Australian Football League side Collingwood President Eddie McGuire has criticized the AFL's "handling of the fixture change of their first-round meeting with Sydney," according to Ronny Lerner of THE AGE. McGuire: "We've got one million people working at the AFL, one of them could have called us." The Magpies "are seething" that they were not "officially notified about their season opener against the Swans being shifted from ANZ Stadium to the SCG," after Sydney negotiated its way out of the final year of its contract with the Olympic venue, and that Collingwood "only found out about it via a media release." Earlier, Sydney President Andrew Pridham goaded Collingwood over the anger relating to the venue shift, "sarcastically assuring the Magpies" that the Harbour City has "perfectly good roads." Pridham was "unperturbed by the Magpies' fury." He joked, "I wake up every morning worrying about Collingwood, so I'm deeply disturbed. I'm sure they'll be fine, we've moved the game from Homebush to Moore Park, not to Newcastle." McGuire described the venue situation as "rude" and supported his CEO Gary Pert's calls for compensation "for not only his club, but also the thousands of Magpies fans who had already made travel arrangements for the match." While McGuire claimed "he had no issue with Sydney over the late venue change," the same could not "be said for Pert," who described the Swans as "disrespectful, unprofessional and inappropriate" and said that their leadership on the issue was "pretty poor." Pert: "It's far more than a minor hiccup, it's very unfortunate not only what the Swans have done but the way that they're dealing with it." Pert declared Collingwood would be "100 percent guaranteed" compensation. He said, "The Swans have done this, inconvenienced everyone else solely to make extra money so I would assume it would come out of that payday for them" (THE AGE, 3/1).
