I am a 28-year-old man and I need Foxtel

I am a 28-year-old man and I need Foxtel.

I should have it by now, but I don’t. Actually, I don’t even have a home right now – I’m in between places – but, rest assured, once I’ve sorted that shit out, I’m getting me some Foxtel.

I’m not going to go into the history of Pay TV broadcasting in Australia, or how a dispute over rights nearly destroyed the very fabric of rugby league in the mid 1990s Super League War. 

In the end, men – and many women, too, of course – want unfettered access to live sporting fixtures. And without Foxtel, or an equivalent Pay TV provider, it is difficult to remain engaged and informed as to what’s happening in sport.

Free-to-air TV is obviously no substitute. Channel 9 persists with its Sunday afternoon delayed telecast fixture much to chagrin of all rugby league supporters. I get that this is a business decision, given they are the exclusive rights holder to that particular fixture each week and can deploy it as they please, but fuck me it’s annoying.

Meanwhile, we all saw what happened to ‘One HD’. Billed as a 24-hour sports channel upon launch, it quickly – due to “unsupportable overheads” – diluted its programming to feature shitty (yet cheap to acquire) American TV shows such as Ice Road Truckers and Burn Notice.

Now Fox Sports is not a flawless institution, mind you. Some of the presenters/anchors are pedestrian at best, while many of the former-legends-come-panellists – with the notable exception of, say, Mark Bosnich, Mark Waugh and Gary Belcher – are clearly out of their depth when it comes to live broadcasting.

But this is 2014 – and one simply cannot afford to be left out of the sporting loop.

I am a 28-year-old man and I am not ashamed to admit that I need Foxtel.

By Dave Edwards