In October 1999 I watched a Netball World Championship final between New Zealand and Australia. The favourites, Australia, trailed most of the match until drawing level in the dying seconds. Donna Loffhayer – the big Kiwi shooter put up what looked to be the winning shot, when Australia pulled down a rebound, quickly sent the ball to the other end and Sharelle McMahon scored the winning goal with one second remaining. 

- Advertisement -

Unfortunately, there was a minimal live audience of this tense and memorable moment in Australian sporting history. Many people I spoke to at the time had not even known the World Championships were on, let alone that Australia had won a nail-biting final.

Sports coverage on television occupies 20% of the television news and up to 10-14 pages of daily print media. So the obvious question is what is worthy of coverage in mainstream sports media?

Each week, I read pages of football reports that are largely contradictory (i.e. one day Ben Cousins is going to return to play football within weeks and the next he will probably never play again). Moreover, both major Western Australian newspapers have a football liftout filled with stories of players who have made it after being considered too slow or a coach who may lose his job after a run of losses. Interestingly, this particular story gets recycled every few weeks with a different coach or a new player, depending on recent performances. And these ‘news’ stories are at the expense of articles about hockey, athletics, netball, lacrosse and almost all women’s sports. 

One thing that does seem to be consistent is the focus on the personal lives of athletes rather than their performance. A case in point is the Cricket World Cup Final. Adam Gilchrist blasted 149 to basically put the game out of reach of the Sri Lankans, yet the media focused on the fact that he had worn half a squash ball in his glove and made an emotional gesture to his coach at home.

Much of the sports coverage it would seem is in fact tabloid stories of famous people who happen to play sports instead of make movies. It seems the only option for sporting purists who like sports for their pugilistic demonstration of one person’s skill against another’s is to set the alarm for the middle of the night and wake up to watch the World Cup final, the Wimbledon final and the Netball World Championships, because it is almost impossible to find out what happened from the media coverage.