The Sharks should have educated Andrew Fifita on how to handle himself publicly
Paul Kent
The Daily Telegraph
March 31, 2014 10:00PM
MOTIVATED by hate mail from trolls on Twitter, Andrew Fifita tried to be everyone’s friend last week.
After walking away from Cronulla he tried to appease Sharks fans by saying that his heart was still in Cronulla.
After rejecting a start with the NSW Waratahs he tried to placate rugby fans by saying he loved the sport and planned to finish his career in the game.
He thought he already had the Bulldogs market cornered, having signed a four-year deal there beginning next year.
So the interview finished, everybody is happy, right?
Fifita couldn’t have been more wrong.
The Sharks should have better educated him on how to handle himself publicly.
They know he is immature and prone to silly statements.
Paul Gallen told Triple M on Saturday that Fifita’s comments were silly. He said that this week some of the older players like himself and Luke Lewis would pull Fifita aside and talk to him about saying dumb things in public.
Unfortunately, by then it was already too late. The Bulldogs had seen enough, and who could blame them?
Yesterday, the hammer dropped.
Fifita is now the second *casualty of Twitter trolls after Josh Dugan cost himself a contract with Brisbane last year, when he told one jerk to “end himself”. You could build a hospital wing with the money they blew.
And yet on top of the personal cost there is a greater cost here. Once again, rugby league looks foolish.
A hundred black headlines were created through Fifita’s $850,000-a-year deal with the Bulldogs. It gave the game a great migraine as the battling Sharks took another blow.
Just as the game has nursed its way through those headlines, more damage, all we ask is could it have been avoided?
Compare that to Buddy Franklin’s switch from Hawthorn to the Swans.
Franklin agreed to join the Swans in January last year, more than 10 months before the first whiff became public. The secret was kept an entire season for, as Franklin and the Swans knew, there was no benefit in releasing it earlier.
All it would do is tip off GWS, who were gearing to make a play for him when the AFL trade window opened, as well as give Hawthorn fair warning about what they were up against to keep him. And even though GWS were circling, Hawks fans knew nothing was confirmed, as nothing could be done until the trade window opened.
Their disappointment when Franklin left was the natural disappointment of any fan, but the timing couldn’t have been more perfect from the AFL’s point of view. The season was over, so no season was disrupted, no fans handed in their Buddy jerseys.
And the secret didn’t begin to leak until the AFL slowly, deliciously, slow-dripped the details to dominate media coverage in NRL grand final week. That included the prime real estate, the back page.
There was a time when the NRL resisted ideas like trade windows. It believed naturally breaking news was all good grist, part of the daily NRL conversation. But fans have grown tired of being disappointed, increasingly turned off by players signing away their futures with more than a year to run on contracts, of their season’s being sideswiped by sudden news. There are lessons on every level here.
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