it's also a myth that our attendances have dropped. Yet this line keeps getting churned out like its fact.
Aside from season one novelty our crouds have been very consistent (while rugby etc have dropped off dramatically).
This
But pointing out the facts...including the massive drop off of rugby crouds would not suit the DoomPost narrative.
For some reason the Nix and the DoomPost have always had a frosty relationship. I stopped buying the DP in disgust during the end of the Seripisos era.....they turned it into a witch hunt. Mostly they are just negative but many many times they have been directly hostile. Which is weird when you consider that its a local paper and the Nix are a local team. My theory is that the sports editorial section of the paper are all rugby heads and they consider the Nix as a viable rival to their precious rugby. Either that or they are F**k wits...or maybe both.
The tragedy in all this is the media form an important part of how the potential ticket buying public percieve the team. Why would people come to watch a team when all the read is negative stories?. The only time the media got in behind the Nix was during the Ifill inspired run to the finals years ago. There was loads of good stories and it generated a great buzz about the club.....and loads of people bought tickets
The Nix provide the media with plenty of copy over December and January period when its quiet for eggball. The irony is that no Nix means they will have to work harder to fill their summer pages.
This is the issue that I have always had - it was never a "witch hunt" with Seripisos, it was the reporting of legitimate news that many on here took exception to. Terry had put himself up to be shot at (not literally) by becoming the Trump character on the NZ Apprentice, at a time that his business empire was being shown to be built on sand, and was crumbling all around him. That impacted a lot of legitimate businesses who were losing (and eventually lost) money from their dealings with Terry. That was news.
If the exact same situation was happening at that time with the owner of the Warriors, or the owner of the Wellington Hurricanes (I know it is a franchise) then no one on here would be stamping their feet about how they are being picked on, and how unfair it is.
With regards to the relationship between the Phoenix and the Dom Post, that has been an issue for a long time. I have no idea why there were issues in the first place (although I have always seen it as a case of the DP being non complimentary and the Phoenix organisation being overly sensitive) but the longer that it has gone on, the more it damaged the Phoenix. The club needed a beneficial relationship way more than the Dom Post did. If the Nix don't exist, there will be plenty of stories about another Kardashian fudgeing a basketball player to fill their pages.