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As the excitement builds to another big season of rugby league, it may well be time to calm down, take a deep breath and fall in love with Phil Rothfield.
It would be wrong to call the chief rugby league writer from the Daily Telegraph a polarising figure, for that would suggest that he is well liked by at least some people.
His is among the loudest and most opinionated voices in the game, with a constant presence through his tweeting, blogging and articles, especially his weekly What’s the Buzz Sunday column.
For many younger (and older!) fans he is a figure of derision, living in the past, using a sound meter to compare other codes, cheerleading for the Western Sydney Wanderers, obsessed with his man crush Paul Gallen and sulking ever since David Smith started screening his calls.
So as the season begins, there are many fans quietly dreading another year of his harebrained opinions and schemes being forefront in the league media yet again.
However, before you sigh and start your angry tweeting there is actually a lot to like about Phil Rothfield. It is worth considering these factors before commencing the gnashing of teeth.
For starters:
5. He is a staunch supporter of his team
No matter your opinion of a person or a club, the act of faithful support through years both thin and very thin is one to be admired.
Make no mistake, every figure in the league media has a favourite team, it is just that some of them hide it.
Phil has proudly supported the Cronulla Sharks for as long as I can remember.
Not just support mind you, he is your classic die-hard fan, buying a membership, attending home games in the pouring rain on bitter winter nights, cheering irrationally and being senselessly optimistic about the club’s future.
At the very least, he shows the sort of devotion to a tribe that demands respect. But what of his bitter whining about everything else wrong with the game.
4. The man loves rugby league
There are lot of writers in the media who complain long and hard about rugby league and criticise it. Be it Rebecca Wilson, Rothfield, or Peter FitzSimons, the Greatest Game has plenty of knockers.
However, where Phil differs from the others harbingers of doom is that he genuinely believes rugby league is awesome.
The way to tell this is to watch the reactions of the loudmouths next time that something goes right for rugby league, as opposed to something going very wrong.
When something goes wrong, there is little difference in the derision and sarcasm that comes from Wilson and FitzSimons to that coming from Rothfield.
But when something goes right, NSW finally wins Origin or the Bunnies break their drought, Rebecca Wilson will use the next three weeks to write about how well AFL is doing on the North Shore and Peter Fitzsimons will belittle any accomplishment by pretending to not understand what it was and point out rugby is more international.
It is only Buzz that goes head over the heels with giddy excitement.
If rugby league was to go down the gurgler and die as a sport in Australia, it would not affect Wilson or Fitzsimons in the slightest, indeed their lives may actually improve.
Phil Rothfield on the other hand would be alongside us all howling at the moon at the unfairness of it all.
He may be a grumpy old curmudgeon, but he genuinely believes league to be the greatest game of all and sometimes, it is only by listening to your harshest critic that you can improve.
Which is fine until he complains loud and hard about something and then turns out to have been completely wrong in the first place.
Well, unlike a lot of powerful figures…
3. He changes his mind when he is wrong
For years league fans complained bitterly about the scheduling of games being done little over a month in advance. It made it very difficult to plan your attendance and support throughout the season and seemed a complete capitulation to Channel Nine.
No one complained more about this than Phil Rothfield and when the NRL started scheduling the bulk of the season in advance it would be very stubborn to deny that he had not played a big part in bringing this change on.
Which made it galling when less the a season later he was criticising the decision since it lead to some very dud Friday night games while the big clashes were being hidden away on Saturday afternoons and Monday Nights.
When he was confronted with this contradiction he simply stated that he had been a fan in setting the schedule in advance but now realised that it wasn’t such a good decision since it gave us some unexciting TV clashes.
This attitude is remarkable. Many powerful figures consider it an act of strength to stick to their decisions no matter how foul they turn out to be.
But Phil is confident enough in himself to admit he was wrong and change his mind.
This also means that if you don’t like one of his opinions, you can change it.
It may be hard, and it may not work, but he has shown that if you present him with a clear and uncluttered reason why his opinions are wrong, he will change.
2. He is from the independent press
Pause now to spit your coffee across your screen. Independent press! He writes for News! He is Murdoch’s little puppy!
It may be 20 years since Super League but Rupert Murdoch and News Limited are still despised figures in the game.
I’ve heard all the arguments about how News has damaged the game and how Murdoch should get out of league. They don’t need to be rehashed since a lot of them are fair.
I will instead invite you to imagine the NRL without the independent press. An alternate reality where the only source of news about the NRL is the NRL itself.
A great quote about news is that “journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.”
In the last few years there have been stories broken by News and other press bodies which have brought shame to the NRL.
The handling of Ben Barba by Todd Greenberg, the assault charges and conviction of Kirisome Auva’a to name just two.
These were cases where the NRL official news channels would never have raised the scrutiny that the independent press did. Which makes sense since it is ludicrous to think any sporting code would.
Without an independent press reporting on the game, situations such as these would simply not be scrutinised and no progress would be made.
Having powerful figures with loud voices like Rothfield ensures that the code will always be publicly accountable for its actions, which is something we are entitled to as fans that love the sport and demand quality governance from the NRL.
But still after all that, you still hate him and are busting to get down to the comments and tear me a new earhole.
That is fair enough and chimes into the final reason why you should love Buzz because…
1. You control him and his destiny.
Phil Rothfield is the chief rugby league writer in the Telegraph for two reasons. Firstly, he has close contacts in the game who leak him exclusives, and secondly, he is incredibly popular.
While you wipe the coffee off the screen for the second time, it is worth reflecting on the panic Phil must have felt when David Smith stopped answering his texts and calls.
For years, Phil had contacts high up in the NRL right up to former CEO David Gallop. He would be able to call them and text them, get little leaks and half answers which he could then write about as big exclusives.
It may not sound like much, but if the news is set to break on Sunday afternoon and Phil has the story on Sunday morning, people are going to buy his newspaper.
It has been clear for some time that David Smith and John Grant have not been as accommodating and this threatens the first pillar of Phil’s control, the exclusives.
Hence his desperately angry and incredibly bitter campaign against the pair of them which has been going on for nearly two years.
As a side note, this week an experienced league hand Shane Richardson rolled into a new job at headquarters and a few days later, ‘What’s the Buzz’ features an exclusive about the future of expansion.
What odds on less NRL criticism coming from Phil this season!
But popular? No! You only go onto his blogs to tell him how stupid he is. You only tweet about him to make jokes about him. And you only read ‘What’s the Buzz’ so you can make fun about him with your father in law.
Well done, you have made him the most popular writer in rugby league. All of these interactions you have are only scored in one way. Hits.
His articles and blogs are among the most read on the Telegraph website. This means that his employer can charge a much higher premium to advertise next to his stories.
Rupert Murdoch may or may not be a supervillan, but he is undoubtedly the most successful newspaperman in the world. He wants people to read his papers and watch his shows.
He doesn’t care if you agree with them or not, if you are reading and watching them that is good enough for him.
So let us recall the words of wisdom from the advertising guru in The Simpsons, if you want the giant advertising monsters terrorising Springfield to stop, just ignore them, and they will eventually go away.
You really don’t like Phil Rothfield, stop reading about him. Stop tweeting about him. Stop paying attention to him and suddenly, there will be a new chief league writer to complain about. But after researching and writing this article, I give you warning, this may not be a good thing, because the grumpy Sharks fan with the bright red face is not too bad.
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