Channel 7. Act Now! Get your head out of the Sandy.

At first I was quietly optimistic, but as the season gets closer I wake up with the sweats every night. Sandy and Bruce together for a Friday night blockbuster? Surely this is what winter nightmares are made of.

Apparently Sandy Roberts will not present or commentate footy in 2007. This is good news as he is a poor and redundant commentator and can ruin a good game of football. Whether Bruce McAvaney’s return to footy commentary is a good thing remains to be seen. He was a great commentator, but he has been out of the game a while. And his performance at the Australian open was disconcerting. Bruce’s passion (obsession) for footy is his greatest asset. His love for the sport was never in question and last year football commentary was dominated by bitter ex-players complaining about the modern game. So his return should be refreshing. But McAvaney’s unbridled love for sport and statistics were taken to new levels at the Australian open, to the extent where he seemed to be parodying himself, enthusing over the most mundane of sporting moments.

But my night sweats do not consist solely of the mindless chatter of Bruce and Sandy. Dreams can so quickly become nightmares. The best nights are when the mighty Demons charge to a flag. It’s a recurring dream but lately its ending has changed. Instead of Neitz slamming home the winner the siren never sounds and Bruce muses openly about the new offerings on Channel Seven this week. We never get that flag, but we do get a brief synopsis of season 4 of (insert shit American cop show import name here). Making sports commentators chat about a television show during a sports game is a low, cheap, pathetic ploy and should be banished now. Nine have done it with the Cricket and Seven, with their insatiable greed for dirty advertising money, have done it relentlessly this tennis season. If seven persist with this technique drastic measures will be taken. Trust me.

But still there is optimism. Cometti will be there. And who can resist his velvet voice and subtle one-liners. But Cometti, for all his greatness, was exploited by Nine. Football commentary is about football and not the personalities of those that commentate, and Nine, like all commercial radio stations, were obsessed with the supposed personalities of its callers. I hope Seven lets Bruce and Dennis commentate, and respect the game for more than advertising dollars and the celebrity of its callers. Cometti is made great by the game that he describes, and seven executives would do well to remember this, and to let AFL be the showpiece around which they base their coverage.

Television commentary is hard. Tim Lane, once the most respected voice in the land, lost a lot of his presence on Channel 10. Drew Morphett, in contrast, reinvented himself after leaving Channel 7 for radio. The new footy network should select its callers carefully, and balance its quota of ex footballers with intelligent, unbiased commentators who know that the game is bigger than any network personality around. Then I will sleep through the winter.