Jokey tweets or strategic direction: What do you want from your ARLC chair?

Australia has a long and comically bad list of political figures mixing with sport.

When the Melbourne Storm joined the NRL in 1998, then Victorian premier Jeff Kennett famously demanded the state be allowed to participate in the State of Origin series.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he “voted for the Roosters” when asked which AFL team he supported.

Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr’s disdain for sport was no secret – and shown by more than his “this traditional bet between NSW and Victoria is now on” announcement at a State of Origin launch. Legend has it Carr would invite academics and high-ranking bureaucrats as his plus one to sporting events because he wanted stimulating conversation.

And how we can forget the legendary send off former Prime Minister Paul Keating gave Steve Roach upon Blocker’s retirement, celebrating how he “kicked a lot of tries” for Balmain.

Is it really that surprising, then, that a career politician like Peter Beattie – the former Labor Party machine man turned Premier of Queensland turned failed Federal Labor candidate turned chair of the Australian Rugby League Commission – may not be 100 per cent across his brief?

The self-described “rugby league tragic” made a most unexpected move this week, deleting his Twitter account after copping it from all corners for responding to an account named for the late and legendary Balmain/Wests Tigers fan Laurie Nichols.

Personally, I thought Beattie’s “good to see you are well” reply was a joke. A lame joke, but a joke. Beattie did say he’d been joking during the predictable faux-outrage that followed but after the Daily Telegraph thought it was worthy of a smart-arsed story, Beattie pulled the pin.

Queensland readers don’t need reminding of Beattie’s modus operandi in a crisis. It’s simple: apologise profusely, laugh about how stupid he feels, promise to be better, then never speak of it again because he apologised and we should all move on. Nine times out of ten, it worked.

Beattie didn’t have the best start as chair, we all know that. Lobbed a jokey, softball question by Channel Nine’s Phil Gould about the name of Cronulla’s NRL team, Beattie had no idea. I had to rewind the footage five times just to get it straight in my head that he wasn’t joking.

Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

Within hours of this stuff up, he’d tweeted a trademark grovelling apology, muddying the waters enough for people to give him a ‘good bloke, honest mistake’ pass. Say what you will about his political career, the man sure can extricate himself from a sticky scenario. He’s a great salesman.

On Twitter, Beattie spent his days lolling with jokers, politely replying to obvious trolls or randomly posting rugby league facts. It was all pretty harmless stuff. Sure, it made people feel closer to head office but did it really serve a purpose? Think about this:

Chris Nikou, chair of the FFA board, isn’t on Twitter.

Paolina Hunt, chair of the Netball Australia board, isn’t on Twitter.

Richard Goyder, chair of the AFL board, is on twitter. He’s got 95 followers and has tweeted 27 incredibly banal times since the start of 2017.

These sports seem to be going along just fine without the boss ‘getting the fans’ temperature’ via social media. They’re paying whole communications divisions to do that.

Twitter itself is used by about 4 million people in Australia, a number that’s dropping fast. Its usage numbers are dwarfed by Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. As a way to accurately gauge public opinion, Twitter’s almost as useful as writing a question on a napkin, flushing that napkin down the toilet, then pulling up a chair and waiting for a useful response to float back up.

Rugby league Twitter is all at once a place full of hilarious content, incredibly knowledgable fans and mind-numbing idiocy that’ll reduce your IQ the instant you look at it. It’s the first place to go to have some fun and the last place to go for strategic direction.

Peter Beattie. (AAP Image/Jane Dempster)

Beattie’s bailing does raise an interesting question for rugby league fans. During all these ‘gaffes’, you sledged him, worked yourself into a huff online, and bemoaned all the ‘free kicks’ the other codes supposedly got, but – think hard before you respond here…

Does it really matter that he couldn’t name the Cronulla team, (maybe) mistook a Barcelona jersey for a Newcastle Knights jersey, or (maybe) didn’t know who Laurie Nichols was?

Does not knowing league trivia to the same level of the rusted-on fan affect his day-to-day role? Of course it doesn’t.

Beattie and the ARL Commission are there to guide the sport (through the CEO and his team). In their own words, the Commission “sets the overall strategic direction for the game and works to ensure that the administration across all levels of Rugby League can meet the demands of being a modern, professional and well governed sport”.

As much as he might give the impression, Beattie has got nothing to do with what happens if Grant Atkins doesn’t call a forward pass or whether a pie costs $3 or $8 at Panthers Stadium.

The Nichols-Twitter deletion ‘drama’ is tiny in the context of his role (he’s not the first chair to get basic info wrong and likely won’t be the last), but it does chip away at the respect for the position he holds.

The ARLC chair has a responsibility to advance the image of the game. It’s incredibly difficult in rugby league to get support for anything in the first place – it’s even harder with everyone thinking you’re a clown.

On that measure, maybe Beattie’s better off having a bit more separation from the punters.

So farewell (from Twitter), ‘man of the people’. Who knows where you’ll pop up next.