In his opinion piece on the SBS website, Les Murray rips into Frank Farina and Frank’s whinging and whining about SBS being awarded the rights to exclusively broadcast the 2010 and 2014 World Cup finals tournaments.
When I heard the news about SBS getting the rights, I was wrapped. Great news that meant I, along with the rest of the Australian football viewing public wouldn’t have to subscribe to pay TV, or crash at someone’s place who has Foxtel, to watch the game we love, or have the coverage of the beautiful game butchered by one of the commercial networks. This however is merely a personal benefit, to me and other football fans, which is tiny in comparison to the benefit the sport in Australia will get as a result of the game being available on free-to-air TV. As Les said, SBS having exclusive rights was a “win-win for everyone”.
However, one Mr Frank Farina isn’t happy about it.
Les informs us that:
In a column in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, under the headline Game Deserves Better than SBS, [Farina] attempts to argue that the World Cup deal ushers in eight years of darkness for the game.
He begins his piece with ‘SBS likes nothing more than to deal in conspiracy theories’. But this from the man who once claimed, and still does, that he got shafted as national coach because SBS was conducting a conspiracy against him.
(One get the feeling that Frank doesn’t like SBS).
Les goes on to destroy each and every point Farina made in his column, but the pièce de résistance in Les Murray’s article was the following:
The minnow is Frank Farina, a failed coach now trying to make a career out of that failure, a man to whom the game owes nothing and SBS owes even less.
You tell him Les!
[Originally posted on worldcupblog.org and recovered from waybackmachine and reposted here with spelling and grammar corrections on 03 August 2023]