Tag: Footy Five

The Footy Five — A Name That Rewrote the Story

Throughout Panthers, Passion & Politics, five Panthers directors — John Bateman, Greg Evans, Craig Terry, Geoff James and Denis Coffey — are frequently referred to as the Footy Five.

It is a useful description — maybe too useful.

The five directors became linked during a period of increasing disagreement within the Panthers Board. The first public indication of a division came with Ron Mulock’s press release of 6 September 1999.1 Even then, however, neither the directors involved nor any particular grouping of them was publicly identified.

The name Footy Five would not be applied until more than two years later.

The position was more complicated.

The stand-alone issue placed these five directors on the same side of an important disagreement. All directors wanted Panthers to remain independently represented in the highest level of rugby league.

The different “sides” developed well after the 1998 Information Night.2 The division was about whether Panthers should continue investigating possible amalgamation arrangements as protection against the possibility that remaining independent might ultimately prove impossible.

But the five agreeing on that issue did not mean agreement on everything else, nor necessarily the existence of the later faction.

As John Bateman recalled in his January 2007 correspondence with Jennie Bentley:

Any real unison between ourselves [the group eventually labelled “Footy Five”] emerged much later during the period March-September 2002 when the Board was facing major problems associated with licenced club amalgamations.

By then, the differences within the Board had become much more visible.3

And the name that emerged was extraordinarily effective.

More Than a Name

At its simplest, Footy Five identified five directors and reflected their particular concern for the interests of the football club.

Political labels are rarely quite that simple.

To start, calling one group the Footy Five inevitably also labelled the other four directors. If these five directors represented football, where did that leave the other directors?

It helped reduce complicated disagreements over governance and the future direction of Panthers to a simple binary proposition:

one side was for football; the other side was not

That distinction was powerful.

It was also an oversimplification.

Perhaps that should not be surprising. The term was created by Ron Mulock, someone with considerable experience in politics and political campaigning, and it framed the approaching board election with considerable effectiveness.

Yet the issues then dividing the Board were complex. They involved club amalgamations, governance, members’ rights and benefits, commitments made to members of amalgamating clubs and, ultimately, competing views about the direction Panthers was taking.

For some of the Footy Five, however, these issues were connected to football.

Their fear was that the club amalgamations might eventually produce a “reverse takeover” of Panthers. A changed membership and governance structure, they believed, could reopen the possibility of a football merger. Some went further, suspecting that management itself might be orchestrating such an outcome.

Whether those fears were justified belongs to the later story. What matters here is that, by the time the Footy Five name emerged, trust between management and the majority of the Board had substantially eroded.

The disagreements were real. So too were differences in philosophy and priorities.

But the suggestion that one group cared about football while the other did not was precisely the characterisation challenged throughout Jennie Bentley’s original manuscript.

All wanted Panthers to survive as a stand-alone club.

One view was that the organisation should concentrate its resources and energy on achieving the stand-alone objective. The other was that prudent management also required investigation and preparation of alternatives that everyone hoped would never be needed.

That is a much more subtle proposition than pro-football versus anti-football.

Looking Back Through a Later Label

There is another consequence of the effectiveness of the Footy Five name.

It stuck!

Once the five directors became identified in that way, the term was a convenient shorthand for describing them — including when looking backwards at events that had occurred before the name existed.

Panthers, Passion & Politics does this too.

The original manuscript regularly refers to the Footy Five while describing earlier events. This can create the impression that the grouping, the name and the political division it came to represent already existed in their later form.

It is an impression needing some qualification.

The five directors were there. They sometimes shared positions on important issues. And their relationships and influence upon one another were developing. Those earlier disagreements became part of the history that eventually produced the later Board division.

But they were not yet publicly — or privately — defined as the Footy Five.

Describing the five directors in an earlier dispute as the Footy Five makes it very tempting to interpret that dispute through the lens of what came later: football against business, football supporters against their opponents, or ultimately the Footy Five against people supposedly less committed to the game.

It is also easy to fall into the trap of believing there was a dispute over standing alone — there was not!

The contemporary story was more complicated.

The Power of Retrospect

This is one of the difficulties of telling history.

Later events give names and meanings to things that may have appeared quite differently to those experiencing them at the time.

A memorable label makes a complicated story easier to tell. Eventually it can become so familiar that it seems always to have existed.

And The Footy Five is undoubtedly a memorable label.

