Your Ideal Sports TV Lineup

Let's face it: if you don't have subscriber television, chances are you're quite likely to miss out on most live sport. Sure there is the news but that really only provides highlights.

I think Sky Sports New Zealand is absolutely fantastic especially with most of its sports now in High Definition (HD). And now that ESPN - once pretty much a stand-alone channel unlike the other Sky Sports channels - has properly become part of the Sky Sports family and also started showing most of its programming in HD, sports viewing in NZ has never been better.

Kiwis missed a huge upset in this year's FA Cup - Swindon 2-1 Wigan

But of course, there is always room for improvement.. For some reason, we are not getting any of the FA Cup games until the semis and Final and I would have liked to have watched some of the Carling Cup games - at least I'll be able to watch Liverpool take on Cardiff City (surely they'd have to win much as people would like Cardiff, the obvious underdogs to cause an upset?) in the Carling Cup Final next month.

Then again, Sky Sports channels are pretty much logjam with sport. Take today for example. There probably was no chance that the Liverpool v Man City Carling Cup semifinal would have been shown on Sky NZ due to the two cricket tests and the Australian Open being on.

Bundesliga action in NZ?

So what about a Sky Football Channel? Given how popular football has become in this part of the world, it would make perfect sense to have the Hyundai A-League, Premiership, Carling Cup, FA Cup, All Whites on that one specialist channel. It would also mean Sky could show some UEFA and Asian Champions League games and even some games from Europe's big leagues. As I have always said, the only way for NZ football to improve is to watch the best play.

What's stopping Sky? After all we already have a Rugby Channel.

Anyway, my ideal sports channel set-up for Sky -

Sky Sports 1 & 2 - All of the top sports involving New Zealand teams, i.e. rugby union, league, netball, cricket


Sky Sports 3 - More "specialist" international sports, i.e. tennis, golf, ice hockey, NFL (FOX/CBS games), basketball


Cricket Channel - International cricket outside NZ, e.g. England and South Africa series


Football Channel - Football, football, football


ESPN - NBA, NFL (NBC/ESPN games), MLB, other American sports


Trackside - horse racing


Rugby Channel - rugby union from all over the world

And then of course special channels for the Olympics like they did for the Commonwealth Games..