CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The embattled NRL club Wests Tigers have sacked their entire administration following an independent review into the club – effectively turning off the entire merger at the wall and starting again.
The club, which was born in the 1999 merger of Western Suburbs Magpies and Balmain Tigers, last made the top eight in 2011 and finished with the wooden spoon in 2023 – despite the thousands of sadistic fans that keep turning up to Leichhardt Oval to watch the boys get punished.
The new entity has reached the finals just three times since its inception – winning the NRL premiership in 2005, in a sensational grand final that many psychologically scarred fans now say was the worst thing to happen to the club because they were able to simple glaze over their very real and unsolved problems with the Whakatāne flair of Benji Marshall.
The club remains divided between three different homelands, between the McCarthur Region in Far-Western Sydney, to the grounds at Concord in the city’s inner-west to the now defunct Balmain Leagues club that has sat undeveloped and heavily vandalised on the Harbourside peninsula.
The club will now bring in former New South Wales premier Barry O’Farrell as interim chair, who was selected for the position based on his experience with turning once popular hospitality venues into luxury high-rise apartments with his highly successful citywide lockout laws that crippled Sydney’s night-time economy in an effort to further manipulate a hyper-inflated 2010s property bubble that has since caused a catastrophic nationwide housing crisis.
With the Balmain Leagues club sitting dormant for over a decade, the sugar-hit of selling the block off to high-rise developers was too much to ignore.
It is believed that both Ashfield Leagues and Campbelltown Leagues are tipped for the same treatment, with O’Farrell immediately moving to shut their bars at 10pm moving forward.
Chief executive Justin Pascoe has resigned and chair Lee Hagipantelis – whose law firm Brydens Lawyers is the club’s major sponsor – has been ousted as part of the changes – which means the new chair might have to once again reach out to James Packer’s Crown Casino or the Sydney Morning Herald’s Domain property lift-out for a bit of help.
Unfortunately the once-powerful talkback radio host Alan Jones is no longer available to help accelerate the sterile wowserism of Australia’s largest city.
