Here you go mate. I only managed to read half, if that. Good luck.
I have nothing but respect for Gus, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t question him
As a kid, I would rush home from footy training to make sure I could record Phil Gould staring down the camera and delivering his impassioned speech before Origin games, then watch it on repeat until I had memorised all of it.
A big reason I decided to get involved in rugby league media, apart from not being good enough at playing the game, was because of people like Gould and how they inspired me.
So it has always been slightly surreal to find myself sitting with him on Nine’s 100% Footy on Monday nights, and never more so than this week when I found myself in a robust discussion with him about the Lachlan Galvin situation at the Wests Tigers and his forthcoming arrival at the Bulldogs.
I regard it as a privilege to sit alongside Gould on that panel but I never forget why I am there, alongside some of the game’s greats. It’s because I am a journalist.
It’s my job to ask the questions people want answered – plenty of which I didn’t even get to on Monday – regardless of how uncomfortable it may feel.
In the days leading up to the show, I was inundated with messages from people I know and rugby league fans on social media saying they wanted to see Gould questioned over his previous comments that Galvin was not on the club’s radar.
Those comments were made several weeks ago after Galvin and his agent had refused to even allow his incumbent club to table an extension that would have seen him earn $6 million between now and the end of the 2031 season.
“Gus”, as Gould is universally known, does not owe me the truth. I’m not here to pick holes in his comments and timeline, because I understand that his primary commitment is to the Bulldogs.
He is entitled to conduct his business confidentially. But journalists are also entitled to try to find out what is going on. If Gus doesn’t want to talk, that’s fine, journalists can speak to any number of sources to get to the bottom of a story. It’s what we do.
There’s a widely held view that if Gus is going to hold a dual role as general manager of the Bulldogs and the loudest voice at Nine’s Wide World of Sports, the questioning is part and parcel of the deal.
Some in clubland believe he shouldn’t even be in the media because of his role at the Bulldogs. I don’t agree. I think he’s great on TV. I still hang off his every word. He’s the most fascinating rugby league identity there is, however polarising he may be.
Nor do I think that in this instance he has done anything wrong. In his position, I would also say whatever I needed to if it meant Lachlan Galvin ended up at my football club.
I would do whatever was necessary not to undermine my football team, which is flying high at the top of the ladder after a decade of disappointment.
And I certainly wouldn’t admit to anything that might prick the ears of the NRL in regard to a potential breach of the game’s not-so-stringent anti-tampering policy – not that I’m implying that was the case here.
Often the truth isn’t right in front of you. Journalists are forced to navigate their way through the agendas, the half-truths and the self-interest from any number of people in order to piece together an accurate representation of what is actually going on.
“What I do know is there is not another CEO, another general manager or a recruitment manager that has to sit on a panel and answer these questions, week in, week out,” Gould said on Monday night.
But the very fact that Gould does sit on those panels, week in and week out, is a source of frustration for plenty of those other CEOs, GMs and recruitment managers he was talking about.
Gould’s disdain for the media is nothing new, even if it is a bit peculiar given how much time he has spent in front of the cameras, or writing newspaper columns, in a career rivalled by few others.
He has long expressed the belief that the media is at odds with the clubs, causing more problems than benefits for organisations that don’t like their workings being played out in public.
He said as much as I left the set on Monday night, adding that journalists should be aware of the stress and pain they cause players and their families with the speculation. There were no expletives off-air and Gus did not attack me for questioning his integrity.
I get what he is saying about the effect on the players of the media’s round-the-clock coverage of the rugby league soap opera. Clubs, too, can have a negative impact on players and families when they tap them on the shoulder. It comes with the territory.
And, by the same token, it wasn’t me who rejected the Wests Tigers offer.
It wasn’t me who hastily put out a press release informing everyone that my player had no future at the club. I wasn’t the one whose manager told the Tigers that coach Benji Marshall couldn’t develop me as a player.
I didn’t go on social media and take shots at a teammate. I didn’t call the law firm to bring a bullying claim against my club. And I’m not the one who is leaving mid-season with 18 months to run on my contract. To quote Pip Edwards, this is not my circus.
