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Opinion

For the Bulldogs' sake - and his own - Luke Beveridge needs to pull his head in

16th March, 2022
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16th March, 2022
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Let me preface this by saying, as a diehard Western Bulldogs supporter, there will always be a whole lot of love in my heart for Luke Beveridge.

The 2016 finals series was the happiest month of my life, and the grand final win a day I’ll still be looking back on and smiling about if I live a hundred more years. Neither of those things happen without Beveridge at the helm.

I say this partly to make it clear that despite last night’s extraordinary press conference exchange between himself and Fox Footy journalist Tom Morris, there is still so much I love and admire about Bevo; his willingness to do anything in his power for his players, his passion for his football club, and his coaching style that never fails to exasperate me but gets the job done far, far more often than not.

It’s also partly because Beveridge seems to think that Morris’ reporting on Lachie Hunter’s original omission from the starting 22 to take on Melbourne was due to his support of the Demons, so maybe he’ll take more notice of this piece from someone who bleeds red, white and blue.

Just to clarify before we begin: yes, Lachie Hunter did play in the end on Wednesday night, after being a last-minute inclusion in the 22 for the injured Jason Johannisen. But I’m going to stick with the assertion that Morris was right and that he was at first dropped, given Hunter was named as medical sub when the final team sheets came in an hour before the game – and I don’t think you could seriously argue otherwise.

It’s not the first time Beveridge has gone after the media – he confronted Damian Barrett at the 2015 Brownlow Medal over his reporting on the Michael Talia game-plan leak, then made a not-so-subtle reference to his ‘black soul’ after Tom Boyd’s retirement; then clipped critics of Adam Treloar after the Dogs’ preliminary final last year, saying: “I don’t know how people around you can live with you, how they can lie in bed with you, how they can look at themselves in the mirror.”

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But there’s a difference between being a protective mother bear coming out snarling against critics of your team – and I’ll maintain forever and a day that some of the coverage around Treloar was worthy of a response – and the vitriol which spilled from Beveridge’s mouth on Wednesday night towards perfectly reasonable, decent journalism from Morris.

For starters, it’s such a tiny, petty thing to be so worked up about. Players get dropped all the time; it’s a part of footy, especially for a team as strong and deep as the Bulldogs’. Equally, Beveridge has done this sort of thing before, and players have regularly come back stronger and harder from it – he dropped Jack Macrae during 2015, Jason Johannisen missed the start of last season, and Caleb Daniel had stints in the reserves in 2017.

To suggest Morris’ reporting on Hunter’s omission before the teams were officially named somehow impinges upon Hunter’s mental health is just bizarre to me. I would argue that the process Beveridge undertook in response to the story breaking – to name Hunter in the 22, then drop him anyway an hour before the first bounce, then name him again after a Johannisen injury in the warm-up – is more likely to have frazzled the Dogs’ number seven.

At the very least, it’s made it a far, far bigger story than it would have been had Beveridge and the Bulldogs simply done as intended and left Hunter out.

That’s not even taking into account Morris’ mental health. Yes, I know, the media don’t care about the mental health of players or coaches, they’re just leeches who feed on misery, they can dish it out but can’t take it; the responses are obvious.

Luke Beveridge

(Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

But there’s a difference between saying players performing poorly need to improve, or suggesting someone needs to work on their kicking, or decision-making, or fitness to make it as an AFL player, and the targeted attack on Morris that the Bulldogs coach unleashed on Wednesday night. In my opinion, at least, Beveridge’s actions in that press conference were nothing short of bullying.

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Part of Beveridge’s fury with Morris seemed to be that he wrote the story without giving an apparently customary heads-up to the Bulldogs that it was happening. Maybe if he’d kept it to just that, it would have been understandable. But Bevo’s axe to grind with Morris, and the media as a whole, went substantially beyond that.

It’s easy to criticise and ridicule journalists – and, to quote Homer Simpson, “fun, too!” And many times, some do deserve to be called out when they get things wrong or go over the top. On this occasion, though, I would seriously urge anyone taking Beveridge’s side in the events of this week to take a strong, reflective think on why that is, and whether it’s fair.

To cut off another response right away: yes, every time someone in the media comes to the defence of someone else, the usual comments come in of the journos sticking up for each other, these vultures who can dish it out but can’t take it, etc. etc. (As it goes, I’ll take that as a compliment – I’m just an idiot with a keyboard and far too much time on my hands.)

But I challenge anyone, even Tom Morris’ most ardent critics – maybe not you, though, Bevo – to watch that press conference in full and not come away from it feeling at least a little bit grotty.

