Roger That: The overreaction to Hawthorn Hawks star Jack Ginnivan is the kind of media beat-up we don’t want

“see u in 14 days.” It’s the (half of a) sentence, that would have taken all of 10 seconds for Jack Ginnivan to write, that has caused uproar this week. The Hawthorn star left the comment on former Collingwood teammate turned Sydney foe Brodie Grundy’s Instagram post celebrating the Swans’ qualifying final win. For every “like” - and there’s been more than 4,000 of them - there’s been someone, somewhere shouting to the clouds with their fist raised up that it’s crossed the line. The same one Ginnivan is said to have walked over when he had a water at the pub last week before the Hawks’ elimination final. In the club’s dominant win over the Western Bulldogs, the 21-year-old raised his arm as though he was downing a pint to celebrate a goal. I hope he doubles down again against Port Adelaide with another not-so-subtle swipe. It’s hard to remember a more overblown reaction than this one. If you don’t expect to win a final, why are you there? Some might say it’s disrespectful to the Power, or gives them ammunition ahead of a blockbuster semi-final at Adelaide Oval. But they just got their pants pulled down at the same venue in an 84-point loss. Despite making the top-four again, their coach is at risk of being sacked. One of their play-makers is sitting on the sidelines suspended, another is nursing sore ribs. Their big, scary key forward was clawed to bits by the Cats. They’ve got much, much bigger problems than Ginnivan. Even if Port find a way to respond and win this week, it won’t be because of him. Even if it might be framed that way, Ginnivan will cop it and move on. If Port don’t, he’ll be seeing Grundy. When Hawks coach Sam Mitchell was questioned, not for the first time, over the comment, he responded by saying: “Our players, a lot of them don’t have each other’s phone numbers. In my world, you send each other a text.” “They don’t do that, that’s not how they communicate. They send it via Snapchat, or TikTok, who knows what else they do?” He added that Hawthorn great and premiership teammate Luke Hodge, who had called for Ginnivan to be pulled into line, was from “my old school days”. Mitchell gets it. It’s a new generation. So much of what there is to love about the new-age Hawks is because of that. Hokball, Hokwarts, Hok Tuah. The older generations would think its gibberish - and half of it is. But if you don’t want footballers acting like media-trained robots that take it “one week at a time”, you can’t be up in arms when by “see u in 14 days.”