SBS soccer fans can't fight the money god

For 18 years SBS soccer god Les Murray has been smiling down the barrel of a lens saying, ‘Goodnight from the world game,’ and Australian soccer fans have been smiling back at him saying ‘Goodnight Les’. World Cups, European Cups, Copa America, The Champions League – we’ve been there together in a relationship of mutual love and respect. The coverage has been enormous, the commentary insightful and it’s cost us little more than the slight productivity slump that occurs when you’re functioning on three hours sleep.

But as viewers of the current European Championships are discovering, being an SBS soccer god doesn’t particularly help when you’re pitted dollar for dollar against an ‘I-control-everything-else’ god. The result being that in Australia, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Sports is the only station televising the championships.

SBS viewers (who were never really going to warm to being tucked in by someone other than Les) have cried foul. Why does Australian Rules and cricket benefit from legislation that guarantees the most important matches will be shown free-to-air? Why is Euro 2000 ignored, when in global sporting interest terms it is surpassed by only the World Cup and the Olympic Games?

The answer to these SBS viewers is of course, ‘Go away. There are hardly any of you. Stop bitching like an Italian centre forward.’ Euro 2000 was never going to get on the list of events guaranteed free-to-air coverage, because now pay-TV has arrived, it is in the interest of both governments (which want licence fees) and media barons (who want world domination) to make it profitable. So while Mr Murdoch was happy to faff around for a period loading Foxtel with repeats of ‘The Ghost and Mrs. Muir’, he was always eventually going to start getting serious.

Even as the big events start to fall, I have vowed not be bullied into subscribing to pay-TV. Instead, I have pursued a policy of befriending people who have made no such vow, own an open fire and a well-stocked pantry. For the majority of Euro 2000, this tactic has paid off well, but then, for Thursday morning’s semi-final, my contact fell through. Suddenly I was looking for early morning pay-TV in the outside world, and my first thought was Crown Casino sports bar.

Sadly I had no second thought, for if there is a cost of free-to-air television, it’s the way bursts of fire and friendly court jesters have made it difficult for me to look past casinos for providing all my entertainment needs.

So there I was at 4.00am. Slumped in a chair. My head tilted back at dentist like angles to view the big screens. The kick-off was set for 4.45, so I was surprised when at 4.15, the sports bar screens were variously showing Aussie Rules, mountain bikes saucering out of half-pipes, and wrestlers smashing each other over the head with deck chairs. It was only when the main screen flashed to the ladder climb event at the US Fire Officers Games that I began to worry.

‘Will you be putting the France-Portugal game on soon’ I asked a bartender.

‘No, it’s on upstairs in the All Star Café,’ he replied.

‘But surely you’ll put it on here too?’ I said, confident that my fellow chair jockeys would back a move away from the fire hose hauling.

‘No. You’ve got to pay $25 at the All Star Café.’

In ‘Raw is War’ wrestling parlance (the order of the day now in the sports bar) Murdoch may have applied the figure-four leglock, but it was Packer who was now climbing up onto the top turnbuckle. Nevertheless, I made a sluggish, expletive filled dash up the escalators, unloaded my wallet, and trudged in for the national anthems. ‘Les Marseilles’ was being sung by the French fans in Brussels - their countrymen here making a good fist of singing along. I did a brief calculation to see who was actually paying more for their night out and decided it was probably the fans in Europe. So long as nobody here ate a burger.

By kickoff there were probably about 300 people whistling, cheering and applauding the players every move. The game was free-flowing, the scores close, and despite my determination to maintain the rage against Crown’s $7,500 nightly return on its $45 monthly Foxtel bill, did find myself enjoying the whole thing. After all, there was no denying that the dozen or so screens were huge, and they’d got the lighting just right so that you hardly noticed the twenty odd Daytona games pressed against the wall.

The crowd screamed ‘Por-tu-gal! Por-tu-gal!’ The slogan under one of the televisions read, ‘the greater the obstacle, the more glory in the overcoming.’ Maybe there was good in this. Maybe being removed from the SBS womb would build great new community bonds, at least amongst the pay-TV ‘have-nots’. Maybe a new generation of viewers would find glory in the overcoming.

But then late in the second half, I tasted my $3 ‘Hot Pot’ coffee, and all the hate came flooding back.