Sometimes, indeed quite often, criticism is warranted: there is a race to be first rather than right, to post now and fact-check later, in this age of media. But putting aside the vicious nature of Beveridge’s ‘criticism’, you can’t even make that claim about this case – Morris was right!

Let’s address the issue of Beveridge accusing Morris of bias as a Melbourne fan first. It’s patently untrue – Morris has repeatedly worked on stories that cast the Dees in a negative light. If Jesse Hogan is to be believed, he was doing it even while employed by the Dees!

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It’s far from the biggest thing in that presser, but I also have a problem with Bevo’s “You’ve got the nerve to ask me a question, and even be here” clip at the start. No one in sports likes press conferences – they’re tedious if you’ve done well and cutting if you’ve performed badly.

But they’re not about the people involved – they’re about the general public getting to hear from people they otherwise wouldn’t beyond spin from their teams’ PR machines. They’re about sponsors getting value for money by being on TV on the big advertising wall. I’ll say this for Bevo’s rant, CoinSpot, Mission Foods and People’s Choice banking are going to get a fair bit of exposure out of it.

Morris, as a journalist, has every right to be there on behalf of his employer, and on behalf of people like me interested in hearing about what went on in the game. For Beveridge to suggest otherwise is frankly disappointing.

The main problem with Beveridge’s fury is that, in the end, he comes out looking like, well, a peanut. If you’re upset that there’s a leak within your team, either deal with it behind closed doors, or better yet, accept that it’s a part of life in a footy industry ravenous for even the smallest bit of news. I still can’t get over how he has let this most insignificant of stories balloon into already the major talking point of the weekend.

You cannot convince me a leak that Hunter was being dropped warranted him to then be named – and having racked my brain, the only reason I can think of him to have been named considering what happened next is simple petty spite – and then dropped an hour before the game. Why spend even half a second thinking about this when there’s a game to plan for against the team that humiliated you in last year’s grand final?

All that does is vindicate Morris, who stood by the story on Fox Footy on Tuesday night only to cop a pile-on in response for not taking an L that was never an L at all, and makes Beveridge look so worried about a mildly significant selection story making its way to a journalist that he’d put out deliberately wrong information on a public sheet simply to try and make said journalist look like a fool.

(As an aside – for all those who demand journalists apologise and admit to fault when they get things wrong, there haven’t been too many who went after Morris putting their hands up that I’ve seen once he was proved right.)

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Like press conferences, team selections shouldn’t be about coaches settling scores – just let your fans know who’s playing without this rigamarole. In the words of Bulldogs tragic and former Roar wordsmith Adrian Polykandrites:

Surely I can’t be alone among Bulldog fans just wishing this sort of stuff could be water off a duck’s back for Bevo; and surely there are supporters of many other clubs out there relieved it’s not their coach doing stuff like this.

I’ll finish off by saying why last night’s outburst from Beveridge annoys me the most: in trying to protect his club and his players, which he undoubtedly was, he has embarrassed both, and subjected them to a level of scrutiny they otherwise wouldn’t have had to endure. It’s a classic catch-22: or, if you’d prefer a Master Oogway quote from Kung Fu Panda, “a man often meets his destiny on the path he takes to avoid it”.

Lachie Hunter, who had a reasonable if quiet game by his lofty standards, is now embroiled in a spat between a journalist and coach that isn’t at all his fault.

A superb game from Bailey Smith, four goals from Aaron Naughton and yes, all the negatives that came out of their loss to the Demons now aren’t going to be the talking point around the water cooler this morning: it’s all going to be about Bevo losing the plot.

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Any Bulldogs administrator or player appearing in the media over the next week is now inevitably going to have to answer questions about Beveridge, and if they slip up even once, then that’ll be the new story that gets discussed on Footy Classified on Monday night. That’s just how it works. Now Barrett, a long-time adversary of Beveridge, gets to openly pot him for the next few days.

Even when they get things wrong, you can’t fight the media. Even false information getting the criticism it deserves becomes a story of its own to fuel the best: “Coach X hits back at Journalist Y after reports of Z”.

But when they actually get it right, and you take a journalist on regardless, you give them the moral high ground. In this instance, Bevo has certainly ceded that to Morris.

That’s not even taking into account the financial, and perhaps even suspension, ramifications that are sure to come down on Beveridge and the Bulldogs now. It’s unlikely he’ll be suspended for it unless the AFL really want to make an example of him, but there’s no way the league will simply tick off what went down. At best, there will be a significant fine, for coach and club.

Beveridge’s actions on Wednesday night, and indeed in all the drama leading up to the first bounce, should be embarrassing for plenty of people associated with the Western Bulldogs, from personnel to fans. I’ll love you forever Bevo, but please, for our sake, pull your head in.

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