That's some fancy sidestepping and dancing my friend. Sure you mentioned off field personalities but you made more of a point and deal about the on field personalities and even gave a number of primary and secondary personalities.
As for off field personalities, yeah sure we have none. But as you say only the 3 best coaches have that in them and then there is Gould, Rusty and Uncle Nick. Sheens and Benji are personalities, but unless they make a real success of it they will only be drawing negative headlines that will further destabilise that club and to pick their chairman as a positive personality is insane and you may as well then included all the useless merkins starting from Fitzy all the way to the Plumber that nearly ran our club into the ground and oblivion.
As you are well aware you were referring to positive and beneficial cults of personality, not anchors that only serve for their own purposes that will eventually sink the boat and drown all it suffering occupants. But sure I know you needed to fluff the pillow as much as possible to strengthen your position, I get that.
But enough of this dancing around. I don't dance, I have fallen arches and will step on your toes no matter where you try to put your feet. You were mostly wrong in your original post referring to a lack of personality players. Which as you point out we do have two. What we don't have though is a club that knows how to use them correctly and get them front and centre into the media. By that I mean in particular television media.
I have said this before. We should be educating all our players proper media presence lessons. Starting with Gutho and Moses. As an example I would get players to do more in house interviews with each other. A day in the life pieces with team mates, Golf day hijinks days. Beach day hijinks or any other social outing day with players. Player and their spouse pieces. Cooking segments with players and their spouses or team mates. Players that live together could be visited and interviewed, grilled for their domestic ineptitude. How did they get to where they are now? What was their journey? Was it hard? What ups and downs did they have to overcome? I'm sure many fans would love to see more of their heroes and what makes them tick and who their partnered with. All these things could be done very cheaply now and totally by the players.
But one of the best things we could do is offer Gutho and Moses to be co-commentators for NSW Cup games wherever possible. That is a sure fire way of getting experience and becoming part of the media pinup boys club. Just like Ennis or Brandy did when they were first starting. If they are any good they will be fast tracked from there. Also how come we haven't had either of them ever presented on NRL360 as part of the players perspective segment? We should be pushing hard to get our boys on segments like that. Look at the angry dwarf Mahoney, first season with the Dogs and bam, he gets that gig.
As a secondary though you are correct in that we don't have anyone within the organisation that is media friendly and savvy and who has all the media on speed dial that can influence them in our favour and push our agenda and a positive spin on everything. I mean didn't we have Cayless as our marketing guy a few years ago? Now let that sink in.
I would actually focus heavily in club funded in-house media production within the club. I would use both Gutho and Moses as the face of one show.
I would approach Fox Sports to publish Parra produced (with some in-kind support from Fox - studio and equipment usage, timeslots on Fox NRL, etc.) content. I'd start with three shows:
- one 30 minute show, Parra TV, with Gutho and Moses, as you havedetailed above, similar to what Benji had when he started at Fox Sports, interviewing different
- Another show similar to the Tigers behind the scenes, but I would have it run all season, and start from the pre-season and go all the way to the Finals.
- And perhaps a fan podcast style show, probably using the The Cumberland Throw people (the club already gives them access, so a logical club funded fit), who do general fan perspective discussions, maybe do a review of last weeks game and a preview of next weeks games.
To be honest I don't know why all clubs don't do this and Fox NRL shows it. Give every club 1 hour of timeslots each week. With recording boxes and streaming content these days I find it difficult to believe they amount of re-runs of shows/games on Fox NRL.
And, perhaps my original post was poorly structured, the intention was always to highlight the lack of off-field personalities compared to some other media darlings, and never to focus on the players. My point was that we only have two personalities inn the club, who were players.
