the game committee?’ He was speaking about his club’s agenda for tomorrow’s talks on his concerns for football’s future. Fascinating. It could also be described as Collingwood calling yet another meeting to whinge about umpires. Not that the Magpies are alone.”
I know Caroline’s gimmick * is personalising stories, breaking news, and, for want of a better description, not being entirely backwards in kicking up a stink. That’s all fine, of course – that’s her approach (and hardly hers alone), and there’s more than enough other parties in the footy media playing the straight bat, keeping untidy matters neatly swept away from the public eye, and otherwise showering the football public with a fair amount of blandness, eyewash, and a confetti of statistics.
However, it tends to mean that she’s not as focussed on a deeper or more meticulous analysis of the football issues raised as a result of the general uproar (sometimes one she herself has helped kick up), in terms of a detailed exposition of the various viewpoints raised, let alone evaluation thereof. This may be one example.
Eddie McGuire’s point about “the direction in which the rules and interpretations are taking us” is something that has worried me and plenty of other football fans (and probably commentators, coaches, pundits, players, ex-players, talkback callers, and maybe the kids who sell the ice-creams as well) for some time. “Who is in charge?” Good question. On the evidence to hand – i.e. the matches themselves and how they wind up being umpired as a result of “who is in charge” – WHY those people are still in charge is another valid question.
And Caroline, with nose firmly to the grindstone – and it’s particularly grinding on this occasion – determines out of all those possibilities, that the real issue can be summarised as:
“Fascinating. It could also be described as Collingwood calling yet another meeting to whinge about umpires.”
And, from the broad, sweeping possibilities of everyone finally getting their heads around the dismal blancmange of a miasma of a problem that the administration and application of the games’ laws has become, and maybe DOING something about it, we devolve to a little personal name-calling about Collingwood. **
Not that everyone other than Collingwood fans doesn’t enjoy a little of this practice, but to me this seems like the thin edge of the wedge on this occasion. Now let’s see. We could take on a major problem that’s blighting the game itself, and is urgently in need of addressing, or we could ignore all that and just bag Collingwood.
It seems like the easy way out, to put it mildly.
It’s not even a decent, solid bagging. Not when you follow up “Collingwood calling yet another meeting to whinge about umpires” with the classic each-way bet of “Not that the Magpies are alone.”
Ah, so it’s not a Magpie-specific issue now? Something fundamentally changed in between one sentence and the next, apparently.
Maybe if a lot of people are having a go at how the game is being umpired – and admittedly, this is a longshot – there could just barely be some sort of a problem with how the game is umpired.
Maybe instead of “whinging”, Eddie McGuire was raising legitimate concerns about both the process of how the rules and those vexed and widely loathed “interpretations” are arrived at, administered, and how they are allowed to play out in practice. In that, I’m going to take a wild guess that he would certainly not be ‘alone’.
But knocking the whole debate down to whether Collingwood is whinging again is certainly a handy way of stifling those concerns entirely.
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* [I use “gimmick” here not as a pejorative exactly, but more in the language of pro wrestling, to describe the extent and nature of a public persona or characterisation, and that person’s work, because it’s an exceedingly convenient piece of jargon which has ready application throughout the media.
Derryn Hinch’s “gimmick” is that he exploits news items to try and “get himself over”. (More pro wrestling speak, but I think you’ll gather what it means from the context. Or as John Blackman aptly put it in Hinch’s more prominent, and nominally more public-spirited days, Hinch’s gimmick is that he’s the “Fire-hydrant of the underdog.”)
Tony Greig’s gimmick, in the Channel Nine cricket broadcast context, is to act antagonistic towards the Australian team and inflame the fans.
Mike Sheahan’s gimmick in print is that he frequently raises various – and often rather odd, and/or difficult to define ‘major issues’, tries to put them over as ‘major issues’ apparently because he’s the one that raised them, and then ponderously comes to some supposedly bold and forthright conclusion, which is not-infrequently undercut and undermined by him having an each-way bet all the way through the article.
