I found Caro's article from Sunday's Age - as I said I didn't think it was too bad
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Let sanity play role in TV scrap
By Caroline Wilson
March 20, 2005
If we did not know better, we would be forgiven for thinking that football as we know it was on the brink of destruction. Victorian clubs, according to Eddie McGuire the other night, will die under a Channel Ten-Seven-led broadcast deal, the way Seven supposedly helped Fitzroy die a decade or so ago.
The quality of the coverage of the great game will sink to its former depths, the players will lose money and Andrew Demetriou's big-picture vision for the game will have no funds to support it. AusKick, too, is on the way out.
But before the Kangaroos, the Bulldogs - not even Collingwood is safe, according to its president - and Melbourne begin creating their epitaphs, perhaps everyone should take a deep breath and consider what is really going on in football.
While the Seven-Ten alliance is not exactly a brilliant omen for the bidding war AFL chiefs had been expecting, it is hardly the end of the world as we know it.
In fact, once the dented egos let their bruises heal - and these are far bigger egos than McGuire's, by the way - perhaps sanity will prevail and the people who really count in football will realise that their game could benefit quite nicely from the proposed new arrangement.
The new partners, should they win the 2007-2011 rights, want six free-to-air games between them, not four, which is what we could be faced with should Foxtel get its way. Far from revolutionising the draw, at present Seven and Ten still want 22 home-and-away rounds, still want a day grand final and have pledged to improve football's television presence in the northern states.
Ten's proposed three consecutive Saturday games is surely not such a bad idea.
Foxtel remains determined to play a role and could even consider two weekly games instead of three with better timeslots and better games.
And the free-to-air component in the new deal has indicated the price for the next five years from 2007 would at least marginally increase from the present agreement - something that did not appear feasible two years ago.
And yet the AFL's response to all this has been the most intriguing. Certainly the competition's elders were caught off guard, as were Telstra, News Ltd and Kerry Packer's Publishing Broadcasting Ltd.
Publicly, after the Seven-Ten bombshell had been delivered to the stock exchange, the message conveyed to the football world was that the new alliance would be great for football.
On Thursday one newspaper reported that the industry would now see a ferocious bidding war that could reap the AFL some $130 million a year from the next five-year deal.
If that report was fuelled by AFL headquarters, then Demetriou and his negotiators were saying different things behind closed doors.
There they were bitterly angry. So angry that the language with which they referred to the Seven-Ten team made Sam Newman's foul-mouthed attack on Rex Hunt on Friday night appear tame.
Demetriou, who last month said that a night grand final would take place "over my dead body", has suddenly placed some caveats upon that sweeping statement.
Should a network promise Friday night football shown prime time into Sydney, for example, he could reconsider, with some other hidden extras added to the deal. Interestingly, neither Seven nor Ten has shown any significant interest in moving the biggest game of the year to a later timeslot.
Staggeringly, he tacitly threw his weight behind McGuire's The Footy Show attack on the Seven Network, although dismissing some of McGuire's claims as over the top, by conceding that without a Channel Nine bid, some Victorian clubs could be endangered.
Could it be that Demetriou is quietly panicking? Could he have honestly not seen this coming? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Seven deserved to lose the footy rights last time around and an even more compelling argument that football is significantly better off under the 2002-2006 broadcast arrangement.
But surely the AFL must have known that by relinquishing a partnership in favour of a strictly commercial relationship the stakes would change. That was clear from the outset when Channel Nine's regional affiliates in NSW and southern Queensland made it clear they had no intention of continuing the Friday night football tradition.
And repeatedly each year when the Channel Nine-backed National Rugby League, like the Australian Rugby Union, continued to stage big-occasion matches against AFL showcase games in Sydney. Packer's Nine headquarters in Sydney, and certainly its newsroom, did the Australian football code few favours.
McGuire's attack on Thursday night was many things. Misguided and even scaremongering at times, it was, though, passionate and entertaining. Clearly The Footy Show will be around whether Nine has the football or not.
There is no questioning McGuire's commitment to the game. But the same cannot be said of the "big fella upstairs". He is a rugby league man, as is his key executive David Gyngell, who is a board member of the Sydney Roosters, and did not attend the AFL launch.
Nine has been talking unofficially with Channel Ten for some five months and yet was unable to reach a deal, so clearly was not as passionate about regaining football and Ten and Seven were.
But either way, you can rest assured that football will survive this. And we, the fans around Australia, might even find the coverage of the game we love even better.
http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2005/03/19/1111086062415.html
