Craig Foster was the gateway drug to my football addiction: Getting ripped off by yet another streaming service and loving it
Maybe it was sleep deprivation. Maybe it was lockdown melancholy. Or perhaps it was wistful, sentimental nostalgia. But watching the post-game show after that breathless Liverpool – AC Milan tie, I found myself feeling inexplicably emotional.
I didn’t grow up in a football household. Unlike many of my peers, it’s not an intergenerational love that’s been passed down, parent to child. My family of bookish music nerds placed more value in academic and artistic achievement; and, aside from a few cricket-mad cousins and grandparents, barely acknowledged sport at all. I can still remember the horrified look on my mum’s face when I first asked to attend a game.
“Isn’t it dangerous?”
I can now picture the terrifying images running through her imagination: ski-mask clad hooligans chanting unintelligible nationalist slogans and hurling flares at mounted police; her otherwise progressive outlook clouded by the years of ‘anti-sokkah’ propaganda she’d been unknowingly force-fed.
Although the wonders of the Premier League and the A-League’s debut campaign had been hidden from me behind a then-impenetrable Murdoch-enforced paywall (the illegal streams in those days… kids now don’t know how good they’ve got it!), I knew something she didn’t.
For I was in the midst of a publicly-funded crash-course in football – or as Les Murray referred to it with his inimitable Hungarian inflection: The World Game.
Glued to SBS throughout indulgent 4-hour Sunday sessions, the conversation flowed from arguments I didn’t quite understand about administrators I’d never heard of, to seemingly physics-defying highlights from exotic, far-away places. From the primal roar of heaving crowds in Buenos Aires, to the fearsome reputation of an indomitable Scotsman in Manchester, I soaked it all in.
But nothing beats watching live football, and so aside from the quadrennial frenzy of the World Cup, I sunk my teeth into the only matches to which I had regular access – the UEFA Champions League. From the moment the players lined up for that grandiose choral anthem, even an uninitiated viewer knew: this was the pinnacle. Quiet as I could muster while my family slept, I’d haul my doona downstairs and in front of the television to huddle against the predawn chill, plug in my headphones, and silently pray that Martin Tyler would be on the microphone.
But whether I was watching a grinning Ronaldinho or a pouting Jose Mourinho, Craig Foster was the constant. I quickly learned that while other pundits traded in cliché or generalities, Foz cut right to the chase: he took his role as an educator seriously, and revealed the tactical battle occurring beneath the surface; the chess match I couldn’t yet identify.
My football opinions are still heavily influenced by Foz to this day: that there is a right way to play the beautiful game, that being proactive and constructive with the ball has inherent merit, and that despite our proud sporting pedigree, in football, Australia suffers from an endemic crisis of self-esteem. Rather than dismissing ourselves as “not good enough”, we should be inspired to emulate the clubs and nations who have elevated the sport to new levels.
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It’s been easy to fall out of love with European football lately. The various super-clubs are now remorseless vampiric squids of capitalism, willing and eager to sacrifice any semblance of competitive balance in a doomed quest to add zeros to the ends of their profit margins.
With empty stands, piped-in synthetic crowd noise, and the Super League conspiracy developing, the entire exercise was exposed as soulless; vacuous. Why are we still playing? Who are we playing for?
With no justifiable personal connection to competitions happening thousands of miles away, I wondered whether I would even care if European club football became the seemingly inevitable Ouroboros: the snake that devours its own tale.
And even as crowds returned and EURO 2020 delivered in spades, my enthusiasm for European football never quite rekindled. Maybe it was the oddly standoffish and stilted Optus coverage, where pundits deal in the usual banalities and generalities, taking turns rather than conversing and speaking as if they’re all reading autocue. I loved Dave Davutovic’s gloriously organic adventures amongst Melbourne’s diasporic ethnic communities, and the truly excellent Football Belongs, but the in-studio element never sought to tease out the tactical intricacies – and for me, never quite captured that special something. And as the football streaming landscape fractured further over the offseason, I wondered: can I really justify yet another subscription? How much football could I possibly want or need?
That was until Stan Sport announced who was headlining their coverage.
Craig Foster, the man who cares so deeply and so profoundly for Australian football, that in his various stints as co-commentator on Socceroos matches he couldn’t help but refer to the players by their first names. The shining beacon of morality and compassion who launched a global campaign to save a refugee footballer whose life was in peril. The man I thought was lost to our code after his 2018 bid for FFA Chairman failed – the game’s powerbrokers were not ready for his radical reform agenda, and in the field of human rights advocacy, he now had bigger fish to fry.
But like Gandalf the White, his football mission is not yet complete, and he has returned in our time of lockdown need, passion undimmed, still sporting that trademark silver hair. While I treasure his profound connection to the national teams, and re-watch his mini-breakdown in the 2005 penalty shootout against Uruguay at least three times a year, his analytical talents are most obvious when there is a degree of emotional distance between him and his subject matter.
Alongside Foster: the self-effacing charm of Max Rushden, who immediately lends an ease and comfort to proceedings. The Guardian Football Weekly host has no pretensions, embracing the lowbrow schadenfreude of own goals and inexplicable open-goal misses, and leaving the serious analysis to the experts – but always ready to challenge, or prod his co-hosts for clarification.
The soundtrack to the whole production is the constant tickle-me-Elmo giggle of Mark Bosnich – ‘chaotic good’, personified. Live television with Bozza is a high-wire act, but his intuitive understanding of the game emerges in the right company. Armed with an expensive Monday Night Football-style touchscreen desk, his odd-couple pairing with Foz delivers laughs and insight in equal measure.
Perhaps the smartest move Stan have made is to leverage Rushden’s rolodex of blue-chip European football journalists, featuring an expert guest on zoom who has their finger on the pulse, rather than relying on an ex-player for up-to-date knowledge on the teams. While watching relatively low-res webcam footage of Nicky Bandini or Lars Sivertsen blown up on a giant screen takes some getting used to, these are familiar voices to podcast listeners, and their expertise adds a great deal to the discussion.
Maybe it was the thrilling nature of the Anfield tie that so inspired me, or the nostalgic appeal that Liverpool and AC Milan hold, having met in one of first UEFA Champions League finals I ever watched. But my enjoyment honestly peaked in the postgame, watching Foz and Bozza demonstrate correct defensive body position and pointing out the spaces Liverpool were able to exploit. The Stan Sport team is knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and most of all, everyone is clearly having so much fun.
With Murray Shaw at the helm – Executive Producer & architect of Fox Sports’ A-League coverage until 2019 – and former The World Game presenter Nick Stoll innovating behind the scenes, it’s little wonder they’ve hit the ground running.
I’ve seen Stan Sport cop their share of social media vitriol for their pricing scheme, and rightly so. Having the sport package available only on top of the entertainment is a throwback to the old Foxtel rort, and prices many viewers out of the market – just as I was, back in 2005. I do hope the higher-ups reconsider.
The streaming rights landscape is now so fragmented in Australia, football fans will have to subscribe to four separate services and fork out over $750 a year for access to the best of domestic and European football. With only the intermittent UEFA competitions to their name, I can understand why some fans have decided to give Stan Sport a wide berth.
Not me, though. Rushden, Foz and Bozza (along with Max’s Football Weekly chums) have helped me recapture that intellectual curiosity and wide-eyed childish wonder; that indescribable “SBS” vibe, from back when I fell in love with the game. At a time when the pandemic denies us many of life’s simple pleasures, we must cherish what we can, and in my pajamas with a hot cup of tea at four in the morning, I will relish every second.
After hearing Foz’s familiar voice, my mum might even tune in, too.
What he said