The Dominion Post

Money should have been spent on enforcing the flu-jab surely?

What $11m could buy the government

.....

More than 60,000 children in poverty

Hmmm, not sure where Stuff are buying their poor kids from but that seems incredibly cheap to me. Maybe they're low quality poor kids - y'know, the ones whose fingers are all messed up so they can't work sewing machines, or the asthmatics who can't go down the coal mines.

Pull out poster in the doom today.

Particularly loving the Rodriguez wtf look in the spikey.

i asked the dairy owner if i could take one out of one of the dominions on the shelf, he told me to go for it so i did, hope the person that buys that dominion is not a football fan.

LR7

got a copy of this, what's with the Liverpool 97 suit bullshark? why not have a traditional team photo? 

and the cut and paste job of the players  on the other side is pretty horrible

I wonder if it will it be in the Sunday Star Times as it was last season for those of us outside Wellington?

#NotShocked

Why would you still be publishing his letters?

http://salient.org.nz/2008/03/a-reply-to-craig-lin...

http://tvnz.co.nz/content/614358/4202557.xhtml

you would think that they'd screen the letters for ignorant bs before publishing them. Guess they don't get very many, so they figure beggars can't be choosers. 

Nah they publish this crap because it generates more letters to the editor. It's the old-fashioned equivalent of clickbait

yeah silly me for considering a newspaper would consider themselves to have an ethical obligation to not publish hateful rubbish. These media outlets have no standards. 

They used to but, fudge ethics and dignity.  Let's have more Henry and Hoskings clones.

Not just anti-football and stoopid - also pretty borderline homophobia. Very poor call to publish.

I'm not not normally one to complain outside of Twitter and these forums, but this one is pretty bad. I've written a please explain why they published it and link in those articles about this persons other views.

This is a person who shouldn't be given a public forum!

So I contacted the Doom Post about this letter and this is their response, apparently ok because football is a girlie sport and that's the joke.

So they don't think its homophobic but seem totally ok with it being sexist.

Bingo, just what I thought too. Have written back to them again and will post if get another reply.

Look, they could easily reply with 'the pot calling the kettle black', YF aren't perfect in this regard.

Sure, no one is but the difference as I see it is compared to our forums or at the pubs compared to a public forum like the paper. They would have had letters to choose from yet chose to go with this one.

When YF chant, 'she fell over', it is just about as public. There is also a choice that people make to participate in that chant.

Have they started employing Andy Gray or Richard Keys as editor now?

Have you considered sending the Dom Post a short response to Craig Lindsay and his pink balls possibly referencing something like "a red cross on the ball or a first aid kit inside the ball might be more appropriate for rugby in light of the recent publicity about the 34 players whose tournament has been ended due to injury in the Rugby World Cup so far."

Or maybe:

"Those of us who are fans of football would say that the sport's supremely attractive no matter what colour the ball."

Or:

"As a football fan, I would say it's not the colour of your balls, it's how creatively they're used, in sport, as in life....and this is where soccer trumps the other football codes for me." 

I'd love to get a letter back to them but somehow I don't think they will publish one from me now. (But will continue to from someone convicted of hate speech)

now now...Craig Lindsay is a very common name in Upper Hutt. 

Do a Shawshank Redemption and write one a week until they publish it

No according to white pages it's not.

I always replace 'she' with 'cheat' in that chant

I just don't join in. But I like the idea of using cheat a lot.

Maybe make that a thing.  Its a great idea

If anypone asks, it's sSheep fell over.  We say sheep.  It's not sexist, it's ironic.

their response is unbelievable. Total shark.

OK so there has been lots of media coverage in the last couple of days - mostly goodish from the NZ side .

But it does get on my Hampton when the revisionists like to change history to suit their arguments.

First up Tony Smith: 

"The Wellington public's indifference may have been understandable in the early years when the footballing fare was route-one stodge. Yet, ironically, attendances were bigger back then, with the stadium sold out for their first playoffs appearance."

I've been to all the home games for almost 8 years and I really don't think we played route one stodge for the most part.  This is just an anti Ricki mantra that has grown legs.

OUR SEASON TO REACH THE PLAY-OFFS WAS NOT ROUTE-ONE (you melter).

"But the Phoenix have been disappointing in one critical department: player development.

How many young New Zealand players have come through the ranks? McGlinchey, Glen Moss and Ben Sigmund were established All Whites before they joined the Phoenix.

Two of the most talented Kiwis, Kosta Barbarouses and Marco Rojas, had to leave the Phoenix to further their careers. It must be galling for Nix fans to see Barbarouses, a Wellington boy, win A-League titles with Brisbane and the Melbourne Victory.

Look at the current Phoenix first team. Louis Fenton and Thomas Doyle are the only Kiwis the Phoenix can claim to have developed."

So how long has the Academy been in existence then Smithy (bad Smithy that is)? Marco didn't have to leave the club to further his career.  He left cos his dad said so and so he could play CAM.  For a club without recourse to a youth squad for most of its life its done bloody well to get what local talent it has through to professional football (you pillock).

Next Hamish Bidwell (who I have enjoyed reading much more so than the boy last season - Sam Werthers or Wuthering Heights):

"The financial position of previous licence holder Terry Serepisos often made the club news for non-football reasons, while performances on the pitch left a bit to be desired."

Err - I think it only made the news when he was unable to pay the bills and then this was dragged out for a few months.  Four years under Terry/Ricki, last two seasons we reached the play offs and were one game away from the grand final.  Have not done better since.

I think we have played a more attractive style of football under Ernie but so far we have been just as successful as under Ricki.   

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.

In fact, our average attendance has actually increased each year over the past 3 seasons:

2012-13 - 6,877

2013-14 - 8,186

2014-15 - 8,689

Bouquet to Stuff - nice one!

http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/football/a-league/739...

Yeah we normally bag them, but there has been some good articles coming from them and this Stuff Nation send them your pictures is good too