Silver Fern Grace Nweke raised her eyebrows with a message of support for the suspended team coach in a post-match interview on Sky Sport. Photo: screenshot / Sky Sport
"Let's get on to brighter matters," Newstalk ZB's Weekend Sport host Jason Pine told listeners after a heavy sigh to close off the talkback part of his show.
"I have never seen the Newstalk ZB text machine blow up like it has. Even when we give away tickets, we don't get this many texts," he said last weekend.
His interviews with Netball NZ chief executive Jennie Wyllie and New Zealand Netball Players Association head Steph Bond didn't shed much light on why Silver Ferns coach Dame Noeline Taurua had been suspended during critical tournaments for her team - or which players had reportedly complained about her leadership and conduct within the squad.
"They are part of a confidential employment matter and what we're doing is respecting everyone in that process," Wyllie had told Jason Pine.
But unspecified concerns among some people didn't give the media - or the fans - much to go on.
"I felt sorry for you. I was absolutely irate," one of several callers - mostly male and frustrated at the lack of disclosure - told Pine.
"She read that from a notebook or from a lawyer's script and did more damage for netball in that 10 minutes than had if she had not come on," he said.
Pine told the irate guy he didn't expect candour.
"It's an employment matter. This happens in the corporate world."
The next day on Newstalk ZB the prime minister was asked for a view.
"It's a difficult one. Obviously there's a lot of legal issues going on there and there's people who are silenced and can't say what they want," he said.
"I can't work out what the actual problem actually is and no one's talking about it," Christopher Luxon added, before praising the power of '360 feedback' in the workplace.
He wasn't alone in not knowing what the problem really was - but still talking about it out loud in the media.
"We still don't know what Dame Noeline is being punished for. Just talk of 'psychological safety' and an environment some found hard. But what's more unsafe - a coach who demands excellence, or a system that punishes integrity?" said Waatea News political editor Claudette Hauiti, suggesting Netball NZ should be stood down instead.
Dame Noeline herself was only communicating in statements via lawyers - and only one player has spoken out clearly on the record in the media.
"Noels if you're listening, we love you and we miss you and we want you back here," Silver Fern Grace Nweke said live on Sky Sport during a live post-game presentation after securing the Taini Jamison Trophy.
Meanwhile, other Silver Ferns players copped it from former players, coaches and fans for not saying anything in public.
So what do we know about what might have gone wrong?
RNZ's Bridget Tunnicliffe reported two players were understood to have approached the players' association back in January on behalf of a larger group of players.
Something of a witch-hunt developed on social media after that, with fans swapping names of players they reckoned might have sidelined Dame Noeline.
On Thursday Silver Ferns vice-captain Kelly Jackson called for social media speculation to stop. Last week Maia Wilson, who recently made herself unavailable after 10 years as a Silver Fern, told Pasifika issues podcast Mandate the keyboard warriors had come after her.
"Do you wanna wear my bib, have a go and see how easy it is? You have all these coach couches and keyboard warriors, who never see what actually happens behind the scenes," Wilson told Mandate.
Online pile-on?
University of Auckland Professor Toni Bruce Photo: Supplied
Professor Toni Bruce has studied media coverage of women's sport for longer and in greater depth than anyone else here in New Zealand.
Back in January, Professor Bruce said that netball might be a role model for the online appreciation of sport.
While many women in sport attracted what researchers called 'unregulated cyber-hate' on the likes of Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and X, Bruce said that fans of the Silver Ferns and the ANZ Premiership here "turn those ideas on their head."
"Head along to a game or browse the Silver Ferns Facebook site to get a feel for what a caring fan environment looks, sounds and feels like," she wrote in Newsroom back in January.
But has the Dame Noeline affair now shown that that's not necessarily so?
"It may well be unprecedented in netball because it has always fought and struggled to get mainstream media coverage. I find it interesting that the explosion of interest happens to be around something controversial rather than what's going on in netball."
With her University of Auckland colleague Margaret Henley she's now researching the role of netball in the cultural life of New Zealand for a major study backed by the Marsden Fund.
"The research we've been doing with netball fans since 2018 shows that if they're critical of what's going on, they don't make that visible publicly. On the Silver Ferns Facebook page they won't make critical comments. The focus there is on supporting the team, the players and the game," Prof Bruce told Mediawatch.
But does the angry online reaction to the Taurua affair contradict that?
"There's definitely nasty stuff currently, that's for sure - and netball fans ... do have very intense opinions. But they tend to express those in closed sites like WhatsApp and family groups - because overall they have a deep investment in protecting the game."
"I would suspect that some of the more critical stuff might be coming from male fans or men who are commenting on netball sites. Because all our data shows a lot of the most critical comments are made by men, or by people who aren't from New Zealand."
"The vast majority of the comments have been critical of (Netball NZ) because they feel like it is letting down netball itself."
Has news media focus made it worse?
But national sports bodies are also employers and businesses. How much are news media entitled to know about what goes on between a coach and the players?
"News media has a responsibility not to speculate. But I think the current brouhaha because there's an absence of knowledge, and nobody really knows what's going on and Netball NZ won't say."
"I think it will come out in the media, and hopefully sooner rather than later, because people are certainly getting themselves worked up about the lack of knowledge and trying to fill that gap with all kinds of speculation."
"But again, it's an employment issue and there are legal aspects that have to be taken into account." I think news media can do a really good job in terms of saying, 'these are all the things we know and these are the things we don't know and these are the things that we can't speculate about.'"
Elite sport is not a democracy. Where there's public investment in a sport - financial and emotional - there's legitimate public interest in how people are treated and the likelihood of success.
"I haven't seen any criticism of the news media and I think people who are netball fans think that this needs to be out in the public. It's a definite shift from when it first broke and there was some criticism of the players - and that shifted to Netball NZ and its responsibilities."
"At the moment, we're in the middle of the mess and it would be really sad if this became one of the big stories of netball after the recent centenary, which was a celebration of netball and its longevity and how important it is to women in New Zealand and, increasingly, to some men."