That’s not a crack at Galvin, or his agent Isaac Moses. Moses did exactly what his client wanted – he found an unlikely exit from a club Galvin didn’t want to be at. Any emotional scars are the price of that one-way ticket to Belmore.
In Gould’s defence, he hasn’t been the architect of this forthcoming Galvin deal. That’s been led by Bulldogs assistant coach Luke Vella, who is Galvin’s confidant and former coach at Westfields Sports High School.
Gould wasn’t even at the dinner last Wednesday night when Galvin met with Vella and Ciraldo to discuss his future at the Bulldogs.
Nor has Gould had the appetite to lead discussions with Galvin’s agent Moses, who was run out of town at Penrith during Gould’s days as Panthers general manager.
I mentioned on 100% Footy last year that I found it interesting that Gould ended his decade-long feud with Moses at the end of last year. His lavish praise of Galvin soon after convinced me the teenager was the end game of his decision to meet with Moses.
Across town at Parramatta, the Eels were under the impression that the Moses one-two punch of Isaac and Mitchell would deliver him to their club. On Friday night, they thought they had a deal done.
They underestimated the influence of Vella and Galvin’s desire to don the blue and white on a deal expected to be worth around $750,000 a season when eventually signed. So the story goes.
“It is gibber. You say a lot of things that just aren’t true. And you say a lot of things that are exaggerated,” Gould said to me on Monday night.
Gould says journalists write stories because “it suits the media’s narratives”. But that’s not right.
Take the Galvin issue for example. Personally, I don’t care whether he goes to Canterbury or Parramatta or if he stays at the Tigers.
I just want to find out what’s happening and relay it to the Herald’s readers and Nine’s viewers. And, of course, I want to do it first. That’s what I’m judged on.
As all journalists learn at some stage in their careers, sometimes sources aren’t as accurate as we would like them to be. Sometimes you are told something as an objective truth but it turns out to be a subjective one. We have to take that into account and so we ask more questions. It’s why we always get at least two sources for our stories. Things change. Goalposts move.
Gould went through it himself last year when this reporter – and presumably others – made enquiries with the Bulldogs about murmurs that winger Josh Addo-Carr had failed a roadside drugs test.
The Bulldogs general manager took to social media, posting on X: “RUMOUR MILL REGARDING JOSH ADDO-CARR in response to circulating rumours and now several media enquiries regarding Josh Addo-Carr … the test results were negative and Josh was allowed to continue on his way.
“Happens to all of us at some stage on the roads. It’s the Police keeping the community safe. We appreciate their work. There is absolutely no truth to rumours that Josh had any issue. None whatsoever. Enjoy your finals football everyone.”
Two hours later the police issued their own statement saying otherwise. A few weeks later, Addo-Carr was moved on. Was Gould lying? Of course not. But the truth can change.
And on Monday night people wanted to see me find out what had happened with the Galvin affair. Had the truth changed again? I tried to find out. I was doing my job and Gus was doing his.
Nothing he said offended me. If I’m going to call into question the intentions of someone on national television, I need to be prepared to wear the black eyes.
There is another point to all this, and it’s about whether the Galvin situation should have been allowed to develop in the first place.
In a way, Galvin – and more importantly the Tigers – have been let down by outdated system around playing contracts. The system should not reward the actions of any party involved in a saga such as the Galvin one that has hijacked the competition over the past six weeks.
Galvin is on about $250,000 this year, which increases to $350,000 next year. If he was not allowed to earn any more than those figures at a rival club in those years, would we have seen the theatrics of the past six weeks? I doubt it.
Instead, he will leave and potentially earn an upgrade on this year’s deal, close to double his salary the following year and the Tigers will be left wondering why they are being punished for doing too good a deal for their club. That’s what the system encourages.
Players who are forced out of their contracts by their own clubs are protected by the NRL, which ensures the athlete isn’t shortchanged if they are squeezed out to a rival team.
The same protection needs to be applied to clubs. That would take away some of the power that is increasingly falling into the hands of the agents.
But this is rugby league. The game outside the game is becoming increasingly prominent. There will always be questions to be asked and there will always be journalists asking them. Some might not like it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
