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Opinion
It would be the easiest thing in the world to just sit here and bag Fox Sports after a weekend in which even more production issues spoiled an otherwise fascinating weekend of football.
Who’d be a tuba owner these days?
Less than a week after apologising to W-League fans for the technical issues that have plagued broadcasts of the women’s league this season, Friday’s clash between Adelaide United and Melbourne Victory was marred by the strangest interruption of them all.
As the clock ticked over to the 39th-minute, the broadcast inexplicably switched to vision of a young man sitting alone in a room with a tuba standing tall on a shelf in the background.
— W-League Tuba Guy (@TubaGuy21) January 29, 2021
It sounds too ridiculous to even be true, but after pocketing $40 million to broadcast “women’s, niche and under-represented sports,” Foxtel’s attitude to actually broadcasting said sports deserves some scrutiny.
The Foxtel Help account on Twitter explained that what viewers “inadvertently saw (was) a quick peek behind the scenes from our team working hard to fix the (broadcast) issue”.
But after weeks of certain W-League games looking more like amateur productions, it’s hard to escape the feeling Fox Sports aren’t pocketing millions to produce broadcasts costing them thousands.
In fairness to the network, they’re broadcasting more W-League games than ever before. And if football eventually moves to a dedicated Over-the-Top streaming service, these are the sort of production woes that could just as easily follow.
But if Friday wasn’t great, Saturday wasn’t much better.
It started with Western United’s insane nil-all draw with Melbourne Victory – a game so action-packed it should become a quiz answer for the most undeserving scoreless draw of all time.
Besart Berisha’s goal against his former club being chalked off by VAR after Connor Pain strayed a millimetre offside was bad enough, but what happened to substitute Dylan Pierias in the second half was farcical.
The 20-year-old looked like he’d won the derby for Western United in the most dramatic of circumstances, only for VAR to call the action back after another offside flag in the build-up.
It might have been the correct call, but you couldn’t tell on TV because the angle of the camera and the vision it produced was so grainy you couldn’t actually see where Pierias started and the body of Victory defender Ryan Shotton ended.
So from a game in which Western United looked to have scored two expertly-taken goals, VAR sent the raucous AAMI Park crowd home believing neither team had scored any.
And when it rains it really does pour, with Brisbane Roar fans forced to wait an extra hour for their clash with Adelaide United in Redcliffe to kick off after a wild storm in Campbelltown caused a lengthy delay in the preceding match between Macarthur and Sydney FC.
Fox Sports can’t control the weather, of course, but forcing Roar fans who’ve already made the lengthy drive up to Redcliffe to sit around and wait an additional hour for another game to finish pretty much sums up where the A-League is at.
Which is annoying, because this was another weekend of gripping football and positive storylines.
From Andrew Durante’s 400th top-flight game to Milos Ninkovic’s solo goal, Alou Kuol scoring again, Brisbane’s resurgence under Warren Moon and Perth Glory’s backs-to-the-wall win over Melbourne City, so much was happening it was hard to know where to look.
It’s been a while since the A-League has felt like that, and it’s hardly a stretch to say the past few weeks have produced some of the most entertaining football in years.
The competition’s administrators just need to find a way to market that fact beyond the core of dedicated viewers still regularly tuning in.
Ongoing broadcast woes don’t help in that regard. But on a weekend in which the action on the pitch was simply too good ignore, maybe that’s the part we should all focus on.