Big-name stars have taken Saudi money, but fans aren’t buying it

Quick now. What’s the latest thing that happened in LIV Golf?

Oh come on, don’t say you don’t know. You remember how Greg Norman said it was the revolution the game of golf needed, the one the public was crying out for? Don’t say you don’t!

There are at least three readers out there, maybe as many as four, who personally contacted me and said Greg was right, that LIV wasn’t a shameless act of sportswashing by the Saudis. And so you three are the ones I am asking.

What has happened since the LIV tournament in Adelaide? There was a flurry of interest when the LIV golfers turned up there for a tournament in April, but does anyone know of anything since?

And what are the ratings? The last ones I can find are from March, which were catastrophically low, and I gather they have stopped releasing them.

You get the drift. For me, it is happy confirmation that no matter how much Saudi money is thrown at getting top sportspeople on board, the public itself is much more picky and either has little to no interest, or actively refuses to watch ... on principle. (Look it up, Greg.)

Cristiano Ronaldo playing for Al Nassr in the Saudi Pro League.Credit: Reuters

Happily even in Saudi Arabia, much the same thing is happening with soccer’s newly enriched Saudi Pro League. Despite boasting global stars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Karim Benzema, Riyad Mahrez and Roberto Firmino – bugger all of the locals are turning up to watch them. Reports have some attendances measured in hundreds, not the tens of thousands you’d expect.

Friends, it is sport at its finest. There is a dynamic within it which says if its very core is corrupt, it will wither, not flourish – no matter how much money you throw at it.

The price of Olympic gold

Nevertheless, speaking of throwing absurd amounts of money at sport, you can colour me shocked – SHOCKED I tells yers – to see that the price tag on the Brissie Olympics has already blown out. It was April 2021 when we were told that rebuilding the Gabba to Olympic standard could be done for a lazy $1 billion. Know what the estimate is now? That would be $2.7 billion. Just what will it be by 2032?

The redesign of the Gabba has already blown out to $2.7 billion.Credit: Illustration by Matt Davidson

And as I think I might have mentioned, it always starts like this. Without fail, they announce that the whole thing will be cost neutral, because the whole thing will pay for itself; then the costs start to blow out, and then the taxpayer is left with the bill.

There is a very good reason there was only one bidder for those Olympics. It was because all the other potential bidders had run screaming from the room and burnt the clothes they were in at the time, once they had crunched numbers exactly like that. The same thing happened with the axed Commonwealth Games in Victoria, if you remember that. The numbers just don’t work any more, and it is insane to put billions of dollars into a two-week sports festival.

Season’s greetings for United

The London Daily Telegraph ran a lovely yarn this week about Manchester United heading to Istanbul for a Champions League tie with Turkish side Galatasaray. Written by veteran journalist Jim White, who’d been on a similar trip, he said one thing was for sure: the greeting would not be the same as the one they faced 30 years ago. He recounted the madness of arriving with the team on the tarmac, and coming into the airport proper to find “several hundred locals ... many pressing signs against the glass barrier scribbled on pieces of cardboard. All of them were in English. None of them were friendly.

“Welcome Mr Cantona. Afterwards you say goodbye Mrs Cantona,” was an oddly cryptic threat. Another – “You call us barbarians, but we remember Heysel, Hillsborough” – was more to the point. But it was the one held up by a bloke that came to define the occasion.

“Welcome to Hell,” it read.

And so it proved, as such messages proved to be merely their opening remarks, and it was only with some difficulty they were able to get to the awaiting bus, through the locals making their derision and menace apparent.

Only one member of the United outfit was unshaken.

That would be manager, Alex Ferguson.

That evening, at a press conference held at the Ali Sami Yen Stadium, one of the shocked journalists asked him if in his long career he’d ever experienced a riot like the one that had greeted them at the airport.

“That was a riot was it, lads?” the amused Ferguson replies. “Youse lot have obviously never been to a Glasgow wedding.”

GOOOOOOLD.

Tibby Cotter’s last stand

On the grounds that I got such an enormous reaction to my midweek piece on the great Australian cricketer Archie Jackson and his tragic fate 90 years ago, let me give you another historical cricketer yarn, from the book I’ve just released on the Australian Light Horse and the Charge at Beersheba.

Tibby Cotter demonstrates his bowling action on a 1905 tour of England.

As previously discussed in these pages, Tibby Cotter was the tearaway Australian fast bowler of his day, who practically invented the bouncer against the England side in the pre-WWI Ashes series. (The English didn’t call him “Terror Cotter” for nothing.)

Leading up to charge at Beersheba – where hundreds of troopers from the Australian Light Horse charged straight at the Turkish and German guns, to record a famous victory – Tibby had been a brave stretcher-bearer, so good he had been “mentioned in dispatches”.

But miss out on this charge? Not on your life. Tibby swapped positions with a mate.

“In short order, Tibby takes his place astride a snorting steed, right in the heart of the Fourth Brigade, 12th Regiment, with his mate Bluey, and right beside two other close mates, troopers Jack Beazley and Rex Coley.”

Just as the sun is going down, they are addressed by General William Grant.

“Men,” he calls out, “you are fighting for water. The only water in this desert is at Beersheba. Use your bayonets as swords. I wish you the best of luck.”

Grant raises his right arm, as all falls silent, bar the impatient whinnying of so many horses. The arm drops, pointing now straight ahead over the crest of the hill, and they are away!

Tibby is with the best of them, as they charge in from the Randwick end.

