Martin Devlin: Matt Walsh succeeding in breaking the Breakers

COMMENT:

An open letter to Breakers owner Matt Walsh.

DON'T STOP.

Please don't ever stop.

You are the best thing that's happened to NZ sport in years. We all need a class clown, we all need a sideshow Bob and YOU are it.

Covering sport in NZ can be a sleepy old business. We don't have regular scandals or much in the way of NRL-style off-field idiocy. We lack enough real star power to make society pages always interesting - unless it's some thinly disguised or
clearly contrived sponsorship/charity opportunity.

Sonny Bill gives his losers' medal away and it's front page national news - that's how sleepy we are. Way down here at the end of the world not much of anything ever happens and in sport it's even rarer. For people who do jobs like mine we crave the big top circus act and now, thanks to Matt Walsh, we've just found the best ringmaster since Andy Martin was CEO of NZ Football.

So with rugby season finished and sports news a little lighter on the ground we, the media, the curators of the clickbait, are desperate for YOU to continue being you. So please, as I said right at the beginning, DON'T EVER STOP making PR blunders or hiring crims and thugs as players or trying to defend your players for getting high and drunk on planes. (And Matt, there's only one reason why people take sleeping pills and drink - and it isn't to sleep. Even the Warriors have done that particular scandal).

Please keep pretending there's nothing wrong with your basketball club, despite sacking everyone in any way connected to real roots NZ ball, and for all our sakes never stop defending a team with a superstar NBA child who themselves can't or won't play defence and proudly sit rock bottom of a 9-team league with a pathetic 2-7 record.

Here in media land we are loving you more and more every day.

So good luck on your glorious 1-man headline-making mission to turn the Breakers into The Broken. In all seriousness you couldn't be doing a better job.