The Tom Morris story made men feel utter astonishment, followed by a certain shame

It was tempting, sitting there in your shorts and thongs over the weekend, to think all was well with the world, and with football. Footy loves a ‘great story’ and the opening round was replete with them. We watched a young man who’s endured two bouts of chemotherapy kick a goal at the MCG. We welcomed back another who has had to retrain his neural pathways, and who recently admitted “I was a shell of the person I was”. We drank in the joy and lunacy of Joe Daniher. In Jason Horne-Francis and Nick Daicos, we saw the future.

After two years of cardboard cut-outs and fake crowd noise, we were gifted heaving crowds and high scores.

But we also saw the industry at its worst. On Thursday, Fox Sports’ Tom Morris was sacked for what he conceded were “disgusting and disgraceful” comments about a work colleague, after recording emerged of him using homophobic and sexist language in reference to her. In the time it took to walk the dog, he went from the high moral ground to a figure of national opprobrium. It was not a good day to be a bloke with a press pass. It was not a good day to be a woman in the media, or a woman who loves sport.

There was schadenfreude. There were straw men galore. And there were no winners. Apparently it was incumbent on everyone who had written an article – or even published a tweet condemning Beveridge – to go 10 times as hard at Morris. Apparently, you had to pick a side. One football reporter issued a statement from the Notes section of his iPhone, hoping that Morris wouldn’t be ‘permanently cancelled’.

There was a common lament, echoed in Nicole Hayes’s piece today: ‘where are the men’s voices here?’, ‘why, after reacting as though the Beveridge press conference was the worst atrocity ever committed,