David Penberthy: Reaction to Mark Ricciuto’s comments reveal deeper problems with the Crows
The floodgates have burst and Crows fans are demanding change. Adelaide fan David Penberthy takes a critical look at his club — and the lessons they need to learn from the Power.
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The end-of-year club official blow-up is becoming a regular feature of the end of the footy season in this town as the two Adelaide teams continue to struggle.
A couple of years ago it was Port chairman David Koch who famously snapped at a post-match function at his entire team, saying any player who wasn’t at Port to win a flag should go and play somewhere else.
This year the job fell to Crows board member Mark Ricciuto, who went further than Kochy in saying that it was the fans who could go elsewhere.
The curtain raiser for Mad Monday is now Stroppy Sunday.
This column isn’t an attempt to drag the Roo business on interminably. He said what he said, to his credit he apologised, and the more important fact is that an external review into the club’s performance is under way.
It should also be stressed that, as with Koch two years ago, the motivation for Roo’s snap was love of the club. Blokes like he and Koch spend hundreds of hours a year doing unpaid work for our clubs, and wouldn’t do it if they didn’t love them with a passion.
Having said all that, the really troubling thing for the Crows is not the content of what Roo said but the fans’ reaction to it, which was like a dam bursting, with years of pent-up frustration unleashed by a clunky throwaway line.
That reaction has nothing to do with Mark Ricciuto and everything to do with the football club, its relationship with the fans, and its relationship with the go-betweens who convey messages between the club and the fans, namely the Adelaide media.
The past couple of years has seen a troubling and serious deterioration between the club and the local media. I know a lot of journalists and I do not know any in this town right now who have any faith in the media strategy of this club. I am not having a crack at individuals, rather the agreed club strategy of holding back from media engagement.
And this isn’t journos having a whinge. The club shouldn’t drop everything whenever a reporter rings asking for an interview or a lazy scoop. But it has to become more open and more engaged.
It is not a media issue. It is a public issue, because the public gets most of its information about the club via newspapers, the radio and free-to-air television. If that relationship has ceased to function, the public ends up regarding its club as secretive and remote, because the media is unable to give any official explanation as to what’s happening at the club.
There was a notorious incident you will all remember back in 2016 which spoke volumes about the contrasting media styles of the two clubs, with Port being run by a media-driven showman and the Crows having a more circumspect businesslike approach.
When that Port fan threw a banana at Eddie Betts, it was actually Port who were out of the blocks fastest announcing an indefinite ban, describing the incident as racist, and with Koch fronting up for immediate interviews where he said the conduct had no place in sport while also spruiking Port’s indigenous credentials.
Mystifyingly, the Crows initially rejected requests for comment on the grounds that it was a Port home game, only relenting when media figures pressed the issue and pleaded with the club to put someone up.
The result of all this was that Port — whose member had given the club a moment of shame — came out smelling like roses, with even Betts hailing them publicly for showing great leadership, while others wondered why the Crows had been late to the party.
The relationship between the Crows and the media really started to fracture last year over the camp fiasco and has not recovered since. For months we were told the rumours out of the camp were nothing more than baseless tittle-tattle spread by troublemakers in the Victorian sports media who were out of the loop.
The official line was that nothing bad happened on the camp and no one had a problem with it. Then, when the club finally relented and held a press conference, you had the bizarre situation where the head of football Brett Burton and the head coach Don Pyke (who was admirable that day) gave totally different accounts of whether there was a problem or not.
All these things create a perception among fans that the club isn’t levelling with them. It reached an awkward crescendo at the farewell press conference for poor old Richard Douglas, when it became clear that his “retirement” wasn’t really a retirement at all.
The club’s retort to claims of disengagement is that it puts up more players than any other AFL club for regular media spots. That’s true, but it is also not the point.
The players aren’t the ones who should answer questions on membership, ticket prices, or be placed in a position to deal with controversial issues such as the camp.
Indeed there is a view among many fans and also reportedly within the playing group that the club’s silence placed these players with media contracts, particularly Tex Walker, in the invidious position of being bombarded with questions about problems that should have been answered by management.
Whatever contempt is felt within the media towards the club is now being returned in kind, with club chairman Rob Chapman saying recently that anyone who claimed to know what was happening within its four walls was either guessing or making it up.
I don’t know journos who make things up. I know journos who try to write stories without input from official channels.
The truth of the media is that even if you don’t engage, journalists will report stories anyway, because their bosses and readers demand that they do.
Those stories will range from being 100 per cent wrong to partially wrong to mostly correct to 100 per cent correct. The best way to control the flow of information is to share it, and the bunker mentality created the fuel for this week’s explosion.
- The author’s wife is an Adelaide Crows board member