If there's one thing that increases media interest around a sports team, it's off-field controversy. Nothing gets the general news media salivating more than trouble at HQ, and the well-documented financial issues facing Phoenix owner Terry Serepisos brought the circling vultures to Phoenix training on Tuesday.
I'm not totally naïve, and I know full well how the media works, having been a part of it for 20 years. But some of the reporting this week has been embarrassing at best and repugnant at worst.
The media session after training was cringe-inducing. Usually there are four to five football journalists there to gain comment about the next match. This time though, every man and his dog was present to thrust cameras and microphones at Ricki Herbert and Andrew Durante in an attempt to ascertain whether the financial crisis apparently enveloping their owner was unduly affecting them.
Herbert's media scrum was a cracker. After four or five very short answers to rather inane questions, those who had been sent to uncover some sort of implosion in the Phoenix ranks shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot as their question lines ran out. When the talk actually turned to football, they remained present (to save face I'd imagine) but played no further part in proceedings.
There was one particular "reporter" - and I use that term loosely - who skulked around the changing sheds afterwards enquiring of each player who passed whether they'd like to make comment. I'll bet you anything he had no idea who any of them even were. It would have been funny to see someone actually oblige, just to watch him ask afterwards, "Umm...one final thing - who are you?"
This strange little man then put together the most appalling piece of television I've seen for quite some time during which he even had the temerity to label the players "precious" for rejecting his slimy advances.
As I watched he and others loitering around, as out of place at a football training session as I would be on a fashion catwalk, I wondered where these people were the last time Phoenix announced a major signing? Or a new sponsor? A community or schools programme?
The answer is of course "nowhere" because that sort of thing simply doesn't cut it in the competitive world of selling papers or gaining viewers or listeners.
Herbert, Durante and particularly CEO Nathan Greenham performed admirably in a situation they'd never signed up for. Their jobs are to coach, captain and oversee a football club, not defend their owner (and the man without whom they'd be somewhere entirely different) from rabid reporters.
As I've said, I know how the media works. But try as I might, I couldn't separate my professional knowledge (and membership) of the industry from my personal distaste at the presence of those who wouldn't know a right back from a left winger and only appear when they smell blood.