My gimmick is that I knock stuff and go for laughs.
I suppose I’m using “gimmick” as a jargon-oriented synonym for “approach”, but as, in its pro wrestling coinage – derived from the more general ‘carnie’ speak that most pro wrestling language is, no doubt – it takes in both the public persona and the resulting work, it does seem such a useful and apt term.]
** [I find the “Fascinating” there so tremendously cheesy and patronising. If you’ve got something to say about Collingwood, don’t leave it stuck in your muzzle, let fly with both barrels. If the points raised by McGuire were valid – and no matter who raised them, they were, and emphatically so – they deserved a little better than being squatted on firmly, and covered with a load of “Fascinating.”]
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DANCING THE LIGHT CHOOKTASTIC
Or
A WISHBONE TOO FAR
Or
SOME RUBBER AND DEAD CHICKENS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS VIDEO - HUMANS GET A PASS
In my real life job as a freelancer for The Age newspaper, I write a weekly column about the coverage of sport events and issues in the media, so let’s talk about one of those right here – the notorious North Melbourne rubber chicken simulated sex video.
Media coverage on this issue on this issue has involved a great deal of rapid-fire kneejerk reaction, and conspicuously less in the way of anything resembling considered thought.
The party-line assumption leapt to, whether rightly or wrongly, was that the video artefact concerned – featuring a rubber chicken dating, then having “sex” with, then “murdering”, and then having more “sex” with, a real dead chicken – promoted the degradation of women.
Well, it could be interpreted that way, absolutely. It could also be a particularly cloth-eared attempt at footballer humour which tumbled off the bus of good taste. It could be bored people with too much time on their hands having fun with chickens and parodying pop videos. Maybe all of the above. Such is the broad church of attempting to interpret ‘popular art’, or whatever you’d call the twaddle in question on this occasion. *
However, the response, also through the media, was all one-way, and very much the classic one of the day – a yammering clamouring for public repentance. So, first all North Melbourne FC gathered together in the media glare to express group contrition, and then the players responsible for the video appeared on “The Footy Show” to express more contrition. Public expression of contrition is football’s growth industry here, regardless of code. Wayne Carey, for one, has pretty much got his version honed down to a stage-show by now. **
One might wonder in this, chicken video-related, instance at least, whether the contrition expressed was of deep regret of having done the deed, or the even deeper regret engendered by being caught.
Much of the outrage, and perhaps most of the assumptions jumped to about the video’s content and intent, centred around the accompanying music – a song entitled “Move Bitch” by the hip-hop performer Ludacris. As columnist David Penberthy somewhat wryly noted in “The Australian”, “If they’d opted for Herb Alpert’s ‘Spanish Flea’, maybe none of this would have happened.”
What very few of the people who’ve busily launched themselves into this roller derby buffet of a debate seem to have done is consulted the lyrics of this icon of popular songdom, which are freely available all over the internet.
If they had, they would have discovered that “Move Bitch” is not about exhorting an inert or unresponsive female sexual partner to greater heights of performance, in an abusive or any other way, as seems to have become the common assumption. It’s the standard “I’m a young guy brimming with vitality going about my young vital guy business as I see fit, so EVERYBODY stay out of my way” song, as has been conventional in youth musical culture since “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis, all the way through “Anyhow, Anyway, Anywhere” by The Who, “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols, and now to “Move Bitch” by Ludacris, apparently.
Basically, had those tireless toilers at the coalface of pop commerciality, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, been young now, and tried to write an equivalent of “Theme From the Monkees” for an urban African-American audience in the year 2009, the lyrics would have probably come out something like “Move Bitch” by Ludacris.
