Rebecca Wilson: NRL boss Dave Smith is being shielded from dealing with serious issues by his minders
Rebecca Wilson
The Daily Telegraph
April 25, 2015 12:00AM
NRL boss Dave Smith has surrounded himself with minders he has hired from politics and the corporate world. For these blokes, earning the big bucks means shielding the boss from media scrutiny and the ability to deal with rugby league’s burning issues head-on.
This includes not talking to many journalists on the phone, refusing point-blank to hold regular media conferences or simply staying mute about anything without a tightly-written three-line script.
This approach to media relations might work in the corporate world but they are hanging their boss out dry in league land and as a result they’re letting Smith commit the cardinal sin of not keeping the faith with the fans.
At NRL HQ, the spin doctors don’t want their boss to address any big issue without first forming four committees and conducting three reviews.
This week, the faceless men struck again when Smith called a doorstop in Canberra, where he was visiting the War Memorial, to talk about the controversial round 13 deadline after more than week of debate surrounding Manly half-back Daly Cherry-*Evans.
Smith inherited the contentious round 13 rule from the previous David Gallop administration. This cooling-off period turned into a blight on the game, the bosses, player managers and ultimately on the players themselves.
The round 13 deadline was introduced to discourage incidents such as James Maloney — when he was with the Warriors — signing with the Roosters in 2011 for season 2013.
At the time, the NRL was hoping the cooling-off period would encourage clubs to keep in-season signings from rivals confidential in fear of embarrassment if the player backflipped.
Instead, player managers hijacked the entire process by using the cooling-off period right up until the round 13 deadline as another bargaining chip.
The deadline has been one of the game’s top-three problems since Smith took over from Gallop. The Cherry-Evans saga has given the NRL another dose of bad publicity that damages their brand just when they least need it.
So this was Smith’s big chance to stamp his authority on the game with a commonsense solution that would make everyone in league land happy.
His minders and brains’ trust have had plenty of time to come up with a solution like league’s version of the AFL’s trade period at the end of each season. Why not? They seem to copy everything else the AFL does.
But no, the spin doctors once again got in the way.
Smith said he was listening to the fans and that meant he would have a close look at the problem in coming weeks. In fact, he said there would be a “review” which has become the buzzword for putting a file in the bottom draw.
Under advice, Smith has called more reviews since 2012 than he’s had skim lattes. He handed the responsibility of fixing this latest mess over to new strategy boss, Shane Richardson, who we are told will give us a blueprint for the future by the end of next month.
Big Richo will address this round 13 stuff then, the boss said. Doorstop over.
In more than 700 days in the job, there is a perception in league land that the new administration is good on big picture things but doesn’t have the ability to navigate through their own corporate structure to solve the everyday problems and issues that infuriate the fans, damage the brand and hold back this great game.
Seven rounds have passed and the game is staring down the barrel of some diabolical scheduling (the same teams playing each other within a month), appalling refereeing (admissions of monumental mistakes from the referees’ boss) and a trade rule that has derailed at least one club’s aspirations for finals football.
For the referees’ nonsense, it is football boss Todd Greenberg who ruled that the only solution to the trouble surrounding the arbitrators was to silence those who questioned them in the first place.
However, Smith showed he can be a strong leader by his swift actions at the start of the season to save the Titans and his administration’s ability to deliver record profits.
He has also quietly bailed out the Dragons and Wests Tigers from financial ruin and is forcing clubs
to be accountable and financially
self-sufficient.
It has now become de rigueur for the spin doctors to allow Smith to stay silent for weeks, handing his many overpaid lieutenants the responsibility for everything that goes wrong.
So normal has the inertia become at Moore Park that regular league roundsmen within the media are no longer surprised when their inquiries are not satisfactorily addressed.
Several weeks ago, the media boss who replaced league veteran John Brady, Sandy Olsen, resigned suddenly. Olsen was a pleasant person but constantly out of her depth and would take days to return phone calls. It’s time for former political minder Peter Grimshaw, one of Smith’s trusted advisers, to step up or the boss needs to find a genuine league expert to replace Olsen.
Smith gave Olsen and several other former party apparatchiks the job of running his corporate life. They have failed. Smith is now the most senior executive at league headquarters. The history has left the building, sacked or resigned in frustration, replaced by a sterile corporation.
It’s time for Smith to take control and show the fans he’s as passionate as they are for the greatest game of all.
