Who is the media’s lockdown darling?

Who has been the most-mentioned person in Australian sport during the coronavirus lockdown? We’ll give you one guess.

ARL Commission chairman Peter Peter V’landys has dominated the sporting media during lockdown. Picture: Nikki Short

Last week this paper dubbed him “The Man With The Iron Will”. This week, we can add “The Man With The Most Media Mentions” to the growing list of monikers attached to rugby league supremo Peter V’landys.

According to a study conducted by media monitors Streem, V’landys was far and away the most-mentioned person in Australian sport since the nation went into lockdown two months ago. More than sacked Rugby Australia boss Raelene Castle, more than recalcitrant players Nathan Cleary and Latrell Mitchell, and even more than AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan.

Most media mentions in lockdown main

V’landys’ efforts in getting the NRL back on the field and back on TV screens via Project Apollo have left every other football code in his wake. And don’t think that hasn’t annoyed several Victorian media commentators, including veteran AFL reporter and commentator Caroline Wilson, who took a public shot at this paper’s “Iron Will” headline, begging us to “please be a little bit even handed”.

Garry Lyon and Tim Watson went further, dubbing V’landys “Push-Ahead Pete” this week.

“Look, I don’t want to start a war between the AFL and the NRL, but I would just like to point this out to Push-Ahead Pete,” Watson told SEN. “It is a little more complex with a national game, accommodating teams from five different states as opposed to the NRL which has people in Queensland, NSW and New Zealand.”

Don’t forget the Melbourne Storm, Tim.

In response NRL 360’s Paul Kent dubbed Watson and Lyon “shit-potting halfwits”.

Most media mentions in lockdown

Add all those mentions to the 1729 references V’landys has attracted in the past two months.

Streem analyst Conal Hanna says it’s not just V’landys attracting attention. Despite an absence of games, the NRL has managed to increase its media coverage based on year-on-year figures.

“A large part of that was the indomitable presence of ARLC chairman Peter V’landys who was far and away the most talked-about sports figure of the past few months,” Hanna said.

The NRL is the only code to actually raise its media profile during the pandemic, according to Streem, with rugby union and soccer taking huge hits. Rugby union’s media mentions have dropped 43 per cent and soccer’s 48.

“While coverage of the two biggest football codes held up relatively well, the two smaller codes have been doing it tough, and the longer lockdown has gone on, the worse it has been for them,” Hanna said.

“The A-League would normally have been playing their grand final in May, so their coverage has been particularly down on normal lately.”

Colour blind

We’ve all laughed about who would play us in a movie — Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti? — but how many people get to see this fantasy play out in real life?

World heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury is such a person. “The Gypsy King” is quite the character — a British battler with a fast jab and an even faster mouth who is the biggest name in the sport at the moment.

Fury, who is named after former champ Mike Tyson, this week revealed he was in talks with Hollywood producers to turn his life story into a movie. So who does a 6’8” (206cm) white guy from Manchester want to play him? Denzel Washington, of course.

“I’ve always said Denzel. And then everybody … laughed about it. Whatever,” Fury said.

Two-time Oscar winner Washington has experience in the field having played Rubin Carter in 1999’s The Hurricane.

Great day to be born

As the plague abates, spare a thought for the Coodabeens’ Stan the Statistician from Stradbroke Island and his fellow numbers men and women. Without sport there’s no numbers to crunch so the sta…, err, facts and figures types, have had to occupy themselves in other ways. Ric Finlay has kept his vast reserves of grey material active by posting rolling averages of COVID-19 numbers.

Hopefully he’ll soon be out of a job on that score, but he’ll definitely be out of a job on his other iso project – picking Test XIs based on birthdays. With the month petering out, Finlay is running out of birthdays. So which day of the month produces the best Test players? The 27th. “Drool,” wrote Finlay when he posted the best of the 27th: M Taylor D Warner D Bradman A Border C Macartney M Hussey G Giffen K Wright A Bichel N Hawke J Iverson. Alongside this XI, the ’48 Invincibles look like Yallop’s Lambs to the Slaughter.

Talent to dye for

If you’re returning to the office for the first time in a while, take a look at your colleagues. If they haven’t dyed their hair while in lockdown, well, they’ll never make it as an elite footy player. Because that’s what elite footy players do. Apparently.

This week it was Cronulla teen Bronson Xerri poking his head up from the parapet thanks to a positive test to anabolic steroids. A shocking revelation made only slightly worse by the decision to dye his brown hair peroxide blond. Rabbitohs five-eighth Cody Walker had done the same thing weeks ago before a video of his Karate Kid impersonation from last November was leaked.

But it wasn’t just the bad boys. Young Parramatta half Dylan Brown emerged from lockdown looking like a cappuccino.

In AFL, Geelong’s Quinton Narkle was already blond. So he went pink. Richmond’s Sydney Stack followed suit. Half the Port Adelaide squad, led by Boyd Woodcock, had also raided the haircare aisle at the ­chemist.

So is this just another case of iso-madness? Perhaps, but it’s also been happening for years. Lionel Messi once dyed his hair blond, so too Neymar. And US soccer player Megan Rapinoe famously went a shade of purple for last year’s Women’s World Cup.

The entire Romanian team went blond in the 1998 World Cup, Mexico did the same in 2018.

We’re told it engenders a sense of camaraderie — a temporary version of getting a team tattoo. It also gets you Brownlow votes. Just ask famous bottle blond Shane Woewodin.

Stack is 250-1 to win this year’s Brownlow Medal and you’ll get a minimum of 500-1 for Narkle and Woodcock. As for Xerri, well, it may be a while before he’s eligible for any kind of award.