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Earth to Channel Seven. We are now a football nation, proud and pure. The Socceroos are the number-one national team by a country mile. The World Cup is our number-one sporting mission with the Olympics a close second.
I don’t rate Graham Arnold as a coach, but by god I want to see his team play and I want to see them win. Like I’m betting all football fans and even some fair-weather spectators will also be wanting to do.
So why is the Olympic broadcaster taking the rather outrageous decision to not televise fully and live the opening match of the under-23s’ campaign against Serbia?
The Olympics won’t have even kicked off. The opening ceremony takes place a day later.
Yet Channel Seven have announced that they will cut away from the two-hour delayed telecast in the 75th minute to take a live feed of the press conference announcement of who will carry the Australian flag into Beijing’s Olympic stadium.
Are we hearing this right?
Worse, other matches in the group, including the blockbuster against Lionel Messi’s Argentina, will be similarly interrupted.
The Green & Gold Army, one of Australia’s original football supporters’ groups, is right to be spitting chips. They took the unusual step of issuing a press release (link removed) condemning the decision and allegedly are now being threatened with legal action by the station.
The GG Army described Seven’s programming decision as “disgraceful” and the choice of commentator for the match, rugby caller Gordon Bray, as “the final insult”.
Channel Seven, of course, have form on the board for treating football with disdain, as anyone who remembers the deal they stitched up with David Hill in the 1990s will tell you. From memory, it was about $25 million for ten years and Seven’s clear objective in securing the rights was to leverage the value of its AFL property by burying football completely.
There was a famous grassroots campaign against the move by supporters of football with the clever slogan “Nobody Screws Soccer Like Seven”, a play on a network ad of the time. Fans carrying banners with the message were routinely removed by police from stadiums during the final days of the old National Soccer League.
Now, as I see it, the network is well within its remit to make the programming decisions it likes – it’s paid good money for the privilege – and have whoever it likes call it – but all the same it simply could have transferred transmission rights to its complementary broadcast partner, SBS, and the problem would have been solved.
But instead it’s persisting with an arrangement that is unsatisfactory for viewers, the federation, supporters’ clubs, athletes’ families and, I would think, the Australian Olympic Committee itself.
Isn’t the whole point of the Olympics to watch sport and not press conferences?
Late in the piece Seven took the step of releasing its own press release, claiming “the live news nature of [the flag] announcement means we are time-shifting the Australia-Serbia match to allow us to cover both this important soccer match uninterrupted and also the live announcement of the Australian who will carry the flag. At this point, the exact timing of that announcement is to be confirmed by the AOC.”
Yet football magazine FourFourTwo asked Seven for clarification of what exactly the “time-shifting” entailed and were met with blank responses from the network.
They released their own statement: “FourFourTwo have made repeated efforts to gain clarification from representatives of the Seven Network as to what the ‘inaccuracies’ in our reporting of its proposed coverage of the Australian Men’s Football Team at the Beijing Olympics are. They have been unwilling or unable to do so …
“We believe Australian football fans are entitled to a clarification as to the nature of [Seven’s] Olympic football coverage and we stand by the accuracy of our reporting of this matter.”
I know who I’d rather trust.
Whatever the outcome of this mess, let’s hope that in London 2012 the whole issue of full rights/complementary rights is satisfactorily sorted and proper protocols are put in place that maintain the integrity of the televised sports while being commercially sensitive to the requirements of the stations that are forking out the money.
As it stands, football at the Olympics is one event where there are no winners.
Disclosure: Jesse Fink also writes for the SBS football portal, The World Game.
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