It surely can’t get any worse for Eddie McGuire.
The appalling Heath Shaw and Alan Didak drinking and lying extravaganza has left both players and their presdient humiliated. Shaw and Didak ought to be at least suspended — perhaps for the rest of the year. Morale at Collingwood is so low it will probably see the club falter fatally before the finals series.
Given that club culture is set from the top, such an outcome would see Eddie under enormous pressure to relinquish the Collingwood presidency after 10 years at the helm.
Then you have the CVC private equity toe-cutters who want to give Eddie the flick from Channel Nine … he’s become a target of vitriol within the network given that his $4 million salary for doing sod all is more than the entire budget for the axed Sunday program.
Sadly, Collingwood’s flawed culture, and those who have created it, is exactly the sort of issue that Sunday could have done a job on. Maybe we’ll just have to settle for A Current Affair’s interpretation tonight.
Even the book publishers Random House have decided that Eddie is no longer interesting enough and former Channel Nine presenter Patrick Lindsay has been pulled off the planned hagiography project.
Whilst Who Wants to be a Millionaire worked well for a while, it was a format that blitzed the world. Rupert Murdoch once told his News Corp AGM that the program was showing five nights a week in India and had totally recast the economics of broadcasting in that country.
Apart from an impressive 10 years as a sports reporter in Melbourne, this leaves The Footy Show as Eddie’s one great television success, but even that is crumbling now along with his long-time partner in crime, Sam Newman. Tasmanian minister Paula Wreidt being in hospital just days after Newman’s latest atrocity is an appalling look, even if it is totally unrelated. And with The Footy Show’s ratings wallowing, the axe is poised.
It’s hard to imagine Eddie being allowed to do a 60 Minutes special on Sam Newman’s cancer battle these days — both are in the twilight of their television careers. History would suggest that 60 Minutes reporter Liam Bartlett was right in his attack on that flawed decision.
James Packer clearly gave up on Eddie by selling out to private equity in 2006 without any prior warning for Nine’s then CEO and current CEO David Gyngell apparently has plenty of internal research suggesting audiences have gone cold on Nine’s former number one star.
Whilst The Sunday Herald Sun column is thought to pay about $100,000 a year, perhaps it is time for Eddie to contemplate that political career which his Svengali brother Frank, a rather unsuccessful chief of staff to Natasha Stott de Spoja, has long planned for. That’s if the ALP would have them.
Maybe Eddie’s best option is to go into business with his great mate Steve Vizard and they can whinge and moan about how badly the media, which made them on the way up, have treated them on the way down.
Can somebody explain how Eddie can be on Kevin’s Social Inclusion Board and at the same time keep defending the behaviour of his mate Sam Newman? what part of denigrating women is socially inclusive?
McGuire represents everything that is cheap, tawdry, bog-Irish man with no scruples about lying, about anything. ‘The so-called blokey-bloke’, who would know the first name of every bar-girl in Melbourne. He has that ‘insider’s permanent semi snear. The sort of man who knows every sh*t-house piece of dirt on everyone in Melbourne. Isn’t football ‘on the nose’ to too many people, to tolerate an also-ran like him?
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke or boozy gun-toting team. ROFL!
Eddie in politics? Is the talent pool or barrel THAT low in Victoria?
He used to be Eddie everywhere. Now he is Eddie Nowhere.
Like anyone who hates Collingwood, I find Eddie a bit grating but I also don’t want to give him too big a dose of the tall poppy treatment. He’s played out his ambitions on a grand scale, and as long as he learns from his failures he doesn’t deserve to be pilloried too far. He’s proven he’s not CEO material, and that he’s not as attuned to the Australian psyche as his backers once claimed. He’s a good salesman and a pretty good tv presenter, and he deserves to make a buck accordingly. I’m a bit worried about him becoming a politician though – he needs to have a good think about where he went wrong as a CEO before he starts claiming he’s the best man to represent a constituency. Politicians with massive egos are either geniuses (Hawke, Keating, Kennett) or disasters. Most successful pollies who aren’t geniuses enjoy success because they are known for putting their ego aside and being genuinely consultative.