Television blues
Posted by Leosash on July 2nd, 2007
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Tennis fans were in for a rude shock over the weekend when Asian Channel- Star Sports decided to telecast the Paes-Damn doubles match at Wimbledon over the much anticipated and eagerly awaited third round encounter between Roger Federer and Marat Safin. It’s a little tough to find any semblance of rationale in the manner in which this choice was made. The channel then telecast the Sania-Peer doubles match, without giving any importance to the Federer-Safin match.
Tennis websites across the world mentioned the Federer-Safin match as the featured match of the day as well as a prominent match for the first week of the tournament. Here are some of the reasons why I think the channel decided to telecast the doubles matches over both the Federer and Serena matches.
1. The channel thought that a match featuring an Indian was a reason good enough for telecasting it and giving it a greater importance than a match featuring the four-time defending champion.
2. So what if Sania lost in singles, a doubles match featuring her would be good enough to sky-rocket the viewership of the tournament.
3. A sudden awakening of “Star Sports’ “political consciousness†in promoting the Indo-Israel and as an after thought the Indo-Czech Republic relations.
4. Federer is anyway going to win the title, so we can directly telecast the final?
Hope the channel does not repeat these sort of choices for the coming rounds and keep in mind that tennis enthusiasts in India do want to watch players other than Paes, Bhupathi and Sania.
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Roger Federer
The world no.
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:40 am
Totally worst on the part of Star. They are going from bad to worse everyday.
Because of Star’s obsession with Sania, we also lost Henman’s fight back in his match with Lopez.
Telecast with viewers being able to choose the match that they want to watch will be the only way to avoid such gaffes.
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Yes. The choice of matches telecasted is very wrong and i don’t see how they plan to benefit from it.
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:08 am
Well star sports is horrible when it comes to any coverage of any event whatsoever. Its quite predictable that they will show the Sania, and Paes-Damm matches by ignoring the best matches in Wimbledon. Atleast Mr Vijay Amritraj isn’t doing commentary this time. Otherwise he goes “Oh! I say” in every shot. Silly, idiot and disturbing. Come Australian Open, that would resume again..
Plus its kinda off topic, but the Formula 1 coverage sucks too. They got people in that pre-show Race Day who don’t know a thing about the sport. And the girl whats-her-name with weird hand gestures, almost goes in every show…
“Welcome to Star Sports coverage of Formula 1, where race cars are driven by race drivers and they go round and round the track, until someone wins.