So what was it about the GrindRugby account that prompted players to confront their own coach? A Herald Twitter investigation (basically using Wayback Machine) has uncovered a whole bunch of archived tweets from the deleted account in an attempt to understand the Bears' very own "Wagatha Christie" scandal.
It's worth noting Mouneimne has insisted he was not the man behind the account, and OTP doesn't dispute this. This OTP investigation hopes simply to understand the account itself and how it got to the point players approached their own coach about it.
The posts in question
According to the Telegraph report published last week, GrindRugby replied to a post critical of Bristol's defence with: "Take a look at the defensive stats for last season-top of the league! Pat wants 5 mins of d training a week to focus on attack- absolute bs!"
The account replied in another post: "But all Pat wants to do is train attack!! And not even at pace or with enthusiasm. He's killing everyone in the squad."
This caught the attention of Attwood, who said it was an "oddly specific criticism" and added "are you watching us train by any chance?" It may be the most telling response of this whole saga.
There were other posts critical of Lam: "Players are fed up already! Mauls and line outs also shocking today - training attack only isn't winning us anything!"
And several posts supporting Mouneimne: "You know Omar has 16 years in pro coaching experience with huge success rates with every club?"
A deep dive into the deleted Twitter account
According to Twitter archives obtained by the Herald (via Wayback Machine), GrindRugby's profile bio as of April 2 read: "Rugby player and critic. All things interesting, funny and stupid from the okes at the top of the game."
An interesting minor detail that's different in earlier versions of the profile bio was the emojis. Previous versions of the bio from 2021 had two emojis: a South African flag (!) and a rugby ball. Later versions of the bio had the flag emoji taken out for some reason. If the players dived this deep, which is unlikely, this may have been a potential red, um, flag.
Further analysis of the account's posts shows many critical comments about former Blues coach Lam and the coaching team.
Meanwhile, there were multiple posts with glowing support of Mouneimne.
However, extremely scientific analysis of the punctuation and writing style of the GrindRugby account compared to Mouneimne's own public social media presence shows two very different styles.
Mouneimne has a very strange punctuation style where he tends to add a space before commas and full-stops when writing sentences – a very similar style to my grandad's messages to me on Whatsapp.
On the other hand, GrindRugby has a more general boomer writing style, with plenty of exclamation marks and ellipses, but never a baffling space before full-stops.
In other sporting 'burner' scandals like the aforementioned Colangelo secret accounts in the NBA, his wife, Barbara Bottini, admitted to creating and operating a handful of anonymous accounts that were critical of players and other league executives.
Other examples of posts from GrindRugby shows that the account was an obsessive poster on many other teams in the Premiership and the Six Nations as well, not just the Bears. And it was also critical of other teams. However, GrindRugby did seem to have a fascination with defence.
There are also many unanswered questions: Why was the GrindRugby account deleted? Why haven't the Bears come out on the record to address the supposed scandal? (The Telegraph report said that the team refused to comment ahead of the release of the story.)
But to reiterate, Mouneimne has denied any involvement, and from this deep dive, it appears that GrindRugby was purely a rugby super fan, and Mouneimne stan, who often couldn't help but reply to posts.
It does, however, show us how social media can sometimes screw with our brains. Anonymous posting can have way more real and dire consequences than we think. Social media can be intense sources of anxiety and paranoia. And anonymity further exacerbates the distance we have with the people we engage with.
If there's anything to learn from this, it's that sports social media users could be a bit more responsible with their posts, and perhaps most importantly, everyone should be better at blocking out the noise (when it's not outright abuse, which GrindRugby never seemed guilty of doing). It is a public forum after all.
Maybe we shouldn't pay so much attention to "egg" accounts. Maybe, deep down, it's about the (anonymous) friends we made along the way.
