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First, a couple of obvious but probably necessary caveats. I have never been an AFL coach. I do not know the pressure of coaching finals footy and I can only guess at what the head-man goes through.
More to the point, when Mark Thompson fronted the media after Geelong nearly stole Friday night’s qualifying final, there is at least some chance that what he said was for the benefit of his players.
Perhaps he refused to accept the obvious, that the last minute in-the-back call was correct, because he was more concerned with the psychology of his players, particularly Cameron Mooney whose mistake sealed the Cats’ fate.
But the job of those who watch the game, rather than decide the outcome, is to say what players and coaches are too reluctant or self-interested to say.
So who, exactly, does Mark Thompson think he is?
I nearly choked on my after dinner mints when I heard him tell journalists to “Write the truth about that last incident, that’s all I’ll say.”
Does he think journalists need his permission to give their honest opinion? As usual, his comments sounded half-way between stern advice and straight out threat.
Actually, I think the situation is much worse. The smugness and haughty superiority with which Thompson conducts himself these days suggest that he really does think he owns football.
Is it pedantry to remind him that neither the result of games nor the heat-of-the-moment decisions of umpires have anything to do with “truth”? These are not matters of truth. They are matters of subjective human judgment and luck. Which is how it should be.
And before you say they all do it, I humbly submit that no, Paul Roos doesn’t, Ross Lyon doesn’t and plenty of others certainly do not. Some of them even manage to speak with humility and good humour, even when they lose.
In some ways, none of this is all that surprising.
The assumption that sports journalists are simply the brain-dead lap dogs of the sports industry is wide spread amongst players and coaches. Recall Harry Kewell’s rant in South Africa where he informed the gathered media scrum that their job was to “get behind the team”.
Did I miss something? If I told you that the job of political journalists was to openly cheer for a political party you’d assume we were living in North Korea, wouldn’t you?
And if I said business journalists should try to talk up the share price of their favourite companies… well, isn’t there a law against that or something?
It is the disease of sports people to misunderstand why journalists listen to what they have to say. It will perhaps be news to Thompson and that other drama-queen, Mick Malthouse, that the press are there because they have column inches to fill.
I could be way off the mark here, but I reckon Thompson and Malthouse actually think that, because they have the best two teams currently running around at the moment, the world is hanging on their every word.
And it is surely because most sports journalism really is essentially free PR for the sports industry that people like Thompson feel it is their job to tell journalists what to write.
The pomposity of this moment and many others like it in recent years is galling for many reasons but here’s one worth thinking about.
We have become so used to coaches haranguing sports officials for unfavourable calls – and claiming to have ‘not seen the incident’ when dubious decisions go their way – that we overlook unlikely but important acts of great bravery and skill.
As a neutral, the hero for me from last Friday night’s game was the umpire who made that crucial, game deciding call.
As the dust settled there was much to celebrate. The courage and cool-head of umpire Matt Stevic was breath taking. It was also a moment to praise a system that can produce umpires of this standard and the people who run this system.
This will sound crazy to some people but only because most of us only know how to complain about umpires and have forgotten – or never knew in the first place – what skilled professionals doing a difficult job they are.
There is an old truism that good referees and umpires should essentially be invisible. In other words, if we notice them it must be because they have done something wrong.
In the final minute of Friday night’s game, Stevic showed exactly why this is rubbish. In that super-charged moment he did what needed to be done; he stepped forward, put himself centre stage and took control.
Still, it doesn’t matter if Stevic’s decision was right or – as Commandant Thompson would have it – “true”. What matters is that we have brave umpires who won’t be bullied by embarrassed full-forwards or melodramatic coaches.
If only we could find a few more sports journalists prepared to follow Stevic’s example.
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