: Seeing Red Rising, Red New Blood & Red Marks for Reporting

Due to the lack of quality content of local origin available on the Idiot Box, the ESPN & Starsport cable channels has always been among the prime alternatives for me.Last weekend, a double header clash of the giants in EPL had me on the edge for both Saturday & Sunday nite (more like early Monday morning too). Congratulations to the Liverpool faithfuls. Kudos too for the Gunners die-hards.Apart from the on-field drama, which was great indeed ( shall not be elaborated in details as that's for another forum), I can't help but be envious of the production people in those two channels. They have one of the most popular sports product in world as their raw materials and a ready made footie hungry viewers this side of the globe eagerly waiting to be satisfied.Good products & good buyers. I am envious indeed. However as last weekend also saw the Malaysian Open (badminton) and Australian Open (tennis) in progress, I was finger tapping the remote like crazy.The hazard of that was not physical but editorial. While the the two cable channels deliver in an almost perfect way, the free to air local channel packaging irritatingly lags years behind.We are still at the 'Nurul Huda Puteri Emas Negara in the 80s TV mode' .Commentaries are redundant to the point of suffocation.Pronounciations and enunciations are careless at best.Editorial direction seems clueless.Narratives are disjointed in terms of story flow and visual editing.To shift to such contrasting qualities of production at rapid pace made the discrepancies glaringly obvious.Please, can we have a bit of intelligent and professionalism in the local TV coverage of sports?Not that I am a wannabe Mat Saleh forgetting my traditional roots hence rooting for 'gwailo' dominated channels.I have dissatisfactions with them too.After countless episodes and man hours of laborious following of ESPN & Starsports, they are not perfect too.John Dykes, I personally feel has grown too confident and cocksure of himself that he is too methododical in his handling of the disucssions. Too empirical in his analysis, too Mat Saleh in his worldview and rigid to the point of boringly predictable in his presentation. I now got the feeling that he is more focused on how he looks and sounds, more than the content.But don't get me wrong. John Dykes is still by far the best sports anchor as far as this region is concerned for me. However Andrew Leci is quietly but rapidly having my votes for that acknowledgement. But these are questions of taste and preferences. They are ok, but I want more. Unlike our local coverage, which fails and fails miserably to deliver quality viewing.
Labels: Sporty Byte