“The refs hate us”, “The Origin selectors hate us” but most of all, “The commentators hate us”. When you’re in front of the television watching your boys, one thing is clear – it’s not just the other team that is against you.
Rugby league exists as entertainment, but also as confirmation of your already rife suspicions that, of the 16 teams in the competition, yours is the one that everybody hates.
It’s as if you’re sitting in the stands as your team stands trial. The jury? Ray Warren, Peter Sterling, Phil Gould, Andrew Johns and Brett Finch. The commentators.
From what you can see, the boys have been a bit unlucky today, but they’re nowhere near as bad as what Sterlo is letting on, are they? What gives?
To answer the age-old question of why commentators are definitely biased against your team (and the 15 others, from the perspective of their fans), we need to unpick a few things.
The first is the undeniable victim complex which teams, fans and players construct for themselves in the modern sporting landscape. How often have we seen post-match press conferences steered in the direction of “I was surprised by some of those refereeing decisions” or “A few calls didn’t go our way” or Geoff Toovey’s infamous “There’s got to be an investigation”?
2016’s NRL season has seen a spike in head-scratchers, with the introduction of the controversial refereeing Bunker causing frustration for coaches, players and fans alike.
The convenience of blaming a third party for your team’s losses is often, and perhaps unsurprisingly, met with scepticism. That this scepticism should manifest itself in commentator and journalistic tut-tuting in the following week should really not come as a surprise.
But is it really fair to say that commentators criticise teams in order to take the moral high-ground over whinging coaches? Probably not entirely.
The fact is that the commentators’ unjust treatment of your team is a spin-off of what commentary is all about; storytelling. Commentators tell stories. I don’t mean that they literally tell stories about what’s going to happen on Channel Nine’s programming later that evening (although they’re often in form for doing that), but that commentators weave narrative into their analysis of the game.
What game would be complete without “he’s a simple country kid, Gus”, “he’s in career-best form”, “Greg Inglis, GI! The Goanna!” or another farfetched metaphor?
There is nothing that rugby league commentators love more than being able to nurture the favourite son by way of excited rants, or to overplay the significance of a single match in relation to a team’s finals hopes.
Their passion for storytelling shouldn’t come as a surprise; in a world where the average fan has all the statistics they could ever need, not to mention player bios and ladder information, at their fingertips thanks to smartphones and social media, commentators have to find a way to remain not just relevant, but exciting.
More than ever before, commentators are coming up with implicit narratives about teams, their strengths, their weaknesses, their fans and their prospects, in order to captivate the viewer.
The Cowboys are the team that defied the adversity of North Queensland’s geographics to win the premiership. The Broncos are the product of the coaching magician that is Wayne Bennet.
As with all narratives however, for every goody, there must be a baddy. There must be a team who “really only have themselves to blame” or “will struggle to make the finals if they continue this form”, if only to help validate the commentators’ positive appraisals of the winning team.
That, my friend, is your team. And everyone’s team at different times of the season.
Maybe it isn’t worth throwing that empty tinny at Joey Johns in the halftime break after all.
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