Midnight coverage feeds Storm fans' siege mentality
Roy Masters | September 22, 2008
ONE-THOUSAND Storm supporters sat on the cold, concrete steps of a waterfront piazza in Melbourne on Saturday night, watching the action from Suncorp Stadium on a big screen provided by Channel Nine.
While Nine didn't telecast the game in Melbourne until midnight, it supplied a feed from its Richmond studios to the outdoor venue.
The Storm set up a small kiosk offering free sausage sandwiches and soft drinks but none of these offerings placated an angry and disillusioned fan base.
Nine's excuse for not televising the game live was that it would "damage the product", meaning the network lacked the courage and confidence in the brand to compete with Channel Ten's coverage of the St Kilda-Hawthorn AFL final.
In other words, Nine believed the NRL would be embarrassed by ratings in Melbourne of, say, 100,000 against a million watching Ten. What about the damage to the brand of ratings of 1000 at midnight?
The truth is the St Kilda-Hawthorn match was such a snorer and Melbourne's passion for live sport so intense and parochial, many AFL viewers would have switched to the NRL midway through the second quarter.
After all, Melbourne produced ratings of 900,000 for last year's live telecast of the NRL grand final.
Fox Sports showed the Storm-Broncos match at 10pm with a different commentary crew to Nine, raising the question why the network couldn't have gone live into Victoria? Answer: contractually, Nine would not allow it.
Based on the vitriol expressed by the 1000 hardy souls who watched the outdoor telecast, the villain is not Nine or Fox Sports but the NRL. Fans say it's not aggressive enough with the broadcasters.
Ten shows AFL on Saturday night in Sydney and is thrashed by Iron Chef on SBS, but is determined to "help grow the game".
Similarly, Seven allows Foxtel to televise its AFL Friday night Match of the Round in the northern states, or "the developing states" as the AFL confidently calls them. Yet the NRL swallows the excuse about "damaging the product".
The paranoia in Melbourne about the disregard shown to their NRL team is such that when the Broncos took a half-time lead, some fans muttered: "Bet they give us Cronulla-Brisbane live next week because we're not in it."
The video referee also came in for abuse when a try to Billy Slater was disallowed, following a similar no-try ruling against him the previous week against the Warriors.
"They're looking for reasons not to award us tries," another said, as the video referee called for more camera angles.
A monstrous cheer came when Greg Inglis forced the ball after it had been batted back into the Broncos in-goal. But the crowd turned mutinous when the video referees decided he had his foot a millimetre in front of the kicker. The video referee's treatment of the Inglis "try" was like measuring a work of art in terms of how many brush strokes the artist used, or a Shakespearian sonnet appreciated in terms of the number of punctuation marks.
Based on the sounds emanating from the Storm 1000, the video referee should be banished. Storm fans may exist in a media black hole, but they are media-savvy.
The newspaper stories sympathetic to the return of Greg Bird to the Sharks, together with Nine's endless repeats of the so-called "grapple tackle" by Cam Smith on Sam Thaiday, have produced an unhealthy cynicism in the Victorian capital.
Should Bird be cleared and Smith suspended, it will entrench the already deep paranoia in Melbourne.
Smith didn't twist the neck of the Broncos ball-carrier, or attempt to cut off his oxygen, Storm fans ranted. Fans who once derided rugby league as the domain of the "no necks" are becoming educated in the grapple tackle.
After all, Channel Nine is breathing precious little oxygen into rugby league in Victoria.
