don't like this idea speaking of Gallop
https://www.smh.com.au/sport/after-...it-time-for-gallop-to-go-20190124-p50tg7.html
After the Stajcic sacking, is it time for Gallop to go?
Days before the opening ceremony at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, at the official athletes’ party, there was a chance meeting that changed the course of Australian football.
The function was held at the new Westfield shopping centre adjacent to Olympic Park at Stratford in London’s East. Westfield chairman
Frank Lowy, the fifth richest man in Australia at the time, bumped into
John Hartigan, the former executive chairman of News Corp.
Lowy was also the chairman of Football Federation Australia, having stepped in several years ago to save the game he loved from oblivion.
He was looking for a new chief executive to replace
Ben Buckley. He asked Hartigan what he thought.
“Get
David Gallop,” Hartigan advised. “He’s the best sporting administrator in the country.”
Months earlier, Gallop had finished up after 11 very long years as NRL chief executive following a fall-out with chairman with
John Grant.
Lowy took Hartigan’s advice: Gallop was appointed soon after and has been the FFA chief executive ever since.
Cut to a media conference at Coogee’s Crowne Plaza on Monday. Gallop was ashen-faced and under heavy attack from reporters for the stunning decision to sack Matildas coach
Alen Stajcic just five months out from the World Cup.
Gallop’s mates often joke how he reversed the ageing process when he left rugby league, having navigated salary cap, sex and drug scandals.
The stress of the Stajcic scandal appears to have put the years back on. For the second time in three days, Gallop struggled to give any real detail around why Stajcic’s contract was torn up.It was very un-Gallop. He's usually a pro when it comes to the media scrum.
In April 2010, he casually walked into a media conference at NRL headquarters, pushed back the tape recorders cluttering the desk, shuffled his notes and then announced he was stripping two premierships off the Melbourne Storm for salary cap rorting.
The Storm were owned by News. The NRL was half-owned by News. It wasn't an easy decision but Gallop handled it with aplomb.
The handling of the Stajcic matter has not been so smooth. It's also very un-Gallop.
How anyone at the FFA could think that the sacking of a successful coach of a much-loved Australian team, off the back of anonymous surveys including one from an organisation like Our Watch that deals with domestic violence committed against women and children, then giving scant details about the reasons why, would all go away without serious questions being asked by the public and press is staggering.
An experienced operator like Gallop should’ve forecast that it would play out this way. A decent full-time communications manager, which the FFA doesn’t have, certainly could've. Nobody bothered to play the tape forward and the damage to the game’s reputation this week has been immeasurable.
The closest any reporter has come to having any detail about the findings has been the ABC’s
Tracey Holmes, who has seen the Matildas Wellbeing Audit.
“A quarter of the players who responded reported feeling psychological distress and many were afraid to seek support, believing it would be held against them,”
Holmes reported. But that’s as specific as it gets.
When I spoke to FFA board member
Heather Reid earlier in the week,
she repeatedly offered this: “Why are people more concerned with how he was sacked than why he was sacked?”
Because the FFA won’t tell us! Stajcic has seen the Wellbeing Audit but still isn’t entirely sure why he has been sacked. No specifics have been provided.
Meanwhile, his departure has triggered some ugly battles behind the scenes. Prominent female figures in the game accused of being the architects of the Stajcic’s demise have been disgracefully attacked on social media.
Indeed, the abhorrent term “lesbian mafia” was tossed up in several conversations this column had with football people this week. On the flip side, anyone who has dared to question the manner in which Stajcic was sacked has been accused of misogyny.
What's relevant is that Stajcic
himself believes he was the victim of a clandestine plot to get rid of him to replace him with a female coach, something first suggested to him by a former FFA board member in August last year.
He also felt the writing was on the wall last November when a new board was installed and Gallop said to him, if only jokingly: “It’s good for me — not so much for you.”
Many in football circles believe that Gallop has been “thrown under the bus” by his new board, forced to sell a bad decision.
To his credit, he's owned it as much as anyone else but the poor manner in which it's been handled suggests it might be time for him to move on.
As an administrator with no football background, he was always going to be viewed with suspicion as an outsider, although he had some great success in the early years of his tenure as the A-League surged off the back of the Western Sydney Wanderers and several high-profile marquee players.
But his job became immeasurably harder when Lowy stood down and handed the reins to his son, Steven, something that enraged many in football circles.
Gallop's resume is so strong he could land a gig anywhere.
More than a few people believe he would be a perfect addition to the ARL Commission.
