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I am particularly partial to a response by way of an article.
If someone has written something that I am not only opposed to, but passionately opposed to, I never feel that merely commenting on that article is enough.
No, no. I like to have my say.
So when Mary Konstantopoulos decided to let it be known that it is never OK to boo your team, not only did I want to say that position is wrong, but I wanted an exceptionally lengthy amount of writing to do so.
On Sunday, it was not only OK, but entirely appropriate and utterly necessary to boo at the 40 minutes of complete and utter anguish and disappointment that I had just sat through.
To say performance by the Knights’ players was awful sullies the good name of ‘awful’.
To be down 20-nil, at home, bearing in mind that it was actually only through the Tigers’ own incompetence that the score line was not even worse, was the most distraught I had been at halftime of a Knights game in Newcastle. Ever.
It was beyond disastrous.
Now, I won’t waste your own reading time with a list of words that might describe how bad it was. I’m actually not convinced that such a word to adequately describe the badness exists.
But I can tell you one thing, it was the first time I felt like giving up on Newcastle.
That’s how truly and utterly bad it was.
(AAP Image/Dean Lewins)
Three seems to be the magic number for the knights of late. The number of spoons we are about to win in a row. The number of wins in the last two seasons.
It’s entirely possible that three was the number of sets we had completed on Sunday.
But when you have sat through that for years, only to have your gut ripped out over and over, without any rhyme or reason, well, it finally wore thin. For a lot of us.
Now, I have been a paying member of the Knights for only four years, so I’ll admit, I’m perhaps not as passionate as some. But for those four years, I’ve seen some truly abominable performances, and I’ve always worn them with a grin, and managed to have a laugh.
I even managed to laugh off the 60-odd points to nil that I witnessed us suffer at the hands of Cronulla last year. Hey, at least they ended up winning the premiership.
Not Sunday.
Sunday truly broke me. In fact, the only thing that was missing on Sunday was the Benny Hill music, so utterly farcical was the play to watch.
So, fairly or not, after years of underperformance, myself and other patrons in Bay 53 in the Western Grandstand let fly with a torrent of abuse at the players that I honestly did not think we were capable of.
Why? I can’t speak for everyone else, but let me tell you why I did it.
I did it because I am tired that the people of Newcastle have to accept mediocrity.
I did it because I am tired of having to only accept, or be happy with, ‘effort’, as the performance isn’t there.
I did it because I am tired of our club paying for a halfback who doesn’t cut it anymore, because of young boys having to perform where men should be, because we are simply turning into a feeder club for other clubs in the NRL to poach our players.
I booed, and rightly or wrongly, at the players, because we, the people of Newcastle, deserve better than what we are being given at the moment.
And that anguish is not only directed at the players, but the entire Newcastle Knights club.
A couple sitting in front of me took exception with our antics, such that they decided to pass judgment, with lines of: “Gee, good fans you guys are.”
And that really got to me.
It got to me, as I let them know, because who else in sport in Australia can perform like buffoons, and still expect crowds of 20,000 to attend their game?
The people of Newcastle had not only been OK to boo, having attended performance after performance of such heartbreaking indifference and amateurishness. In fact, in a clear contradiction to the opinion of Ms Konstantopoulos, we had finally, very much, earned the right to boo, after a performance where we made the bottom of the ladder team look like premiership contenders.
This story may well have ended with the final whistle that brought an end to the torture on Sunday, but the next day, something quite curious occurred.
In the town of Newcastle, late Monday night, the local newspaper ran an online article, in print on Tuesday, where a high-profile Knights board member had the temerity to put the coach on notice that if performances did not improve, Nathan Brown was out.
Well, as a paying member of the Newcastle Knights, such board member antics have gone finally a step too far.
To even imply that the current state of this once great club lies at the feet of Brown is ignorant at absolute best, and deceptively manipulative at worst.
The current state of the club is more a testament to the absolutely atrocious state we were in when Brown got here.
Left with an ageing squad, a harsh reminder of a Nathan Tinkler reign that was more glitter than gold, and Wayne Bennett, a super-coach that was more ethanol fuel than premium, Brown was tasked with not only picking up the pieces, no, he was tasked with creating pieces to make a puzzle again.
(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)
But a particular board member has come out to publicly decry our coach?
It’s an extremely curious turn of events.
Some have said it was a call to arms by a board member who is one of the people, a show of support for a long-suffering fan-base. That’s a very positive spin.
There are those of us, however, who have taken a much more cynical view, in that a board member coming out, talking as if for the fans, and blaming the coach, is in fact deflecting attention away from the very clear failings of a board that, to date, has actually done very little by way of evidence to show an iota of care for its supporters.
Knights supporters are a lot of things, but we are not fools.
Yes, we are lauded for standing by the team through thick and thin, and recently I wrote about why the Knights are in fact the best club in Australia.
But we are only human. We have very real limits, and we will not be taken advantage of.
And board members in a club that is under the most intense of pressure would be mindful to stay out of the public eye, because if the rumours and murmurings are true, and the Knights are to be sold shortly, forget the coach, it will be the upper management the first in the firing line.
And that, for all those reasons, was why it was ok to boo. Such things do not occur in isolation. Not in Newcastle anyway.
It was more than simply 40 minutes of so much displeasure that I wanted that memory erasing thingy from Men in Black. It finally said to the club that we, the fans, wanted and deserved more than what we are being given.
It’s possible that I’ve never been prouder to be a Knights supporter than at that very moment.
It’s possible that it showed we still cared.
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