Chasing Jack

In an ideal world, Jack wouldn’t have said what he did in such a public forum. In that same ideal world, Hardwick would have halted the press conference after this zinger.

But given that we were supposed to play finals, are now 2-6 and just lost to Melbourne – it’s pretty obvious that Richmond doesn’t exist in an ideal world. Jack did say what he did in a public forum and rather than kill the story with that line, and it was a very good line, Hardwick strung everything out an extra five hours by making an empty threat that he was never going to follow through on.

Disclaimer: Jack is my favourite current Richmond player by a considerable margin. I think he’s our best player and, in 2014 to date, I think he’s been mismanaged by the game plan to the extent that I’d hardly blame him if he wanted out at the end of the year.

He made the classic CJ Cregg mistake of screwing up by telling the truth. Anyone who has watched us closely knows that we’ve tried to replicate borrow from Hawthorn’s game plan and at some time during the last six months everything has gone haywire. But that doesn’t mean that your full forward should air that dirty laundry during an interview.

As I mentioned above, the gaffer could have killed the issue this morning but he didn’t. And in a slow footy news week, it dragged into this evening and onto Melbourne’s public transport network.

What chance does Riewoldt have if his own competition’s media team are willing and able to follow him camera in hand on his way home? If you haven’t seen it, I’m not linking to it on here because that’s pretty much exactly what they want. Would be interesting to hear what the AFLPA thinks about it  but considering they didn't seem to care about anything other than free agency I'm not holding my breath.

I don’t who the comms person (they aren’t journos) was that thought it was a good idea (it was probably Matt Thompson) but Christ on a bike, you’d hope that a media team that represents the league would have even a sceric of professionalism rather than lowering themselves to A Current Affair tactics.

If the footy media wants players to say things, they probably should chase one of the few who does to the train station. Pretty hard to sum it up any better than this.

I get that we under achieving at the moment, we talked a big game before the year and we are absolutely fair game at the moment, but surely there is a line somewhere? And if we can't trust the AFL themselves to keep behind the line, what hope do we have from the Murdoch crew?