A Moment Botched

By Scott MacLean

If you’re anything like me, at just before 10pm on Friday night you were tuned into the final-round NRL clash between ancient rivals Souths and Easts. Not because I had interest in the match itself, plus I had an early start the next morning, but to see one thing.

Watch Jai Arrow walk out for the 100 th time in Souths’ myrtle-and-garnet colours, after his playing career was brutally cut short earlier this year following his diagnosis of Motor Neurone Disease; a horrible, insidious, condition whose effects Arrow is already clearly enduring.

We got to see him in the tunnel with club skipper Cameron Murray right behind him, about to lead the Bunnies out onto a jam-packed Allianz Stadium with the sound of You’ll Never Walk Alone in the background. The eyes started getting a little misty….

And then for viewers in New Zealand. Cut.

Cue the Betcha betting promo for the match.

In my living that mist was replaced by a different one. Red. “You’ve got to be f*^%ing kidding me!”.  The moment I should have been watching is replaced by a rapid-fire post on X and another to Sky Sport’s Facebook account. Livid was an understatement, and I was far from the only one.

By the time the promo ended, Arrow was already on the field and waiting for the opening whistle before taking his leave as a South Sydney RLFC centurion.

The moment we’d wanted to see had gone. The NRL quickly had the whole clip online, but here the damage had been done. We wanted, nay expected, to watch it when it happened, not on tape-delay.

The next morning, Sky was in full damage-control mode. An apology was issued, the CEO was doing the media rounds, while at the start of the coverage of the Warriors clash with Manly the thoroughly professional Laura McGoldrick delivered the on-screen mea culpa on behalf of her employer. It might have smoothed some feathers, but I suspect the whole thing will rankle for some time because it’s not the first time and not the only one in the past fortnight.

I do have some sympathy for the production staff on duty at Sky at the time. The previous NRL match between the Titans and Dolphins had run periously close to the kickoff of the Souths-Easts one (side note: Union got pelters for games running nearly two hours, yet League curiously gets a pass on it), and Sky would have been contractually obligated to run the Betcha piece. Yet it seems that no one either realised the magnitude of what was about to happen, ignored it, or had the authority (or willingness) to skip the promo and deal with Betcha afterwards. It wasn’t a “scheduling error” as Sky claim because it happened when it should have; it was a production miscue.

That fault sits with Sky alone. The promo is pre-recorded and they aren’t the ones deciding when to air it. Gambling has its issues, and it is – ironically – Gambling Harm Awareness Week, but anyone blaming Betcha and the TAB for this is out of line.

There’s a basic level of competency we should be able to expect from our pay-TV provider when they have control over what’s happening. And on this occasion, they failed miserably.

Question is, will they learn from it?

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