Its effectiveness can perhaps be measured by the fact that the terminology was eventually adopted retrospectively in the original account of these events — and subsequently in this project.

For Panthers, Passion & Politics, that requires a small but important editorial correction.

Where the term Footy Five is used in connection with events preceding the later Board conflict and election, it should generally be understood as retrospective shorthand for the five directors who later became known as the Footy Five.

It simply avoids allowing a highly effective later political label to define an earlier debate more neatly than the evidence warrants.

And in a story so often concerned with the power of perception, language and public narrative, that distinction seems particularly worth making.

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Related Themes

Conflict · Footy Five

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  1. See Beyond the Book — Resurrecting the Merger Debate ↩︎
  2. See Part 34 — An Information Night — Weaponised ↩︎
  3. Roger Cowan believed the faction — later labelled Footy Five — was well defined by late 1999 when they forced Leo Armstrong to relinquish his long-held position as chairman. ↩︎

Resurrecting the Merger Debate.

By the end of July 1999, many believed the public debate over a possible joint venture between Penrith and Parramatta had finally run its course.

On 31 July, the Panthers Board rejected the National Rugby League’s invitation to lodge a non-binding joint venture submission. Although such a submission would not have committed Panthers to a merger, it would have extended the deadline and preserved Panthers’ access to the substantial financial incentives being offered by the NRL. By declining the invitation, the Board effectively closed that avenue.

This decision did not remove the uncertainty surrounding Panthers’ future. At that stage the club still faced the possibility of exclusion from the reduced national competition. Questions about the club’s long-term future therefore remained unresolved, even though the merger proposal itself appeared to have been settled.

Five weeks later, the issue unexpectedly returned to the public arena.

On 6 September 1999, former Panthers Patron Ron Mulock issued a press release predicting that another attempt would soon be made to pursue a merger with Parramatta. The statement prompted General Manager Roger Cowan to write directly to Panthers sponsors, responding to a number of Mulock’s claims and explaining both the Board’s position and the reasons behind his earlier recommendation that merger options should be investigated.

The exchange did not end there. Ron Mulock subsequently published a full-page paid advertisement in the Western Weekender and later circulated a detailed response to Roger Cowan’s letter. Together, these documents provide a revealing insight into how the debate was conducted during one of the final stages of the merger controversy.

More importantly, they demonstrate that although the Board had made its decision, there remained a significant difference in management philosophy. While the objective of remaining a stand-alone club was widely shared, opinion differed over whether responsible governance required contingency planning for adverse outcomes or an exclusive focus on achieving the preferred result.

The community’s favoured position was well-known but the atmosphere had quieted after the July 31st confirmation.

Rather than allowing the issue to fade from public view, the correspondence starting with the Mulock Press Release of 6th Spetember reignited debate at a time when the club’s future was still uncertain.

The accompanying Digital Archive — A Campaign of Letters reproduces these documents in chronological order as contemporary source material. They are presented without alteration, allowing readers to examine the original correspondence and advertisements and draw their own conclusions.

Related Topics

Related Themes

Conflict · Footy Five

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The Myth of the Footy Five

Part 37 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 11: A Strange Response to a Lifeline

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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Few Board decisions carried greater significance than the one made late in July 1999. Panthers’ place in the national competition may have depended upon it. It was life or death in rugby league, says Cowan

Panthers losing its place in the NRL competition would have been a disaster, yet here we have a board refusing to talk about it, and refusing to sign something that would have given the club more time.

Sometimes I would have daydreams about the Footy Five attitude1. I imagined them deciding to dive into a pool from the high tower. They would climb to the top, look down and discover that all the water had drained out of the pool. This was new information. But they had already made a decision, and why would they change it just because of new information? So they had dived anyway. As they plummeted downwards, they were studying a book entitled Corporate Governance. It was open at the chapter about considering all the available information and making decisions in the best interests of the organisation.

There was only one downside to signing that letter. Extending the deadline would have allowed the media to continue its speculations, and this, in turn, would have continued to foster divisions in community attitude.

If it had been signed, it is certain that the subject would have been raised again in Penrith Council, perhaps with some questions to Bateman and aspiring councillor Evans, who had previously served and was known to many on council.2

If it had been signed, there would have been no Footy Five campaign, no full-page ads from Ron Mulock attacking Cowan and the other four directors. And there would never have been what Cowan regarded as the biggest myth of all — that the Footy Five and Mulock had saved the Panthers.

