Brekkie Crumbs (Notes from the NewsRadio Breakfast team) for Monday November 9th
Glen - Breakfast Host:…
So Kevin Sheedy is to be the man to bring AFL to the Rugby League heartland, as coach of the new Western Sydney team.
It is a great coup for the putative club, as not only is he obviously one of the best coaches of his generation, but he is also proven to be a master promoter of the game.
His consistent and often provocative efforts to build Essendon into a national sporting brand have been widely acclaimed and shamelessly mirrored by clubs such as Collingwood.
The Bombers were great ambassadors for the AFL, on and off the field, and Sheedy’s creation of, and involvement in, initiatives like taking the game to the Northern Territory, the encouragement and recruitment of indigenous players, and the annual ANZAC Day battle with the traditional rivals Collingwood all helped Essendon, and the AFL more broadly, come to stand for more than just sport. They expressed the role and effect sport can have on Australian culture and life, while also bringing some much needed perspective to those involved in the game.
Reading his autobiography and interviewing him after its release reminded me of his long campaign to grow the game and spread its popularity and reach all across Australia.
He has long spoken of his support for clubs in the Eastern states and expressed frustration at the media and the AFL’s approach to making sure NSW and Queensland have every opportunity to be exposed to and embrace the game he’s always held so dear.
Now, after the Richmond Tigers confirmed that their ineptitude this year was not restricted to efforts on the field but also to the club’s boardroom by not grabbing the former Tiger player to coach his old club, Sheedy has put his life where his mouth is and apparently agreed to move to the foreign lands of outer Sydney to spread the gospel of Aussie Rules according to St Kevin. He’s a man of great integrity and wide knowledge and may well help show the troubled NRL competition how a coach and sporting club is supposed to behave.
Good luck to him. They’ll know he’s in town.
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Marius - politics
A very simple grammatical analysis may help explain some of the Prime Minister’s woes over asylum seekers.
In his many statements on the issue he has hammered four words: “calm, methodical, humane, tough.”
Four adjectives in search of a verb and a subject.
The criticism of the PM’s media torrent in recent days was that he kept talking while saying nothing. While vividly describing the government’s course of action with the mantra of the four adjectives he never said what it was. He was describing an attitude not a course of action.
To the extent that he has set out a course of action - co-operation with Indonesia after his personal intervention with Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono - it has not yielded results.
Mr Rudd got SBY on side but that did not guarantee the crucial support of local authorities, so the Oceanic Viking had to roam from port to port. And even more critically he failed to realise that the 78 refugees would, in their own words, rather die than land in Indonesia.
The Australian Prime Minister’s powers do not extend into Indonesian waters. And Kevin Rudd’s best efforts to persuade those over whom he has no direct power have so far been ineffective.
He has appealed to Indonesia’s sense of international obligation by pointing to Australia’s rescue of refugees off the Cocos Islands. They were picked up by the Australian ship and brought to Christmas Island because they were encountered in Australia’s search and rescue zone.
Just as - please note Jakarta - the 78 now on board the Oceanic Viking were Indonesia’s responsibility because they were collected that nation’s search and rescue zone.
The Oceanic Viking saga is now being counted in weeks not days and it has been a bad for the government’s standing in the polls.
Whatever action Kevin Rudd takes will be disapproved of by some part of the electorate. But taking no action, allowing an issue like this to drag on for weeks, diminishes the government in all eyes.
