Sporting Madness

The English Premier League kicked off this weekend, but if you're a Canadian without an extensive sports television package, you can be forgiven for not noticing. Of the 10 Premier League fixtures this weekend, exactly one was available on one of the three basic Canadian sports channels (TSN, Rogers Sportsnet and The Score). That was today's 4-0 win by Blackpool over Wigan, which was certainly thrilling, but hardly the most anticipated matchup of the weekend. What about those other nine games? Well, two of them (Tottenham - Manchester City today and Manchester United - Newcastle on Monday) are available on TSN 2 . You can make an argument that that's reasonable, as TSN 2 has a fair bit of quality content these days, but it is still an extra cost ($5 per month with one other channel on Shaw). Six of the games are on Setanta Sports, with two being carried live (Aston Villa - West Ham today and Liverpool - Arsenal tomorrow) and the other four as same-day replays today. That...

Well, Rogers Cable finally came to an agreement [Fadoo.ca] to carry TSN2 shortly before Jaypocalypse Now would have occured next week when the Jays faced the Red Sox in games only available on TSN2 [ Neate Sager , Out of Left Field ]. No specifics have been released yet, but it's a good bet that Rogers caved in the end; TSN had all the leverage in this one thanks to their agreements with every other cable/satellite provider (which demonstrated that their terms can't have been all that unreasonable). Someone at Rogers' baseball division ultimately sold the cable side for 30 pieces of silver with the decision to put Jays-Red Sox on TSN2, as the great Chris Zelkovich of the Toronto Star noted earlier this week on his blog : "A deal has to be coming because, if it isn't, Rogers call-centre employees will have to show up for work that day with bulletproof vests and industrial-strength earplugs as they try to explain to angry Jays fans that they can watch the game on...

Two stories on the Globe and Mail 's website only hours apart give rather different takes on this year's Grey Cup viewership. The headline for the story from The Canadian Press is "Cup audience increases five per cent", while the headline for William Houston 's column is "Small audience tunes in to Grey Cup Game" (game really shouldn't be capitalized, but so be it). The ledes are also rather different, as shown below: CP: "An average of 3.65 million people tuned in to watch the first-ever Grey Cup broadcast on TSN and RDS on Sunday, according to numbers released by the network. The total audience for Calgary's win over Montreal in the 96th Grey Cup represented a five per cent increase over the viewership for last year's game, which Saskatchewan won over Winnipeg. That game was aired on CBC." Houston: "TSN's first Grey Cup telecast drew one of the lowest television audiences in the history of the CFL championship game. Th...

Photo: The cover of Bob Ackles' memoirs . It came as quite a shock last week to hear the news [Neate Sager, Out of Left Field ] of Bob Ackles' death at 69 [Ian Austin and Marc Weber, The Vancouver Province ]. Ackles was such an integral part of the B.C. Lions, the CFL and Canadian football as a whole that it seems weird to consider a future landscape of the game he loved so much without him in his prominent role. It's been a bad year for CFL icons: remember, we lost J.I. Albrecht [Stephen Brunt, The Globe and Mail ] back [Neate Sager, Out of Left Field ] in March [my piece], so Ackles' death takes away yet another of the characters who made this league great. Today, as an appropriate intro to the Lions-Blue Bombers game, TSN spent a half-hour of their pre-game show relating the tributes [a collection of them from TSN.ca ] to Ackles, a man who thoroughly deserved all of them. The collection of tributes they were able to put together on short notice was very impres...

Photo: Saskatchewan knocked off B.C. 26-16 Friday night. (Photo from Luongo ) First, a quick disclaimer. There was plenty that happened in the sports I'm interested in over the weekend, but unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of time to write about it. Thus, I started several posts but didn't get them finished: they should go up later tonight or early tomorrow. Here's the first one. I'm going to try to start doing some analysis of the various games I go to or watch on here. There's usually plenty of other outlets handling the game stories, so I'll focus more on the analytical side, with perhaps a bit of humour here and there. My preferred method for these is from the Clint Eastwood classic " The Good, The Bad and The Ugly ," breaking down the best performances, the worst performances and the just plain awful stuff that happened (a previous example is here ). I'll file these under "The GBU". As always, post thoughts on the series or ide...

Photo: For Hockey Night in Canada, the song doesn't remain the same. (Photo from The Globe and Mail ) CTV announced today [ tsn.ca ] that they've acquired the rights to the popular "Hockey Theme", better known as the opening soundtrack to the CBC's Hockey Night in Canada , "in perpetuity." This comes shortly after the CBC's last-ditch attempt to bring in Gord Kirke as a mediator (as if he didn't have enough on his plate with the Leafs' GM search). There are several intersting aspects to this move. First, it draws a hell of a lot of attention to TSN's new six-year deal with the league, and with every one of their games now featuring at least one Canadian team, the case can be made that their "Hockey lives here" slogan is becoming more and more accurate. It continues their attempt to look more like the first line instead of the grinders and checkers. It also should bring a fair bit of public goodwill to their side: just look at ...