“Spice of Truth in the mince”
Courier Mail
Saturday 16/4/05
David Cohen

Remember Joe Previtera? The Channel 9 employee burst on to the sporting arena in 1999, because of working behind it.

It went like this: Queensland fast bowler Scott Muller was playing his first Test. One of his throws from the outfield was poor. Checking the tape afterwards, it was noticed someone had said ‘Can’t bowl, can’t throw’.

Media madness ensued. Some were sure legendary leg spinner Shane Warne had uttered the remark. Warne was positive he didn’t say it. But Muller was given a mauling.

Just when it seemed things were becoming impossible Previtera confessed he had said the offending phrase, and was apologetic.

What did Muller think? He reckoned he’d been ‘rissoled completely’. He played one more Test and within a few months his first-class cricket career was over.

Even though Tony Wilson’s enjoyable first novel, ‘Players’ is about Australian Rules football, many readers will hark back to Joe the Cameraman and the business of sport as they absorb Wilson’s dark satire on the great winter game.

Ian ‘Tickets’ Thompson is the lout everyone loves to hate on TV5’s footy variety show, ‘Leather and Lace’. Tickets is at the peak of his powers: after a brilliant career on the field, he’s making lots of money as a malevolent media man.

But one day he snaps. Many people – and more importantly, a camera – see him headbutt an elderly homeless man.

Stan Yeomans, the urbane host of Leather and Lace, knows it will be hard to ad-lib Thompson out of his latest embarrassment. And the owner of TV5 (and many other things), Sir Barry Haynes, wants the mess sorted out.

Someone delighted with the ruckus is Billy Nock. He’s also a former player who hosts a footy show on a rival station – but his show is regularly thrashed by the nastier, more noxious Leather and Lace.

Instead of a cameraman, though, in steps Dante the sound recordist. Dante coaxes a confession of guilt from the dazed homeless man, and testifies that the old bloke started it.

Players is a dependably written romp through some of the most sacred institutions of modern Australia. TV and the media, fame and fortune, sport and teamwork – they’re all put under Wilson’s satire microscope, and none emerges from the examination with much credit.

Sport and politics shouldn’t be mixed, some say. Wilson’s characters and plot show that everything is about politics, and professional football is just another commodity in the shrinking Australian media landscape. Some play the game, but only a few are players.

Wilson also has a few bees in his bonnet on how footy has been transformed. At times there are agreeably spiky observations.

Even the pies at the game tell us something. One character is disgusted by the perfect Thai chicken curry pies that the beautiful people eat in the corporate boxes, and then reflects on what you used to eat at the footy; ‘strange murky artefacts – the meat wasn’t even definable – it was just a texture, a colour, a mood.’

But as Tickets Thompson, Stan Yeomans and Sir Barry know, if there’s more money to be made by the fans being ‘rissoled completely’, it must be done.