There would never have been a ‘Board Wars’ story on the front-page of the Western Weekender. And the Footy Five may never have lost their seats on the Board.

Panthers Board, management, and staff – including the Five themselves – would have avoided much pain.

It is also likely that Panthers would have been spared the enormous costs – in money, time, spirit and lost business – of the Temby inquiry. The NSW government might have been spared a useless exercise which cost it millions of dollars, and the respect of the club industry.

It never occurred to Cowan that there could have been any misunderstanding about the non-binding nature of the document.

Despite all the encouragement I had given the management team trying to have open minds and think creatively, and my own understanding of the powerful impact paradigms can have, it never entered my mind that anyone could fail to understand. I tried so hard to explain it. The document itself seemed so plain.

In September 1999, Ron Mulock sought to publish a full-page advertisement in two local newspapers. It supported his position on the merger situation and was highly critical of Cowan. The Penrith Press declined to run the ad, saying they considered it defamatory. The Western Weekender ran it. 

The ad described a document that had ‘fallen off the back of a truck’ to come into his hands. It was a copy of the letter to NRL chairman Malcolm Noad, signed by Denis Fitzgerald – and with a space for Roger Cowan’s signature. The Mulock ad quotes from the document:

‘This submission creates no obligation on our clubs to conclude the joint venture’.

The ad also noted the document to be confidential.

Editor’s Note: Following the Board’s July 1999 decision, the merger issue unexpectedly returned to public debate — the full-page advertisment mentioned here was not what sparked the return, three weeks earlier a press release lit the fire. The Historical Context article — Resurrecting the Merger Debate — examines the exchange of letters and public statements between Roger Cowan and Ron Mulock and links to the Digital Archive containing the original documents.

So, how did this confidential document get from the Panthers boardroom into his hands?

Greg Evans told the Inquiry there had been a split in the Board between those who didn’t want to merge at any cost, and those that were willing to accept the merger. Ian Temby asked if ‘the former group would have rather seen the Panthers cease to compete in the top competition than merge?’

Evans answers: ‘I can’t speak for them, but I probably would have.’

Yet the theme that resounds through Evans’ evidence is his passion for rugby league. This, he claims, first prompted him to stand for the board, and to lobby board members when vacancies became available. Yet his evidence appears difficult to reconcile with that passion. He told the Inquiry he would probably have preferred Panthers to leave the competition rather than merge to ensure top grade games continues to be played by a Panthers team at Penrith Stadium.

Mulock’s attack in the Weekender initiated the myth of the Footy Five, as Cowan explains:

He divided the Board into two groups and labelled one group the Footy Five. He was claiming the high ground for them, saying it was they who would save the club. He denigrated the three directors who had voted in favour of signing the non-binding letter.

So the very concept of a Footy Five, from the first day it was invented, was a total misconception.  I call it Mulock’s myth.

As for his other claims, there was no split on the Board about retaining our identity in rugby league. Chairman Barry Walsh has said many times, there was no vote on a merger. The only vote was about signing a non-binding letter.

What did Evans have in mind when he told the inquiry that there were some directors willing to accept a merger? Did he really believe something for which there is no evidence anywhere, or was he just having difficulty in breaking out of his paradigms?

A myth that Cowan had signed the letter grew in the wake of Mulock’s attack, linked to claims he wanted a merger and that Cowan was anti-rugby-league.

Roy Masters disagrees.

I saw that letter, and it was signed by one person, and it was not Roger Cowan.  I don’t know how hard he pushed it, but he didn’t push it so far that he signed that document.

The claims by Mick Kelly and others that Ron Mulock and/or the Footy Five had saved the Panthers from extinction are not borne out by the events of the time. The dogmatic stance taken by the Five could easily have spelled the end for the Panthers team.

North Sydney’s misfortunes during 1999 ultimately played a decisive role in saving Penrith. Norths’ stadium on the Central Coast was supposed to open for the 1999 season, but it rained in Gosford almost non-stop for months. The club had vacated its home ground at North Sydney oval, so all its home games had to be played as away games. What should have been a bumper season became a financial disaster for them.

It had been a well-kept secret that North Sydney had financial problems. Towards the end of the 1999 Season, they announced they were going into receivership, and thus had no chance of competing in the NRL on their own. The club formed a joint venture with Manly, and Penrith moved into 14th position. That day, for the first time, Penrith became assured of its place. For some months Cowan had been aware that Norths’ misfortune was helping to close the gap for Penrith. It was a tight tussle on the criteria ladder.

