SABC gives cricket audience the finger

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

South Africans who discovered this morning that the SABC is not broadcasting commentary on the first one-day international between Sri Lanka and SA in Colombo had better get used to radio silence on sport events.

The state broadcaster has pulled the plug on live ball-by-ball cricket commentary on Radio 2000 in favour of periodic voice reports, and Sunday Times has learnt that it plans to do the same with its coverage of major soccer and rugby matches.

Not only will the move deny millions of listeners live coverage, it will also put scores of freelance commentators and production staff out of work.

“We need to know where we stand,” one freelancer said. “Technically they will be firing a huge number of us.”

SABC spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago explained the decision to snub the cricket audience by saying, “We don’t have the rights.”

He confirmed that the Sri Lanka tour ODI series would not be broadcast by the SABC “on any of our platforms”.

Asked why the SABC did not hold those rights, Kganyago said, “We were unable to secure the rights.”

However, Cricket SA have sometimes allowed the SABC to broadcast matches for free because the organisation has said it does not have the money to put games on the air, much less to pay for the rights.

Funding may not be the problem. Rather, it seems Radio 2000 managers are set against devoting large blocks of airtime to live sport.

Insiders say Radio 2000 managers purposefully did not budget for cricket rights because they do not want sport cluttering the broadcast schedule of what they hope to turn into a commercial station. Accordingly, the station has been removed as a platform for broadcasting cricket.

Full match coverage on the ongoing soccer World Cup in Brazil is being carried on SABC stations only because the organisation still holds rights it secured for the 2010 edition of the tournament, which was played in South Africa.

Kganyago said he was “not aware” of plans to also shelve live soccer and rugby coverage, but another SABC source was adamant that “the sword has been put over rugby and soccer” as well.

Cricket updates will be heard on the station only every 15 minutes during the ODIs in Sri Lanka even though the times do not clash with World Cup soccer matches. The test series starts on July 16, three days after the World Cup final, but will suffer the same fate.

The SABC brings sport to many more South Africans than pay channel SuperSport. In October, 2011, 23 773 441 viewers watched coverage of Australia’s tour on SABC3. Only 2 002 706 tuned in on SuperSport.