I’ve been saying things all my life which are controversial and it’s one of those things that they occasionally cause more of a stir than I intended them to.
This is what happened today. I read an article by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Georgina Robinson about the Wallabies over in Europe. I’ve been reading her articles for a while and I have nothing against her, she’s doing her job.
But I felt that with the Wallabies struggling – Deans has not done the job for Australia – we needed someone like (former Fairfax rugby writer) Greg Growden to get stuck into the real issues.
So I tweeted about this.
My wording wasn’t the greatest and people take offence against these things. I do apologise.
But my point was that if we had someone over in Europe covering the Wallabies who’d been in the job for longer, like Growden, then we’d have had a tougher line in the article. We need this. As I’ve been saying on The Roar for a while, Deans isn’t doing the job. We need someone else to lead the Wallabies forward.
But using the term ‘girl’ in the tweet wasn’t the greatest, I accept that. I was getting at the need for someone with more experience. A journo who has been in the job longer would have gone a lot harder – that’s my point.
The thing about Twitter is that it’s so immediate. You can say something on it and people can respond straight away. And that’s great. But I made a mistake with the way I said it. But Gillard’s trying to use the sexist thing about everything right now in Australia – I’m not sexist but the way it came out wasn’t right.
This was one of those comments you make, it came out wrong, and things just went from there.
So I apologise for the offense it may have caused some people. My words weren’t the greatest. But I hope we can look at the real point I was trying to make: that Deans hasn’t done the job for Australia and we need the media to be pointing this out.