The lyrics are offensive, invoke violence, and are demeaning to women, no doubt. That said, the song’s not exactly about what people here assumed it’s about – the essence of the lyrics stands firmly in the long-established pop music tradition mentioned above. And “bitch”, apart from the conventional sexist meaning, (which does also feature in the lyrics), is a term used in contemporary urban African-American culture to refer to both males and females who meet with the speaker’s disdain, whether one likes it or loathes it. The interpretation of even the most nominally offensive and commercial of “cultural works” is a trickier business than some people think.
So was the video misinterpreted? Maybe, possibly, arguably not, and not the issue, in that order. The point is, EVERYONE in this society has the right, in theory, to make tasteless, or distasteful, or frankly ’orrible, videos which are open to interpretation. Or radio and TV shows, or magazines, or movies, pop songs, or whatever. It’s basic freedom of expression, or what the American part of our brains calls our First Amendment rights, regardless of the fact that we’re not American. Incidentally, our attitude regarding First Amendment rights is somewhat similar to that of urban dwellers here to inside toilets – i.e. they may not have them, exactly, but they think they probably should.
Footballers don’t sign up anywhere to forfeit such rights. There’s some sort of bizarre chop-suey logic with regard to professional sportsman here – possibly based in some sort of grim diehard Protestant work ethic of the past – that if you play games for a living instead of having a proper soul-destroying job like everyone else does, you have to pay a serious penance for this.
For example, you are apparently expected to magically become a “role model” – an occupation hazily defined at best, and seemingly varying in particulars depending on who is saying it at the time, and to what situation it is being applied.
They also shouldn’t get “too much” money, regardless of the rude financial health of the sport which you participate in, and any reasonable estimate of the going rate for elite sportsmen in a vaguely comparable field.
And they are expected to forego all rights that regular citizens have with regard to being tested for “illicit” drugs. (Performance enhancing drugs are a different matter entirely – one which speaks to the perversion of the sport on a fundamental level. What used to be called “recreational drugs” are chiefly an image-control issue, as far as the sport is concerned.)
Apparently now the right to creative expression, of stupidity or otherwise, is to be appended to the growing list.
Well, the reality is, the North Melbourne worthies concerned have an implicit, if not explicit, right to make their stupid video, the same as anyone else in society does. There’s an issue about whether they should have done so effectively “on the club letterhead”, since, among many other shining examples of foolishness, it was plain to see that the material was shot on club premises. (Still small potatoes in the field of idiocy compared to the masterstroke of posting it on the internet.)
To that extent, they’ve richly earned any umbrage their employer may choose to visit upon them. They did the club no favours by involving the club, and by extension, did the organisation the club is a part of - the AFL - no great service either. On that level, there was a certain amount of fall-out due the perpetrators of the video.
That element of the equation to one side, did the folks who brought us this artefact deserve the condemnation of the general public? Well, I’ll leave that to the general public. I’d suggest that various pundits in the media, and nominal experts interviewed by same would be better off leaving that decision to the general public as well, rather than jumping to assumptions on that score.
Did they even have a right, as professional footballers to MAKE such a video? Well, that’s another question entirely.
FREE MAN’S INALIENABLE RIGHT TO PERVERSION OF RUBBER/DEAD CHICKENS
However any suggestion that, as people involved with an AFL club, they had no right to perpetrate this atrocity, or whatever we’re calling it today, is a nonsense that should be viewed with the deepest of suspicion. They do football for a living. The expectations on their public behaviour may differ for such workers, and both League and club may well expect certain standards of behaviour to be maintained while the player is actively representing them. However, otherwise they have the rights of all other workers and citizens.
Freedom of expression is something Australians readily champion in principle, and often go to absolute water on in practice, particularly when the instance under discussion is widely portrayed as disreputable, or, these days, politically incorrect.
The underlying and fundamental principle behind such freedom – “I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it” – under the pressure of the moment in Australia all too frequently seems to carry the implicit contract rider, “…as long as a majority of right-thinking people agree with it.”
