The Three Amigo dirty laundry has finally been placed into one big honking pile and laid bare for all to see. In his article this morning, Andrew Webster, the Chief Sports Writer of the Sydney Morning Herald, has done a pretty comprehensive job of sewing all we knew or suspected about the behind the scenes goings on of the fabled Three Amigos within the Wallaby camp over Deans’ reign.
It’s an intriguing piece for a few reasons.
The first has to be why it needs to be written by the Chief Sports Writer and not someone with Rugby in their title? For those watching The Newsroom, it would seem that being on the Romney campaign bus is a that’s hard to escape.
The second is the timing. Deans is gone – has been for over a month. The Amigos are well and truly busted in the court of public opinion. This article really brings no change, certainly not in the way it might have. Today is, however, the statute of limitations for such an article. The Link era begins for real tonight, tomorrow, this will be yesteryear’s news. It does have the feel of “it’s a free hit, let’s get it out there”.
Those things said, the article does shed some further insight onto a bizarre episode. While many will froth and foam about the irresponsibility of a Gen-Y – their addiction to ego as exemplified in social media – it actually reveals more about those who were responsible for them.
The two John O’Neill anecdotes were particularly fascinating.
“Twenty per cent of you are letting down the other 80 per cent,” O’Neill says, according to witnesses in the room that night. ”That 20 per cent are the same 20 per cent who have their mobile phone in their hands right now. The same 20 per cent are the ones on the grog midweek instead of complying with the rules.”
That was in August last year. Kurtley Beale telling O’Neill where he could sit on the team bus event allegedly happened at the World Cup. Yet the erstwhile ARU CEO thought the man responsible for the performance of the Wallabies – Robbie Deans – was the coach to take the Wallabies through the biggest Aussie rugby event for the last decade and the next – The Lions tour.
As for Deans versus the Amigos, the whole episode reminds me of a random memory I have from schooldays. One of the core thrusts of Cicero’s Philipics, is his despair for the ‘youth of today’ as embodied by the self indulgence of Marc Antony – some two thousand years before Twitter!
This really is nothing new. If there is a particular quirk about Gen-Y and their behaviour, the people to look at are the generation that spawned them, and found putting boundaries in place just a bit too painful.
Even if you argue that Deans didn’t turn these guys into the egos they have been, he was still the ultimate keeper of the boundaries, and they needed to be enforced way before the ARU CEO was being told where he could sit on a bus.
