If we were to turn back time and return to the beginnings of the AFL media and ask the people in it how they would think the future would pan out, I doubt they would have predicted something as big as it is now.
From the days of Peter Landy, Lou Richards and Bob Skilton on one network covering the game, the media surrounding the AFL has grown dramatically since the early 1990s.
Innovations like the Footy Show, Fox Footy Channel, AFL Media and the Internet have created avenues for more and more experts to make a living.
In this time, the rise of ex-players as pundits has dramatically grown as the demand for opinion and expertise for the hungry beast rises. This has been on show in the last week with Matthew Lloyd and David King both coming out swinging about certain football people.
Lloyd was the first to tee off, singling out Cats defender Josh Hunt for not being “hard enough” at the ball after Hunt seemed to shirk a contest against Collingwood last Friday night.
Lloyd, along with Wayne Carey and Shane Crawford also dug up evidence from an incident in 2006 to conclude Hunt had on him a ‘stigma’ which he would struggle to rid himself of.
We even got a self-indulgent story from Lloyd about how he broke ribs to prove to Sheedy that he was tough. I’ve seen the incident involving Hunt and I am not going to say whether he was soft as I would a hypocrite.
But what haven’t been talked about are the many times Josh Hunt runs back with the flight of the ball in a courageous manner, disregarding his own safety.
If pundits wish to have a go at Hunt that’s fine, but Crawford, Carey and Lloyd are wasting their oxygen trying a player for an isolated incident.
Fans aren’t stupid and will remember more of the pundit’s comments than Josh Hunt’s indiscretions on the field.
Yesterday, David King teed off on Mark Neeld saying Melbourne made a “massive error” in appointing the former Ocean Grove coach.
King had the audacity to lord over Melbourne saying if they were “accurate” they would have told Neeld to go somewhere else questioning his “man management”.
Again fair call for King to make these comments but the bravado from behind desk masks a dirty little secret. David King was once an assistant at Richmond during a period where the coaching structure was unequivocally questionable.
If Neeld has man management issues, King surely must question the abilities of the coaches he worked under at Richmond and his own abilities as the club resembled a mediocre mob destined to never grow.
King should know what it is like to suffer with a club without identity and should maybe temper what he says instead of making snide remarks from an ivory tower.
If Pundits wish to make big calls that is fine by me; the media needs these people.
But save the bravado and hot air aloofness for practice in the shower boys, all you do is make yourselves look like a pack of vultures feeding on the easy targets.
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