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This is going to turn out to be a very expensive leak for Greg Bird. My understanding is that he can expect to be fined somewhere from $10,000 to $50,000 by the Gold Coast club, depending on a couple of factors.
One is how angry the individual members of the club’s disciplinary committee are when they meet on Thursday to decide on penalty. The second is how good an argument Bird is able to put up on behalf of himself for a fine at the lower end of that scale.
Even a $10,000 fine would be a decent whack for a splash of the shoes. Bird’s co-captaincy of the team is also at risk after the weekend’s frivolities.
It is hard to decide exactly how to consider this incident, in which Bird was seen by witnesses to have urinated in the vicinity of a police car outside of a Byron Bay hotel on Sunday night.
It was the weekend of his wedding and the police car was parked next to a Bird-group vehicle.
We could laugh our heads off at it and say “oh, Birdy, you boofhead, you’ve done it again”. Particularly since, when he fronted the media to make a statement apologising for what he had done, he referred without thinking to it having put a “dampener” on the weekend.
I mean, it isn’t the crime of the century.
Or we could stick it to him for being stupidly irresponsible at a time when his club really doesn’t need it.
The Titans struggled to attract crowds to its home games last season.
It is easy for fans to drop off because they’ve got a legitimate excuse that is not even related to whether the team is playing well – getting to and from the club’s home ground can be a nightmare because of the lack of parking and public transport.
Gold Coast is also currently without a major sponsor. The club’s chief executive, Graham Annesley, travelled to China in August for negotiations with a potential sponsor, but the deal fell through.
The Christmas-New Year period, when business traditionally shuts down, is about to descend upon us, decreasing the odds of the club having a sponsor in place by the start of next season
The Bird incident just further weakens Gold Coast’s position.
It is embarrassing to even talk about it, but the debate over just how big a misdemeanour Bird is guilty of centres on whether he actually urinated on the police car or just beside it.
There were initial suggestions that the incident may have been captured on CCTV footage, but my understanding is that there is no such footage available.
Bird says he urinated next to the police car, not on it.
My question is this: When he realised he was about to urinate in the vicinity of a police car, why didn’t he think ‘maybe this isn’t a good idea’ and hold fire?
The look on Annesley’s face when he fronted the media along with Bird made it clear that the club’s level of anger over the incident is high.
I don’t know if Bird is genuinely remorseful or not. I hope he is.
As an isolated incident – and particularly if Bird didn’t actually urinate on the police car, as he says he didn’t – it’s obviously at the lower end of the scale when it comes to the register of off-field incidents.
Really, we shouldn’t have to be talking about this sort of rubbish and the sooner we’re no longer talking about it, the better.
The problem is stupid stuff like this keeps happening. Because it inevitably damages the game to some degree there has to be accountability.
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