A Rugby League View on an AFL Scandal

This piece was originally filed at The Big Tip in December, 2010.

As a rugby league fan who has witnessed AFL types take the pointy end of the morality stick every time a rugby league scandal breaks, I have somewhat enjoyed the squirming down south at the St Kilda nude photo scandal.

The traditional Melbourne response to a rugby league scandal is to scold, shake the head solemnly and declare that no such behaviour would ever occur in the AFL. So insecurely protective of their turf, the Melbourne media, for the most part, refuses to acknowledge the existence of the NRL or rugby league despite rugby league being Australia’s highest rating and most watched code. The only time the NRL gets a mention in the newspapers or on radio (don’t mind television…Nine, trying to appease the AFL in order to win the next rights, refuse to put anything resembling the NRL in Melbourne pre-midnight essentially means there is no NRL on television outside of New South Wales and Queensland) is when a scandal breaks or the AFL pulls a low-rent publicity stunt by paying massive overs to lure a prominent rugby league player to switch codes. AFL fans lap it up, ignorant to the ways of their own media thanks to the insularity they crave so much.

The generalised attitude seems to be that rugby league is a brutal sport played by thugs while AFL footy is a family game played by decent, god-fearing role models. It is a wonderful fairytale that the AFL has concocted and it has certainly been swallowed hook, line and throat-filling sinker by the Melbourne AFL press.

It comes as no surprise that fewer scandals seem to break in the AFL than in the NRL. The Melbourne football media is nothing more than the publicity wing of the AFL, ever-protective of the sport, complicit in the cover-up of scandal and a party to withholding information that may damage the sport. Occasionally a scandal will break that is too big to contain, a la the Ben Cousins drama. Every now and then a sacrificial lamb is thrown to the public. His name is usually Brendan Fevola.

Such a mentality is completely foreign to the Sydney rugby league media, who collectively take an aggressive and investigative approach to the sport and the body that runs it. It is called journalism. Even though News Limited owns half the NRL, they take an antagonistic approach to reporting the game, refusing to bury a scandal or push the agenda of the NRL. If anything, The Daily Telegraph goes too far and engages in gossip-mongering and active undermining of the code.

The result is that NRL scandals get reported, make the front page and are discussed widely while AFL scandals are kept from the newspapers and the forum of public discourse. Footballers are footballers and there is very little difference between the cultures at NRL clubs and AFL clubs. It is merely the attitude towards reportage that is the difference.

It is fair to suggest that the only reason the St Kilda nude photo scandal has hit the public domain in the fashion it has is because the traditional media was circumvented. Kim Duthie has allegedly met with the AFL over 20 times and has reportedly offered the nude photos to media outlets yet outside of a few days where allegations of Duthie’s alleged pregnancy at the hand of a St Kilda player whom she allegedly met at a school function, there has been no mention of her or her story. So she went to social networking to say what she figures needs to be said.

This is not to say her story has any validity. The St Kilda players involved in the photos appear to have done nothing wrong and the allegations that Duthie stole the photos from Sam Gilbert’s laptop have certainly gathered momentum over the last 48 hours. Duthie’s erratic behaviour and low-rent motives also bring her credibility into account.

All that has very little to do with the Melbourne media’s handling of her or this scandal though. She is clearly embittered by something that occurred with the St Kilda Football Club and regardless of whether details should have been revealed, it is arguable that there is a story there that is worthy of reporting. Such a story, no matter how it plays out, clearly hurts the AFL’s family-friendly image though and needed to be squashed.

So now the AFL types writhe, battening down the hatches and marginalising the girl as some crazed spurned lover prone to lying and uncontrolled even by the courts. Perhaps she is. Perhaps she isn’t. That isn’t the point. The point is that the Melbourne football media do not have the mentality of journalists but the mentality of the AFL marketing department. The old-boys couldn’t save the AFL this time though. And now Andrew Demetriou has some idea of what it is like to be David Gallop, where journalists probe and the media does not simply exist to piss in the sport’s pocket.