Risking a schedule fit to burst
Rohan Connolly
The Age
December 31, 2006
YOU only had to turn on the box for five minutes at some stage this year to observe just how much of 2006 was spent looking back.
With television in this country celebrating its 50th anniversary, there seemed to be a cavalcade of most memorable this, our favourite that and top 10 such-and-suches.
Sport featured prominently in many of those nostalgiafests, this year also the 50th anniversary of Melbourne's hosting of the Olympic Games, a milestone that managed to spawn not a lot less publicity than did the original.
AFL football did its share of reflecting, too. It was 40 years since St Kilda's famous one and only premiership, and 10 years since the dramatic "year that football changed forever" with its ill-fated attempt to merge Hawthorn and Melbourne, birth of the Brisbane Lions and death of Fitzroy.
Yet there's another football anniversary falling today that has slipped completely under the radar, and with pretty good reason. It's not an auspicious occasion — perhaps more a reminder that as all-consuming as we often like to think is our indigenous game, even a football-mad public can be served up too much of a good thing.
It was six years ago tonight that Carlton and Collingwood graced the MCG for the much-vaunted "game of the millennium", a pre-season cup clash dragged forward a couple of months in a bid to cash in on the dawning of the new year and new century. It seemed like a good idea at the time. This was Melbourne, the home of sport, where you could draw a huge crowd to watch two spiders race up a wall. A game involving the AFL's most famous and bitter rivals. And a town where too much football is never enough.
Except this night. The pre-game hype had predictions of a crowd as big as 65,000. The reality was 50,000 less, only 15,000 witnessing Carlton's 88-point demolition of the Magpies, and a 12-goal haul from a controversy-free Brendan Fevola. (Yes, it was a long time ago.)
About the only thing the millennium game proved was that even a sport that has spawned an appetite supposedly as insatiable as the football fan's, there are limits. And scheduling a game before the turn of a new year, let alone a new football year, clearly breached them.
You won't see an official AFL game late in December again. Nor, hopefully, one in January. But come next football year, under the terms of the new broadcasting agreement, even without pay television, it looks like you'll be presented with enough football on free-to-air TV every weekend to make your head spin.
At least it will come within the confines of a time far more associated with the season than a New Year's Eve. But that might not make death (of interest) by football overdose any less a possibility.
Even those of us who love the game with a passion have our breaking point. Let alone those whose interest is less rabid, or, heaven forbid, only passing. And all groups will be sorely tested by the weekly football marathons in store next year.
The fable of the goose and the golden egg comes to mind, not just when it comes to the punters, but particularly for the two networks entrusted with getting about 24 hours of televised football to air each weekend next season.
Should Foxtel fail to pull off a last-second Lazarus and networks Seven and Ten split the eight games a week, you're going have to work pretty hard to miss the sight of 36 blokes chasing a ball around.
And the two stations are going to have to work even harder to make what initially might have seemed a potential ratings bonanza pay off in ratings terms, as the simultaneous glut of football on the box threatens to become a mutual throat-cutting exercise.
Those heathen folk who choose to watch something other than AFL on a Saturday night once in a while won't be appeased much whether the league ends up agreeing to the two networks' request to stagger the starting times of two games, the choice being either two stations televising the same product at once or at least one screening a game over an even longer stretch.
SBS's Iron Chef has embarrassed AFL in the ratings stakes before. The fever-pitched cooking show could really baste its timeslot opponents in 2007 as it picks up a bigger share of the football unfriendly.
The fanatics, meanwhile, who'd been happy to pay a Foxtel subscription to have access to eight games a week, might be able to do so free next season, but, in the advent of staggered Saturday night starting times, perhaps have to give up a meal time or two, with games possibly scheduled to begin on the box at 2.30, 4.30, 6.30 and 8.30pm. There's fanaticism, and then there's obsession, and that sort of commitment leans more towards the latter.
Of course, those who can stick it out will be rewarded with their share of memorable football. They'll also witness plenty of the sort that makes a few hours tending the garden a far more pleasurable proposition. Serve champagne on tap and in time, it will start to taste like water.
It was Collingwood president Eddie McGuire who six years ago predicted that turnout of 65,000 for the millennium game. Even a man who loves footy as much as McGuire learned something out of that.
You'd never suggest Eddie wants the game to suffer now, but as chief executive of the Nine network, watching rivals try to wade through a football schedule bursting at the seams, there's something to be gained from a stark reminder that even for AFL, less might well be more.
http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2006/12/30/1166895525107.html