“It was a heart-throbbing sight as they plunged up the slope,” one witness, Ion Idriess, records, “the horses leaping the redoubt trenches – my glasses showed me the Turkish bayonets thrusting up for the bellies of the horses – one regiment flung themselves from the saddle – we heard the mad shouts as the men jumped down into the trenches.”

For his part, Tibby charges at a field gun that is being pulled into position and, quickly unslinging his rifle and bringing it to bear, is satisfied when the entire crew throw their hands in the air. Cotter lowers his rifle himself ... only for one of the Turks to pull out a revolver and shoot him. Cotter falls from his horse, bleeding badly.

His mate Bluey, finally finds him after dark. He is moaning softly, still breathing, but bleeding heavily from the bullet wound.

“Tibby!” Bluey calls out. Recognising the voice, Cotter opens his eyes.

“Blue,” he gasps, before referring to a meal they planned on their safe return, “you can have the fish supper on your own.”

He died shortly afterwards.

I put a flower on his grave on Anzac Day this year.

In the immortal words of Andrew Webster

When it comes to seriously disagreeing with the sports views of my friend and colleague Andrew Webster, I can pretty much count the occasions on the finger of one finger. And this is it.

“Personally,” he wrote on Friday, “I like Glenn Lazarus as the next inductee [of the Immortals]. He was the game’s premier prop in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, winning premierships at Canberra, Brisbane and Melbourne.”

The famed “Brick With Eyes” was indeed exactly that.

But an Immortal? Taking his place in the same group as the likes of Johnny Raper, Wally Lewis, Artie Beetson and Andrew Johns?

Please, Andrew.

A rare try to the rampaging Glenn Lazarus in 1992.Credit: Craig Golding

Right now, if you could choose one player to play for your life, would you really choose Lazarus ahead of Ray Price, Peter Sterling or Brad Fittler?

(Cue Dennis Cometti, when a similar question was asked in AFL: “I’d choose my mother. Not a great player, but at least she’d care.” )

Gould makes a meal of secrecy

One doesn’t want to be unkind about this, but does Bulldogs supremo Phil Gould ever meet anyone in his office, his home, someone else’s home, a private room, somewhere, anywhere, but in a spot where a photo is always taken of the “secret meeting”?

I don’t want to be unkind I said! But he makes it hard.

For how much can a koala bear? And how many photos of “secret meetings” with Gould can be taken before – call me Einstein, and pass the chalk – the thought occurs that maybe they’re never intended to be secret? This one, I gather, was a grainy shot of Gould meeting with Warriors prop Addin Fonua-Blake and his “management team”. (While I think of it, when did managers form up into teams?)

Maybe, just maybe, Gould thinks it in his interest to have his photo taken with this or that player and the fact it happens 15 times in a row doesn’t make him a fool, but we of the media, who duly oblige with carry-on about it.

What They Said

Tiger Woods: “There will come a time when I can no longer win. When that time comes, I will walk away.”

Max Verstappen on the Las Vegas Formula 1 race: “99 per cent show and 1 per cent sporting event.”

Nick Kyrgios.Credit: AP

Aaron Timms in The Guardian on Nick Kyrgios’ tennis commentary: “The greatest compliment I can pay the man’s punditry is that it immediately made me want to watch him play again. Kyrgios the commentator, no matter how casually commanding, will never match Kyrgios the player, this volatile maestro of the lines. Tennis after Kyrgios will be more polite, more tasteful, perhaps even more graceful. But it will be far less interesting.”

Olympic statement on the contentious surfing tower for next year’s Olympics:“The new tower, more sober and reduced in size and weight, installed on new perennial foundations, is the solution to ensure the durability of the tower over time and to guarantee the holding of future sporting events in Teahupo’o.”

Todd Gurley.Credit: Getty

Former NFL star Todd Gurley on how the NRL will fare in the US: “I can’t speak for everybody, but I’m going to speak for everybody on behalf of the United States when I say we don’t know what AFL is, but we do know what rugby is. But I think the rugby that we know is rugby union. We’re a little bit behind with the NRL, but that’s why you have these games.”

Damien Hardwick has the same issue with AFL up on the Gold Coast: “If we want this sport, which it is in my opinion, to be the greatest sport within Australia, we’ve got to continue to grow it in the northern markets, no question.”

Lucas Neill avoided being jailed for up to three years after a jury in the UK acquitted him of a charge of hiding assets, following a seven-year bankruptcy battle: “I’ve won my freedom, but I feel like I’ve lost in life.” Can the Australian soccer community not do something to help such a fine servant of the game, now on hard times?

Matildas manager Tony Gustavsson on reports he had an interview for the Swedish men’s team job: “I’m passionate about the Matildas and, as I have stated before, I’m fully focused on qualification and participation at the Paris 2024 Olympics.” I smell Eddie.

Team of the Week

Glenn Maxwell. The Big Show – one of the more felicitous of Australian sporting nicknames – is in the form of his life with another fabulous innings in India to rescue Australia in that T20 thingammy.

Max Verstappen. Not that I care, but he’s won 19 of 22 Formula 1 races this season. Surely that nearly kills it as a spectacle. Just a bunch of cars going rrrrRRRRrrround and rrrrRRRRrrround and rrrrRRRRrrround – and you already know who’s won?

Min Woo Lee. Won the Australian PGA Championship.

Francesco Camarda. Became the youngest player in Serie A history at 15 years and 260 days old when he came on for AC Milan against Fiorentina last week.

@Peter_Fitz

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