This World Cup feels like a watershed, for TV coverage of football in Australia as much as for the game itself. With Les Murray having announced his retirement, SBS will never look quite the same again. And despite his huge contribution over so many years, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.



Australian football fans owe Murray a huge debt of gratitude for his role in ensuring they can watch all 64 games at this tournament (and its predecessors) live and free-to-air. SBS has changed its formats and personnel over the years, but it continues to present an admirably thorough and professional World Cup that puts many more well-resourced channels in other countries to shame.

Its loyalty to Martin Tyler as an addition to the mostly inoffensive “world feed” list of match commentators is admirable. I would trust Tyler to commentate for my life, if such a thing were possible (even if he did inexplicably use the words “Well done, Fifa” during the Brazil-Mexico game).

Having said that, I can’t help feeling a couple of things are missing from the SBS coverage, deficits that the developing influence of Fox Sports makes more obvious.

One is conflict, disagreement, even the occasional full-blown row.

The panels of former players enlisted by SBS for the live games – including Jason Culina, John Aloisi, Aytek Genc, Zejlko Kalac, Ned Zelic, Paul Okon and Clint Bolton – are extremely well informed, perfectly articulate and ... just a little dull. Not because their views in themselves aren’t interesting, but because they essentially tend to agree with one another.

The Socceroos’ defeat against Holland was a case in point. Culina, Genc and Kalac rightly highlighted the technical flaws that cost Australia the game, but there was scope for a broader debate about the extent to which Ange Postecoglou’s team had succeeded or failed in its World Cup task.

It’s not hard to imagine such a lively difference of views if you have access to the work of Adam Peacock, Mark Bosnich, Robbie Slater and others on Fox Sports. Not that they are individually better than the SBS crew (although personally I find Peacock the best presenter and Bosnich the best panellist in Australia), but there is an atmosphere of constructive disagreement that often makes for more compelling viewing.

SBS is not short of strong views, but the most forcefully argued are held by its chief analyst Craig Foster, whose role at this World Cup is a bit baffling. Foster divides opinion dramatically, but no one can doubt his outstanding technical knowledge or ability to articulate it. It seems wasteful that he is absent from most live coverage, appearing only in the evening analysis shows with Murray from Brazil, and as co-commentator on Australia’s games.

Foster has been a mixed blessing in those games, in a generally solid partnership with David Basheer. Though some certainly find his style intrusive and grating, he combines an acceptable level of partisanship for the Socceroos (to my mind) with instant appreciation of where they are prone to come undone, producing an extreme level of anxiety that feels appropriate to the occasion.

But as a panellist he needs a foil, someone to challenge and provoke him occasionally. Murray has not fulfilled that role for years. Lucy Zelic and David Zdrilic are fine at what they do (leaving aside Zelic’s description of France’s Mathieu Valbuena as “like that single girl at the wedding, loitering in all the right places”), but you sense they would not be asking Foster the hard questions either.

The Peacock-Bosnich relationship suggests something else that is missing on SBS – humour. The best commentary teams in any sport include those rare individuals who can combine serious analysis with a light touch and sense of the ridiculous – a Dennis Cometti or a Kerry O’Keeffe. Bosnich is the closest football has to that, and the World Cup is poorer for his absence from the station with the live broadcast rights.

This is not an argument about the merits of Fox versus SBS, or about individual panellists – inevitably each viewer has pet likes and dislikes. Overall the World Cup standard has been high. We should be grateful the nation has not been united in fury, as Britain has over the inability of Jonathan Pearce to understand the goalline technology system and Phil Neville’s outstandingly dull contributions.

But the landscape has changed since Fox’s arrival. More voices are coming through (including a few women on both channels, finally), with different tones.

SBS, with Murray as its lead protagonist for the past three decades, has seen itself as a promoter, a proselytiser of football, and sometimes of a particular view about how it should be played. The World Cup has been its most powerful vehicle to sell the world game, a tag it has popularised and adopted as the badge for its entire football coverage.

Perhaps that legacy is one reason the offering for Brazil 2014 has been a bit lukewarm.

SBS no longer needs to fight that lone battle, but instead must compete with other broadcasters and online sources for the ear of an increasingly knowledgeable and demanding audience.

Once this tournament is over and Les has been properly farewelled, it would be good to see some changes in style as well as personnel – principally for the station to lighten up its coverage a bit and find the key presenters who can entertain and provoke without losing its hard-won authority.