Can I confirm I understand the timeline of the developments today, I was probably asleep for a chunk of it:
1) Story comes out claiming Nix meet with this South West Sydney.
2) Hyslop tweets claiming that the Phoenix have said they never recieved an email or took a phonecall from this expansion franchise.
3) Nix send pissy tweet
4) Story comes out with Gallop confirming the two sides met in Sydney today.
Have I got 2 and 3 the wrong way round? In the end, that part probably doesn't matter.
You can claim agendas all you like and undoubtedly there are plenty and some people are acting in bad faith here. But if the above is correct, you have to add the Phoenix to the list of people acting in bad faith here. They're willfully misleading (but also being tricky so they can claim they didn't) a Kiwi journalist.
If Gallop has come out on the record and straight up lied here and there was never a meeting, he should be sacked immediately. If the Phoenix are lying, well they will have to work very hard to restore credibility with me.
For those saying, it's Friday night of course they can't respond.... I absolutely guarantee they will have a member of the comms team who is on duty over the weekend, or a member of the senior management team. If they've been caught lying and we've finally got someone on the record claiming the Nix are meeting with people about the license then they need to respond to that ASAP and probably should have been prepared for it.
As plenty of people have said, the Nix sucking at comms isn't new. But today seems like a bit more than that.