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I reckon it would be a decade since I attended fewer than 100 rugby league games in a calendar year. This year, I might scrape past the 50 mark.
“Might”.
I can vaguely remember a time, in the early 1990s, when I had Saturdays off and watched games on TV or attended with a beer in hand.
But from pretty much the turn of the century, I was a three-a-week man. When Monday Night Football came in, it was four-a-week, for 26 rounds more or less.
The century would come up before the semis, before Vanuatu took on Niue in Port Vila on the way to Malta versus British Armed Forces.
What caused the change this year is only of passing importance. What I want to write about is what I’ve noticed.
But I’ll explain the cause for the sake of thoroughness. This weekend’s grand finalists, Brisbane and North Queensland, I have seen the majority of the home games in each club’s history.
And I’ve never lived in Queensland.
When the papers stopped sending reporters interstate for matches – and that was at least a decade ago now – I kept going by paying for it myself. One financial year I spent $64,000 on work-related travel, leaving precious little to spend on luxuries like food and water.
So that’s why it changed – as well as me generally letting go of obsessive behaviour for reasons I will not bore you with taking a stab at.
These days I go to games in Sydney, I live blog three matches of a Saturday for Fairfax and I go to a game on Sunday if it’s in driving distance so I can perhaps pick up some radio work and do my column more thoroughly.
Whereas I was always Triple M’s sideline eye on a Monday, no matter where the game was, I only perform those duties now if the match is in Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra or Wollongong.
And how about this. I was overseas for 9 weekends out of 26 this year and the only impact it had on my income was I could not do radio.
In fact, coming back to Australia after Challenge Cup Final has been a massive loss-maker for me. I should have stayed there – I’m at Old Trafford next Saturday anyway.
What I have learned is that there is almost no advantage for a reporter being at the ground anymore. In fact, it’s a disadvantage.
Do I like going to games? Yes, love it. I love going to the pub too, and if I run into someone I know down there, I might get a story. The odds are actually about even – which makes both destinations tremendously enjoyable wastes of time, 98 per cent of the time.
Bear in mind I’ve been around for eons. I know touch judges and doormen and ground managers and club doctors and they will occasionally tell me something newsworthy.
If I was a kid who was not just trying to get feature stories for the following week, I can’t imagine why I’d go to a match today, the way the media access is.
At the game, the wifi doesn’t always work. Sports Ears, those little contraptions that let you hear what’s happening on the field, used to give you a few stories but now the TV and radio commentators know to be quiet when something juicy is being said.
Last Saturday night I was able to write a story about Johnathan Thurston discussing his injury while the game was still in play, leading with quotes on the siren.
If I had been at AAMI Park, I would ha been too busy topping my running copy to listen to the interview, then I would have gone through the old school routine of asking about it at the media conference and missed hundreds of thousands of readers during the intervening 45 minutes.
Everyone sees the media conference live on the NRL app if they want to. If you ask a question at the presser, I’ll report the answer before you do from the luxury of an air conditioned office, taking a break from my pad thai.
The players are made available, after a night game, around 10.45pm which is too late to get any quotes in the paper unless you don’t bother writing your match report with press conference quotes, which will probably get you sacked.
And even if you do get a player, it may not be on your own. If you don’t get anything different, why are you there?
From the office, I can monitor three radio stations, the TV coverage, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and write story after story, tweeting as I go. The man at the ground is cracking jokes waiting for the media conference to start, looking at his watch waiting for players to emerge from the sheds, rushing back to the press box too late to do a good job on his ‘replace’ (match report with quotes) and spelling the star player’s name wrongly as a result.
The only part of covering a game now that reminds me of the old days is when you’re sideline eye for the radio and you run on at fulltime. You can ask “did he stick his finger in your eye, Gal?” or “Did Shillo get you with the headbutt, Woodsy?” before the media manager gets to them and before they cool down.
That amounts to around one hour and 15 minutes before the print guys get to them.
Sideline eye is still my favourite gig in rugby league media. Cutting video, copying embed codes and writing wry asides from 1457km away is now a clear second.
Is this good or bad? Actually, I don’t care. It’s just the way it is now.
I don’t think I’ve missed a grand final live since 1985. This Sunday, I’ll be in an office in front of the box, embedding tweets and uploading screen captures.
And my competitive juices are flowing once again, in a way they haven’t from going to a media-managed, keep-em-waiting live NRL game in a long, long time.