AFL 2025: Robert Walls was pioneer of football's hard take, he did not do hot takes
The same might be said of some of his hard takes. Wallsy essentially wrote that the West Coast 2006 premiership was tainted. He wrote of Tony Liberatore, who had felled Matthew Knights (whom Wallsy had coached), that if Libba had indeed split Knights’ head open, “then he has become a pathetic figure on the football field.”
He scored a player zero out of 10 for a grand final performance.
In the televisual ring, his most celebrated confrontation was with Kevin Sheedy, which followed a spat on 3AW. Sheedy, who could mix jest and irreverence with an old back pocket’s spite, had quipped “not all the snipers were in Vietnam” in the ’70s, in a snipe at Walls.
Sheedy accused Walls of “hiding” in Brisbane after his stint at Carlton. “See you on Monday,” Walls fired back. The volcanic radio exchange was followed the next Monday by Sheedy’s appearance on Seven’s Talking Footy, where Walls was a panelist alongside host Bruce McAvaney and this paper’s pioneering chief football writer Caroline Wilson.
Robert Walls on air for Channel Ten with Stephen Quartermain.Credit: Getty Images
David Barham, then the producer of Talking Footy and who became of Wallsy’s closest mates (and hired him to call at Ten), instructed McAvaney to do the introduction and let the current and ex-coaches let fly – as they did.
Walls counter-punched – hard – by noting that Sheedy had been driving a Rolls-Royce at Essendon and didn’t know what it was like to get money from his own bank account to pay a player at a broke club, and so forth. The pair ended the program on more convivial terms, like a pair of boxers who had just finished the bout.
It was riveting television.
Walls, as several media people have noted, played the media game as he had coached – hard but fair. His calls landed and even if they upset individuals and clubs, Wallsy had the commentator’s most crucial commodity – authority.
If there is no exact analogue to Wallsy in today’s voluminous footy media, I would venture that his columns were the game’s answer to Niki Savva’s now, in that they came from someone who had been inside the tent (Savva having worked for Peter Costello and John Howard), and who brought that insiders’ vantage and intimate knowledge, but opined without fear or favour.
Unlike today’s media practitioners, Wallsy pre-dated the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, which demands hot takes.
He also had a knack for reading the play in live broadcasts. Quartermain recalls how, in the 2004 game famed for James Hird hugging a spectator following the match-winning goal at Docklands (after Hird had a stunning last quarter), Wallsy had implored West Coast to surround and smother Hird if they wanted to hang on.
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In dealing with Wallsy when he was coaching – and I didn’t do so until he was at Brisbane – I was always impressed by his candour and decency. He and Leigh Matthews stood out for their unwillingness to tell untruths, even about injured players. I’m not sure that Wallsy knew how to tell a lie.
This trait made him a formidable figure in the burgeoning footy fourth estate. I won’t call him a “media performer” because didn’t perform at all.
He just called it.
