I listened to *some* of SJ's podcast today, to see what he'd have to say about retirement...
I have to say, if they keep trumpeting that podcasts are the new media, and taking away the power and the rhetoric from journos etc...that they better start asking less sycophantic questions and actually be a bit more subjective, or some may stop listening (me). But maybe, that's not what the new generation does.
At one stage, Marc Peard calls SJ one of the greatest, if not the greatest Kiwis league players of all time, then Brook Ruscoe (SJ's closest mate) calls him probably the greatest Warrior of all time. I couldn't listen on past that. I love positivity, and giving people their dues, but the questions were blowing wind directly up his backside. No real insight.
If SJ is in the top 20 Kiwis of all time, I'd be surprised. If he was in the top 10 Warriors, again, I'd be surprised.
This is why I am very, very reluctant to get behind player-created content, despite the seductive sounding rationales offered for it e.g. that it cuts out the middleman, stops journos making up BS, etc etc
Yes it cuts out the middleman, but it doesn't get you any closer to the
truth - rather, it just gives you a direct line to the "party line" from the player. This is exactly why journalism exists, because you can't just take what an inherently biased, self-interested party says as the gospel truth. Saying that only the player can give you the correct information about the player is straight up Orwellian logic.
You can see it happening in real time too, you only need to look at Instagram comments for example. Despite all the talk of trolling (which is definitely a real thing) the more striking feature is actually the cultish sycophancy.
This is the same reason I was hesitant to support SJ when he complained about "the trolls" a little while ago. In a lot of ways it's all an attempt by self-interested people to control the narrative and squash negative assessments of them, by replacing it with a biased pro-whoever narrative that frames all criticism as inherently bad.
Beyond that, it's also a pretty bad idea to take critique and analysis out of the hands of people who are actually educated in things like logic, reason, what a fact is etc, and hand it over entirely to footy players who may not have even a rudimentary education in how, say, logic works. If that sounds like pretentious philosophy student babble, well I think it's just as pretentious to think that only footy players are capable of understanding footy when we are all perfectly capable of watching it and more or less observing what is going on.