Cowan remained apprehensive right up until the final decision that ensured Panthers’ place in the fourteen-team competition. Three possibilities worried him. Firstly, Norths could – and probably would – finish in front of Penrith on the criteria score. Secondly, even if Penrith was only slightly ahead, grants of $20 million by two governments — given the political push to have a team at Gosford – might have somehow been included in the formula to push the advantage back to Norths. Finally, if Norths merged with Souths it would create an entirely new entity to take the 14th spot.

Each of those possibilities would have been the end of Panthers.

Cowan finally breathed a sigh of relief when Norths chose Manly as its partner. Manly had long been assured of a place, and Norths’ place became vacant for Penrith.

Panthers had survived — but only because events entirely outside the club’s control had unexpectedly changed the criteria race.

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  1. Editorial note: Footy Five is used here — and elsewhere — as retrospective shorthand. The name became associated with these five directors during the later Board conflict and election, rather than during the events being described here. See Beyond the Book — The Footy Five: A Name That Rewrote the Story.
    ↩︎
  2. This paragraph refers to John Bateman and Greg Evans two of the Panthers Board who were included, by Ron Mulock, in a group he called the Footy Five. ↩︎

← Part 36 · All Parts · Part 38 →

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A Lifeline Rejected

Part 36 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 11: A Strange Response to a Lifeline

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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Panthers was running out of time.

With only days remaining before the deadline for NRL amalgamations, the club appeared destined to miss the cut for the new fourteen-team competition. Then, unexpectedly, a possible lifeline arrived.

It required nothing more than the signing of a non-binding letter.

The Board rejected it.

Through the first half of 1999, Penrith continued to sit at number fifteen in the NRL criteria. The deadline for amalgamations was midnight on 31 July.1

Commentators had labelled a merger between Parramatta and Penrith was a ‘done deal’. Community concern was mounting. Two Panthers directors with ambitions in local politics, John Bateman and Greg Evans, were sitting between a rock and a hard place.2

Late in July, Cowan received a call from rugby league headquarters concerning the deadline.

Penrith was still highly regarded in the Super League circles,3 and they were trying to do anything possible to assist us. It was obvious to everyone that we were in dire trouble. We sat solidly at number fifteen, and that didn’t look like changing. Nobody knew what was happening at Norths.

The call suggested that we could at least maintain a fallback position if we were prepared to sign a letter saying that we were still considering a merger with Parramatta and requesting more time.  The letter would very clearly state that it was not to be taken as any commitment to a merger.  It would be a non-binding document, aimed solely at keeping our options alive.

In his evidence to the Inquiry, John Bateman spoke of the events of July 1999. He said that when Cowan presented this offer to the board on 31 July, the Board resolved not to sign the letter. Bateman also spoke of his frustration concerning a paper that Cowan presented to the Board on 20 July, with the latest information on joint ventures.

 Bateman said:

In the previous September we had resolved to stand alone. That was our view, and then Roger tabled this paper giving us more information and basically telling us that we were in a risky position standing alone.

From a corporate governance perspective, directors are expected to receive and consider information that may materially affect the organisation. Why, then, would the presentation of updated information about such an important issue become a source of frustration?  A CEO who withheld such vital information would be guilty of poor corporate governance.4

On 31 July Cowan called a special meeting to advise the Board that there had been an offer that would overcome the need to comply with the 31 July deadline. Panthers would simply need to sign a non-binding letter addressed to NRL Chairman, Malcolm Noad. Cowan suggested to the Board that there was nothing to lose by signing it.

The document at the centre of the 31 July 1999 special Board meeting. Click image to read.

Bateman was not the only one who was angered by the presentation of the non-binding letter. The ex-wife of Greg Evans remembers how very stressed her husband was before leaving for that 31 July meeting.

Why these two directors reacted angrily to a non-binding proposal that would keep the Club’s options open remains a deep mystery. Cowan developed an interesting theory about it, which seems to be borne out by some seemingly unrelated events of the 1990s.

He came to believe that the concern could not have had anything to do with merging because it was a non-binding letter and the Footy Five had the numbers to prevent any merger any time they liked. He started to wonder if the problem was just the publicity.5

Greg Evans shed some unexpected light on the events of July 1999. He was adamant that none of the Five had believed that the document was actually non-binding.

