I've been thinking more about this and it seems crazy but it would explain a lot. https://twitter.com/NRLBoomRookies/status/1266321561402798080

The unnamed clubland official who reporters love to quote and always chips in his opinion for how dire the NRL's situation was pre-coronavirus could certainly be Gus

He is the archetypal boomer. Facts and process and rules don't matter. All that matters is how he feels and what he perceives to be flaws now that weren't present in the past.

I went back through 18 months of WWOS headlines tagged with Phil Gould. Firstly, Ch9 turning out two or three articles a day based solely only a few sentences of your opinion is not a healthy environment and would drive anyone insane.

It also means he's the only non-player producing any content for them, which makes him valuable and gets him an even bigger platform/status.

He of course uses his position to project onto the alleged fame seeking refs. Quite why anyone would become a ref for fame is unexplained.

Of course as the pressure ramped up on Beattie, later Greenberg, Gus was there to "offer" "solutions" to the "problems"

So to test this hypothesis, we'll need to see if any of his other brain farts come to pass. The draft is one. Here are some other recent ones I found.

Conferences

Sydney club mergers

40/20 posts

Expansion into Brisbane, Perth and Auckland for the next TV deal (no relocation, actually sounds pretty good)

Rejigging the judiciary's punishments so the boys can play

Has iso and twitter cooked my brain? Very likely.

Does that make this wrong? We'll see.