| Dougie Donnelly. Oh, those were the days... |
Oh for Sportscene's golden age, even though there were only ever cameras at one game. Hazel Irvine or Dougie Donnelly in the hot seat. Jock Brown's commentary. Chick Young's fortnightly 'exclusive' that Eoin Jess was on the brink of signing for Rangers. Hearts apparently playing a 3-1-3-1-2 formation with Tosh McKinlay as left wing-back and John Millar as a right winger whenever they were on (that's how I remember it, anyway!). Those were the good old days.
Contrast with the modern day. Jonathan Sutherland's perpetually surprised face (he's just as amazed as we are that they keep letting him do this job). Billy Dodds, who despite over a hundred appearances (probably) on the show has still completely failed to offer a single phrase of insight. And, most galling, highlight editing that would shame a media studies student. With a fifty minute timeslot to fill, and six Premiership matches every week, most of the time there are two or three games with severely truncated highlights - some where there is less than a minute's action. Hell, they've even cut out major incidents such as red cards on occasion.
To call them amateurs would be insulting to those people, and there are plenty, who produce excellent coverage of Scottish football for free. Basically, the folk in charge of Sportscene either know nothing about football, or they don't give a s***. Possibly both.
When they started behaving like this last season, it wasn't such a big deal; the SPFL's YouTube channel came to the rescue. Five minute highlights of every game, with eight- or nine-minute versions added later in the week. They even went up for non-UK residents on Saturday evening, which meant a sneaky blogger who wanted to do his Talking Points contribution on a Sunday morning could use ProxFree to access them.
But no more. In 2015/16, and with next to no warning, the YouTube content has been drastically slashed. For most games, the highlights are even shorter than on Sportscene. The reason given by the SPFL at the time was that individual clubs would produce their own footage.
So where the hell is it?
When I asked that question a couple of months ago, someone involved with Hearts' own TV channel got in touch - the Jambos put up free highlights taken from their own footage throughout their Championship-winning campaign, but had apparently been ordered not to do that anymore. Now they show goals, and only goals, from their games.
The reason? Well, "one or two clubs" weren't happy about fans getting to see action for free, as they felt it undercut what they could make from their own subscription-based media. Who are the culprits, or, more likely, culprit? I can take a guess, as these internal channels tend to appeal to ex-Pats. And I don't think the audience for ArabZone or RedTV is high enough to justify this sort of action.
So it seems like clubs have been told specifically not to post up footage from matches. The small silver lining is that Motherwell and Inverness don't seem to have got the memo. Both continue, for the most part, to put highlights on YouTube. The former produced fourteen minutes of footage for last week's game between the two clubs. It did seem a wee bit biased in the favour of the Steelmen, but that's understandable.
For every other game, we got only what Sportscene allowed us to see. If they aren't going to show us more, then it'll put the SFA Compliance Officer out of a job. More importantly, it means that advertisers get less and less exposure. I bet shirt sponsors were expecting their product to get more than 45 seconds of action on the TV every week when they signed the deal.
This league needs all the exposure it can get. Restricting us all to Sportscene's weekly amateur hour is an inexplicably short-sighted and stupid thing for the SPFL to be doing.
In fact, "short-sighted and stupid" may well turn out to be this league's epitaph.
Lawrie Spence (LS) has ranted and spouted his ill-informed opinions on Narey's Toepoker since September 2007. He has a life outside this blog. Honestly.
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