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Opinion
While it’s possible for a commentator to call their own team, should they?
It’s a precarious tightrope which is always awkward for the commentator and the listener.
Special comments by Garry Lyon for a Melbourne game, Eddie McGuire for Collingwood, Mark Ricciuto for the Crows games and James Brayshaw for the Kangaroos. It’s commonplace these days to hear a legend or president of a football team commentating. Until recent years, there was a separation of functions.
30 or so years ago, if you had a formal role in a club, it was very unlikely you would commentate at all, let alone your own team. Then ten or so years ago, more big club power brokers started getting commentating gigs, and the uneasy relationship grew. Now the slippery slope has got to the point where it seems deliberate for the broadcaster to pick a club legend to do commentating for their own team.
They try their best to stay neutral, wrestling with the right words to use to conceal their loyalties, making respectful comments about the positive elements of the opponent’s performance and seemingly applying their strong knowledge of the game to give valuable insights in a neutral manner.
So, the obvious question is – does it really matter? Perhaps this a great way to hear from the best minds in the game as the theatre of the game plays out.
The answer to this on the surface would be that it doesn’t matter.
However, another perspective on this question might be quite illustrative of a much bigger problem permeating the AFL institution.
The first part of the concern is that during games, there are moments where the commentator’s loyalties spill over, perhaps subconsciously. Lyon’s call of the Crows handball toward the boundary line in the dying moments of the Melbourne versus Adelaide game might be a case in point. Ricciuto’s comment from the sideline of that game that Taylor Walker and Darcy Fogarty didn’t have much to worry about after being reported might be another.
There is an issue when club power brokers are having such a direct influence on the way that key incidents are communicated to the live audience. Sure, they are entitled to their opinions on these incidents, but not in the moment that it occurs, where the commentator’s response is so pivotal to how the media later reports on it. These commentators are conflicted in their roles, and that matters.
Secondly, and probably more importantly, this relationship further concentrates the power held by a small few in the game. There is an inherent arrogance to think you can commentate for a game that you might be the president or large power broker for. This arrangement sends the message that these figures are bigger than the game. So big that they don’t need to worry about their obvious conflict of interest.
We all just seem to tolerate it. It flies in the face of the concept that Australian football is the people’s game and it negates the ability for a variety of voices to feed into how our game runs. This pluralism is what makes institutions strong. Without many voices, you get decisions made for the benefit of the few, rather than the majority.
As an example, how is it possible that a grand finalist might have only played at the MCG once in the minor rounds, whereas Collingwood, Melbourne, Hawthorn and Richmond play there between ten and 14 times a year? Why is this huge inequality at least partially addressed? Additionally, how is Eddie McGuire able to play puppeteer to Gillon McLachlan on the Port prison bar guernsey issue, even though he’s not formally connected to Collingwood any longer?
There is a reason why Aristotle, the Romans and the forefathers of modern democracies embedded the concept of separation of powers as a key component of a democracy.
As US political philosopher James Madison wrote in 1788, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
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