This is obviously a direct contradiction of freedom of expression. You can’t have it both ways. You disrespect and erode that freedom – and very much at society’s peril – or you don’t. Freedom of expression is inconvenient that way. Realistic limits can, and must be set for the benefit of society – such as in the cases of child pornography, incitement to racially based violence, and blueprints for making bombs – but such limitations must be very carefully considered and monitored for essential freedom to remain unimpaired.
Conditional arguments like “But in this case, Item X is just downright horrible and should be banned” or, as was recently the case, “People shouldn’t be able to exhibit artworks like this so close to Easter” are contradictory to the interests of freedom of expression. They are also inherently contradictory to its nature. The underlying principle is not “I defend to the death your right to say anything as long as I agree with it.” It never can be.
Some also don’t quite understand that the erosion of such freedoms is always a slippery slope. It’s not the nature of governing bodies to take an inch when a mile is available, particularly when it comes to censorship. Something as puerile, inane and possibly offensive as a pornographic movie may be today’s item of contention, but, if the public lets the banning of that item skate by (because “In this case, Item X is horrible, and should be banned”) the same legislation may well be used to subsequently ban, say, a movie of controversial sexual content but fundamentally political intent, or a newspaper, or a website, or the music of a certain artist. In fact, I can all but guarantee you it will be. Viewed historically, that’s the way the censorship toboggan slaloms, right down the aforementioned slippery slope.
The pro-banning viewpoint also never takes into consideration that works of art – well let’s say creative works anyway, so as not to stretch a point – even on the lowest possible bottom-feeder level, are open to interpretation. There is no one definitive interpretation of the “meaning” of a particular painting, video, movie, comic or song. No creative production in any medium is inherently offensive, in that sense. It has to be offensive TO somebody to be DEEMED offensive. And the nature of human beings is that all somebodies are a little different from each other. If we banned everything that any individual found somewhat offensive, there’d be a lot of empty space on the newsstands, and we could convert all cinemas to bingo parlours. (Well, up until someone found bingo offensive, probably because of all that “Two fat ladies” business, and then they’d go too.)
If this is true of movie pornography, and it is, it’s also true of some knuckleheaded video about chickens having sex with each other. There is no basis in a society based on freedom of expression for the banning of such items, the prohibition of the making of such items, or the particular proscribing of certain classes of individuals within that society from the creating of such items.
So what do we actually learn from this experience?
Well, it may be argued that time has come due, and then some, to find other things to occupy full-time professional footballers who apparently have rather too much time on their hands when they’re not playing or training. Perhaps a chess tournament, or further study, or something of that nature.
However, there also comes a time, not to defend the indefensible, but to defend its right to exist, if not the absolute NECESSITY of that right, no matter how idiotic or downright horrible the particulars of the “indefensible” may seem. Even as puerile and marginal as the item in question may well be.
Regarding this issue, it may be that all of us, regardless of race, creed, colour, sex or gender, are the proverbial “bitches” who need to “move”, before yet another avenue of freedom is closed to general traffic, and we suddenly find we have nowhere left to move at all.
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* For the record, my own reaction was that you could call it inane or gross humour, but whatever this media bunfight has been, or was meant to be, the question was never an issue of aesthetic criticism. My feeling is that to call the video an attack on female dignity, or an excoriation of women, is drawing a very long bow indeed. It’s a stupid gross-out humour video featuring chickens. In the greater context of various codes footballers’ documented, err, “misadventures” with women, you can see how the over-reaction re the video was jumped to, but it was still a frenzy of over-reaction. They made a meal out of it, quite frankly. Given what happens to them in the video, it was never going to be a good idea to make a meal out of those chickens.
** (Just for the sake of absolute clarity and for the benefit of any readers not familiar with the particulars of this case, there has been no public suggestion whatsoever that Wayne Carey was involved in any way with the rubber/dead chicken simulated intercourse video project, and the reference above was not meant to imply this either. The reference is to the Wayner’s intermittent but highly polished run of previous contrite apologies in the media for various other, err, instances of ‘wayward behaviour’, none of which had anything to do with chickens or videos.)
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