Shannon Gill

The story of how Watson came to St Kilda and was virtually allowed to ride his own ticket is being touted now as a cautionary tale.

It certainly hasn't helped the likes of Dermot Barrett and Gary Lyon and Gerard Healy, should they ever attempt to move directly from the media into a senior coaching role.

Yeah, it was John Longmire.

Of course he was saying that, yeah.

And that's, so, you know, Luke Hodge probably, probably looks as the one that could do it, but you would think that they would have to go and do a couple of years after it.

Okay, so it's been mentioned, John Russo, the fourth umpire who was brought in in the 90s, was doing Brisbane and Sydney games initially, kind of like a rule explainer for people watching in Sydney and Brisbane.

He graduates to the A-team Friday night role as someone referenced, and he became a big part of it, and he would go toe-to-toe with the experts.

I don't think people liked him that much because of that.

He had a big blue with Tim Watson, which has been referenced as well, which caused a lot of big stir and that –

Tim said, I think John thought I shouldn't have disagreed with what he was saying because of his standing in terms of being an ex-umpire.

And this went all the way down to the umpire's boss who agreed with Tim Watson rather than John Russo.

This is the classic media navel-gazing argument.

Now, I think special comments, well, it peaked or maybe it was the other way.

The 97 and 98 grand finals.

Now, we've had some people reference this on the text line.

I'm going to go through this.

This is how the box looked or how the commentary looked, the analysis looked at the 1998 grand finals.

So, first of all, we had special comments.

So that was Tim Watson and Lee Matthews on Special Comments.

Then we had a thing called Pineapple Head Playtrack.