The game is not the same - and thank god for that

What an age we live in. There was much to enjoy in this week’s first State of Origin clash.

However for me, the most awe-inspiring moment came when legendary commentator and part-time reality-dweller Ray ‘Rabbits’ Warren informed us, the viewing public, that Channel Nine’s Spidercam was sponsored by San Andreas, in cinemas now.

I simply shook my head in wonder, a delighted and amazed smile playing about my lips. That I should live to see such times, I thought. That the evolution of modern sport should have reached such a stage of advanced refinement that fans everywhere can enjoy the fact that a camera angle that they don’t want to see is funded by a movie they’re not interested in.

Well it simply blows my mind.

Back in the day we didn’t have conveniences like this. If we wanted unhelpful and indistinct footage from above the field, we had to imagine it ourselves, and none of our cameras were sponsored by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson vehicles – they had to fend for themselves. Back in the 1980s, when sophistication in broadcasting just meant a clean stick for Rex Mossop to bite on, we dared not even dream of a day when rugby league commentary could feature frequent references to a totally unrelated cinematic blockbuster.

How deprived we were.

But the promotion of San Andreas was not the only innovation on show on Wednesday. Channel Nine really pulled out all the stops: meaningless graphics, pretentious speeches, shameless gambling promotions.

I shudder when I think of the primitive coverage of the 1989 grand final, when James Grant plucked a loose ball and sprinted away to the tryline, without any of us even given the chance to put twenty bucks on him as first scorer. And even worse, not a single soul watching that supposedly “classic” decider ever got cash back for picking Paul Sironen. Unbelievable that we even bothered watching the stupid game, really.

The innovations of modern sport continue to amaze. The old diehards of the 1960s and 70s today must wonder how they ever managed, for example, without the benefits of the backdated suspension. It seems insane now, but there was a time when a player found guilty of violating doping codes would be forced to serve a suspension by sitting out games he hadn’t played in yet.

Laughably archaic now that we know the more civilised method is to suspend a player for games he’s already played.

Doping, of course, was itself very primitive in those days, before the invention of human growth hormone or Stephen Dank.

It’s not just in rugby league that we find the wonders of modernity blessing our fevered brows. Think of the naïveté of the backward cricket fan of the eighties, thinking they were enjoying the ferocity and skill of the all-conquering West Indies team, not realising how much richer their cricket-watching experience would be if the best players never played for their national team because they were earning millions of dollars travelling the world playing for whichever businessman paid them the most.

Of course, back in those days you could play a tournament without anyone even putting a counter up on screen to show how many sixes were hit – we had no way of measuring the quality of play at all! Did we even know we were alive?

A funny story. I was watching some old footage of a Test match from the 1980s, and couldn’t shake the feeling something was “off” somehow. Was it the comical, toothpick-like bats, such as might be used by an infant with no interest in top-edging pulls over the rope? Was it, indeed, the absence of a rope? Or was it the weird insistence on quaint expressions like “bowling fast”, “swing” and “the ball” – which as far as I could tell were obsolete terms meaning “a heavy ball”, “good shape”, and “cherry”?

Suddenly I realised the real problem, though. No Viewers’ Verdict! I laughed out loud – what kind of a game was cricket in the dim past, without a solitary text-in poll to keep things interesting?

How could anyone even know who was winning the game, without a democratic vote on the subject? Not to mention the difficult of determining what colour shirt the commentators looked best in.

And then there’s football. I can still recall a time when soccer administration was hidebound and inflexible, hostage to old-world attitudes and prejudices. When it came time to decide the host for a major tournament, it was the same old places, the traditional powers, the usual suspects.

Innovation and creativity were unknown. Incredible to think that at one point in the World Game, there was not even an available mechanism for awarding a World Cup to a tiny inhospitable desert nation that kills its workforce in huge numbers. It was up to the brave men of FIFA and their enormous dollar-sign sacks to invent that mechanism, and finally move football out of the Dark Ages.

Yes, it’s an amazing time we sports lovers live in. Let’s hope it all stays this way forever.