Last Saturday Jon Ralph wrote a story for the Herald Sun that opened with the line “For every coke-snorting, nightclub-hopping AFL player, there are dozens that quietly start charities and visit sick kids in hospitals,” then two days later took to the airwaves to apologise for what he said.
He shouldn’t have.
As soon as the article hit the cyber-newsstands it got a predictable knee-jerk response from footballers and their protective body the AFL Players’ Association.
Seriously, these guys have to pull their heads in and realise that maybe the image problem players have is created by their behaviour and not the way it's reported..
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Let’s look at Ralph’s words without immediately throwing our hands over our ears and shouting “lalalalalala”.
‘For every player that brings a negative story there are dozens doing positive actions purely for the sake of being good’ is what he’s saying, actually playing down the number of dickheads and assuring us the good guys are well in the majority.
Just because Ralph used the term “coke-snorting” AFLPA CEO Paul Marsh and the like have gone into protective mother mode; ‘Don’t dare speak about my child that way! He’d never do anything wrong.’
The amount of times I’ve heard that said while I know the kid’s out back setting fire to the cat.
This is what’s wrong with the western world these days, and this is what’s produced the relatively small percentage of AFL footballers who do spent their off-hours surrounded by drugs, criminals and as many women as they can find, forgetting about the one at home looking after their kids.
“We’ve got to a point now where we have to hold the media more accountable,” Marsh said.
“Criticism of what the players are doing on the field does come with the role of being an AFL player, but personal attacks and these sorts of clickbait headlines and factually incorrect stuff, that is the stuff that we are going to try and hold the media to account for.”
Firstly, to suggest a small number of AFL players have healthy cocaine snorting habits is not “factually incorrect”.
Secondly, to suggest the media should keep its criticism to what the players get up to on-field is ridiculous. The whole point of Ralph’s article was to praise what they, or Josh Kelly in this particular case, do behind the scenes, away from the crowds.
The media is always covering hospital visits, school programs, launches of players’ own businesses, pubs, restaurants and fashion labels. When a footballer that doesn’t know the difference between a crew neck and a polo wants to get publicity for his new t-shirt label they don’t go and pay a PR company tens of thousands of dollars to devise a campaign, logo, billboards and TV commercials – they ring up Ralphy and say ‘can you get us in the paper?’
Paul Marsh knows only too well the hundreds, if not thousands, of stories journos choose not to write despite knowing they’d sell papers by the truckload based on the sordid lifestyles of AFL stars.
Journalists know they need to protect the product that pays their bills, but they also know their job, and that’s to cover the sport on both sides of the fence.
The young Rover used to do a bit of writing in the world of cricket, but the Australian national team is such a small, closed group that they demand what is and isn’t written about them and flatly refuse to talk to anyone who writes anything less than glowing praise.
Don’t let football go the same way or we’ll have a few hundred David Warner’s walking our streets, when one is more than enough.
@RalphyHeraldSun at a time when the @AFL @7AFL @FOXFOOTY @theheraldsun and all other football media are crying out better access to @AFLPlayers, you roll out that tripe...? No wonder players don’t want to talk and the fans ultimately miss out! #brokentrust
— JR8 (@JackRiewoldt08) March 18, 2018