I really believed that signing that letter was signing to merge with Parramatta. So did the others.

I believe if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then that’s what it is. It might have said non-binding, but once we signed it, we were going to merge. The NRL were putting enormous pressure on everyone, standing over teams, trying to force amalgamations. It was very bad PR for teams to die completely, so it was in their interest to push.

There was debate and discussion that night, but when the letter was discussed by the entire board, the fact that it was non-binding did not come into the discussion. Every member of that board believed it was an agreement to amalgamate.

Another of the Five, Geoff James, agreed with Evans, saying his view was ‘dead right’.

It might seem difficult for some readers to believe that anyone could misread such a letter.  It was a simple one-page document. There it is on the opposite page! Leo Armstrong, Barry Walsh, Keith Rhind and Terry Heidtmann had no doubt that it really was a non-binding agreement.

The committee had representation from local councils, and from local community organizations and businesses, as well as people from Panthers management and Board. The purpose of the committee was to devise strategies that would convince the league decision makers that they could not drop Penrith.

The other three members of the Footy Five group were asked in writing if they agreed with Greg Evans’ view. Dennis Coffey did not respond.

Craig Terry says he had a different perspective on the incident. The document said non-binding, he recalls.

But my view was that signing that document would signal that we were prepared to reopen the issue

It was an important document, and we had no legal advice to say what it actually meant. It did say ‘non-binding’, but what it said was not the main issue. We had made policy determinations that said ‘no’.

Later John Bateman wrote that whilst the document was non-binding, he felt that signing it would bring about a merger. Cowan says it would be easy to jump to conclusion about Evans and James when they claimed that the document was a binding agreement, but he believes it is possible they actually believed what they were saying.

If Evans and James genuinely believed the document committed Panthers to a merger, then an obvious question follows. How could intelligent and experienced people read a document that repeatedly described itself as “non-binding” and nevertheless conclude it required a merger?

The contradiction is difficult to ignore. The letter before the Board imposed no immediate legal obligation and expressly preserved Panthers’ ability to make future decisions. Yet some directors clearly believed it represented something much more significant.

Before considering one possible explanation for this apparent contradiction, it is worth pausing to appreciate just how differently the same document was being interpreted.

Cowan suggests an explanation comes from the author Joel Barker whose book The Business of Paradigms, explains that people interpret information through mental frameworks — beliefs and patterns of thinking. These mental frameworks, or paradigms, cause people to fail to see evidence that goes against their beliefs.

Barker says that even experienced scientists sometimes fail to see clear evidence, although it might be right before their eyes, if it is in conflict with what they expected to see, or what they believed.6

According to Cowan if directors came to that special meeting with the firm belief that they were being asked to vote on merging with Parramatta they could have been “trapped by their own paradigms”.

My argument that it was non-binding and that we had nothing to lose would have fallen on deaf ears.

From the Footy Five point of view, a decision not to sign may have had certain advantages, no matter what different reasons each of them had for not signing. Perhaps it was just plain old-fashioned good luck — make a silly mistake and it comes back to reward you.

Had they analysed the situation and concluded there was nothing to lose except some unwanted media speculation, it would have been difficult to justify not signing it. As directors they had a duty to do what was best for the business, and what rational argument could there be against keeping all the options open for as long as possible?

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  1. Only the top 14 ranked teams were to be included, amalgamated entities were guaranteed a spot – so this deadline had great relevance for Penrith.
    ↩︎
  2. Roger Cowan believed the political ambitions of both John Bateman and Greg Evans may have influenced the way they approached issues surrounding the merger debate. His reasoning is explored further in the accompanying Removed Section — Political Ambition.
    ↩︎
  3. Although Roger refers to “Super League circles”, he is really referring to senior figures associated with News Limited and the Super League organisation.
    ↩︎
  4. The Australian Institute of Company Directors identifies keeping directors informed of matters that may materially affect the organisation as one of the CEO’s fundamental governance responsibilities.
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  5. Roger Cowan eventually developed an alternative explanation for why this apparently harmless document generated such strong opposition. It is explored in the accompanying Removed Section — Political Ambition.
    ↩︎
  6. “Paradigms” was a subject often covered in training sessions at Panthers thoughout the 1990s. One of the videos consistently used is available on YouTube was Joel Barker’s Discovering the Future: The Business of Paradigms. It runs for about 40 minutes and shows how easy it is for thinking patterns to create perceptions that don’t match the evidence. ↩︎

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