timana tahu
Akermanis vs Tahu
Akermanis, a veteran Aussie Rules star, was sacked this week by his club, The Bulldogs, because he refused to be silenced, in his media jobs, from talking about whatever was on his mind. As Patrick Smith writes in The Australian today: “He was speaking openly about what the club needed to be kept inside.”
You can see what would have happened here. The club would have said something like, Jason, if you must keep these media jobs, just write and say the anodyne stuff that’s expected of you: we’re playing one match at a time, the boys will be giving 110 per cent and football will be the winner. To this, Akermanis said: No.
Good on him. And good on him for continuing to speak. I loved it when he poleaxed one of the commentators on The Footy Show by saying, simply, “At least I’ll be remembered”.
And here’s my devil’s advocate question: if Akermanis was sacked for breaching the code of the locker room, the unwritten law that what’s said there, and said on the training paddock, stays there, and if you apply this code across sport, shouldn’t it have been Timana Tahu who was sacked during the rugby league Origin series, and not Andrew Johns, notwithstanding the offensiveness of Johns’s remarks?