Brutal response to AFL coach sacking is a reminder that a line has been crossed

Adam Simpson tossed the coin, waved to the crowd and went on his way. “Let’s get on with it,” he said. West Coast gave them a scare but Brisbane were too good in the end. For Eagles fans, it was time to give thanks and move on. For others, it was a chance to reflect on how this sport is covered and how its people are treated.

Whenever a coach loses his job, there’s usually a villain – the journo who breaches trust, the player who leaks, the board member who knifes. In this instance, it was The West Australian newspaper, which ran with a tasteless but hardly atypical front page – “See ya Simmo”, with a conga line of Ls.

The newspaper has been trafficking in outlandish, almost cartoonish front and back pages. Some are vicious. Some are quite funny. Most, like the dozens devoted to Harley Reid in the past 12 months, are pretty harmless. The editorial thought process is clear – we’ll piss off all the usual suspects on the eastern seaboard, triple our clicks and in a few days there’ll be some other outrage.

But even Wayne Carey slammed this one. “This paper is run by children,” Will Schofield posted on X. “The fourth estate in Western Australia is the source of weirdness,” Gerard Whateley said. “That is one of the most disgraceful things I’ve seen in football,” his AFL 360 co-host Mark Robinson said.

On any given day however, you could pick up Robinson’s own newspaper and read something – whether it’s about asylum seekers, drug addicts or any other easy target – that’s more offensive than what the West Australian dished up. Indeed, his Monday column, “The Tackle”, isn’t exactly renowned for its restraint. Hours before he lashed out, Robinson published a column headlined “Simpson’s death was by 1000 bad quarters”.

This isn’t a “whack Mark Robinson” column. When it comes to the human side of football – former players struggling with the effects of concussion, Neale Daniher’s fight with MND, and so on – there’s no one in the football media who handles those stories better. But he has never quite come to terms with the fact that, on the whole, nine teams lose every weekend, and they don’t play poorly simply to irritate him. Robinson often reacts to losses and poor performances as though someone has just set fire to his house. And like so many who directed their anger towards a smartarse, subediting Sandgroper, he can be pretty savage himself.

Robinson is a leading voice in an AFL media industry that treats coach sackings as a sport, and that hands out gongs to the journalists who break the stories first. It’s an industry that puts up betting markets on the first coach to be shown the door, and that bags them when they refuse to be interviewed, when they lose their temper in the box, when their moustache isn’t “good optics” and when they display too much emotion after a narrow win. When coaches are eventually sacked, it’s an industry that calls for “humane” cullings, that says things like “gee, he spoke well” and that then decries a lack of journalistic standards out west.

For years coaches have been telling the media that a line has been crossed. “Coaches feel like the scum of the industry,” Caroline Wilson said last year. Even Craig McRae spoke of the enormous toll it takes on his wellbeing and family life. “You guys can be cruel sometimes,” Simpson said at his departing press conference. “It is a stressful existence,” Chris Scott said on Footy Classified a few years ago, in response to Wilson’s “Elephant in the Room” segment. “It is not a very good job, to be honest,” Scott added. When Don Pyke lost his job at Adelaide, in the same week that Danny Frawley had died, he spoke on what can be a pitiless industry, one that “is leading to a wide range of issues around contentment”.

Robinson compared the coverage of Simpson to the darkest days of Fleet Street. But we’re a long way off that. “Goodbye Tosser” was Sven-Göran Eriksson’s farewell in the Sun. “We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness,” one columnist wrote. The late Graham Taylor was treated even more disgracefully, with the Sun superimposing a turnip on his forehead beneath the headline “That’s yer allotment – At last turnip Taylor turns up his toes”.

Compared with that, the West Australian’s coverage was almost civil. Its front page was crass and grubby. But it was more consistent with the overall tone and tenor of how the game is covered than many of the industry’s key voices care to admit. There’s a lot of po faces, a lot of glass houses, a lot of stones being thrown and a refusal to listen to what sacked coaches are trying to tell us.