March 29, 2024

News Cymru

Two sides to every headline

Wales England post match interviewer Sonja McLaughlan implies Welsh Players cheated

Apparently the backlash to Sonja McLaughlan’s Wales England post match interviews were too much for her to take and left her crying in her car. Wales Online sums up the post match Wales-England situation here

I can’t say agree with the all the things that have been said about her 6 Nations Post Match interview (because I haven’t see all the comments) but what I can say is that I was personally disgusted by them.

I’ll give two examples of her disgraceful post match questions

Asking the Welsh player if he thinks he should have told the ref he made a mistake for the first try

This is a completely unacceptable and obviously antagonistic question on many levels. Sure she is entitled to be upset but she should be taking out her anger/remorse (whatever she was feeling) on the guilty parties as she sees them, not the players.

It is not up to the players to referee the game and it is certainly not her job to imply the players she is interviewing are cheats which is what the question amounted to.

The second example was when she was interviewing the English player Farrell.

Do you think you were robbed of the result

To be fair to Farrell, he could have rolled with this question but he didn’t, and massive kudos to him. He set her questions straight and said he can only talk about the things he can control.

Either Farrell is super switched on all the time or he was standing in ear shot of the previous two interviews of the Welsh players and was ready to respond.

I’m inclined to think the later.

He had heard the completely inappropriate and unfair interviews of the two Welsh players and had is mind set on putting the record straight if he was going to be asked similar questions.

And he put the interviewer straight emphatically and professionally, Sonja McLaughlan was out of control she needed to be wound back in.

She says she was reduced to tears by the social media response to her interviews.

I personally have not seen any “abuse” of Sonja McLaughlan on social media. In fact the opposite, since she said she had been crying in her car she has been receiving torrents of support.

In my opinion, the interviewer should be neutral. Focus in on the controversial issues of the match and get the perspective of the players involved, but this is not what happened here.

What happened was Sonja saying she thought the Welsh had cheated so she asked the Welsh player do they think they should have owned up to it.

What happened was Sonja saying she thought the English had been robbed and asking Farrell for his opinion of her opinion. Which quite rightly he refused to do point blank.

It was not only the post match interviews that were off colour but the commentary of the game in general. Brutally biased against the Welsh and against the French referee to the point of using the “R” word.

Rugby is famous for it’s respect of the referee and his decisions, football wants to have the same situation but commentary like this undermines the example rugby sets and the example football wants to follow.

I’ll sum up with the coverage of Wales England by being is was completely off the rails. The commentators and interviewers, the “stars” of the coverage were in a wild fervour and I have to ask, where was the guidance, where was the leadership of the broadcast to guide these people back on track.

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