From 1986 to 1994, Tim Bowden hosted Backchat on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
For those unfamiliar with the program and unwilling to google it, Backchat was the ABC’s main televised forum for viewer feedback. Clips can still be found on YouTube and, judging from the second half of the match between the Cronulla Sharks and the Melbourne Storm, National rugby league players are as fond of those videos as I am.
Unfortunately for the NRL players, NRL referees have considerably more power to penalise them for their opinions than Bowden.
Almost as soon as I started watching, Cameron Smith was sent to the sin bin for ten minutes.
According to Fox Sports, it was the first time in his career that he had been sent to that location in his career. As he walked past the crowd, there was at least one Mohawk that deserved to be permanently left lying in a barber’s bin.
Furthermore, as the photo accompanying that Fox Sports article makes clear, he was pointing at the security guard’s bald head, presumably to indicate to any would-be barber exactly what he needed in the way of a new haircut. Meanwhile, the game resumed.
Well, some of the time. The rest of the time, it was called to a halt by the referee’s whistle. This provided an unexpected source of increasing merriment, as listening to former greats of any game whine about whatever unspeakable evil has befallen it in recent times is something of a guilty pleasure of mine.
Apparently it is unusual for an NRL game to have so many penalties as to equal the number that Darryl White used to wear on his back for the Brisbane Lions in the Australian Football League. To quote Donald Trump, who knew?
It turned out that a bloke named Todd, not Trump, was responsible for this whole mess. Not the referees, not the players, but a single bloke named Todd. George Carlin once told his audience that he was “getting really sick of guys named Todd.”
While the animus of Channel Nine’s commentators is not aimed at all guys named Todd, NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg is the highest of the “higher ups” that are instructing the referees to treat their whistles more flippantly than their wallets.
At no point was it considered necessary to solicit his opinion or, in its understandable absence, refer to what it actually is, let alone test it against whether the referees have correctly tested it against the rules of the game in previous seasons.
Viewers were instead treated to the opinion that the game was better when less penalties were called, without once asking the question of whether it was deserved.
Say what you will about Backchat, but at least the premise of that show was based on listening to different opinions.
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