The IT Nerd

Being an British born Canadian citizen, I take Football (or Soccer as North Americans call it) very seriously. So this morning I set myself up to watch the only match that mattered to me which was Arsenal versus Norwich City as I am an Arsenal supporter and Arsenal are currently the leading team in the English Premier League. It wasn’t on TV, so I had to watch it on TSN.ca. Not the biggest deal in the world as the quality of the feed was good. Still, it should have been on TV seeing as they are the best team in England. The first half went well for Arsenal as the took the lead and went into the half leading 1 – 0.

That’s when things went south.

Just before the start of the second half. the feed from TSN.ca failed. I thought it was my Internet at first until I discovered it wasn’t. Then I flipped over to TSN on my TV to discover that their coverage of Manchester United versus Southampton was also off the air. Instead, highlights from SportsCenter were being shown. That’s when I knew that something was really wrong. So I checked Twitter and found this from TSN:

We are currently experiencing technical issues – please stay tuned

— TSN (@TSN_Sports) October 19, 2013

The thing was, that Tweet came about 20 minutes into this incident. By that point, fans had started to express their rage online:

Seriously @TSN_Sports figure it out! You have CFL coverage on both #TSN stations. I want my Manchester United match back on! Wake up!!!

— VanCity Reds (@ManUtdVancity) October 19, 2013

Thanks for ruining my Saturday @TSN_Sports ! I really want to watch highlights instead of Manchester United v Southampton. #annoyed

— Anup (@anup_rao) October 19, 2013

https://twitter.com/jianghomeshi/status/391587449517793280

https://twitter.com/wAlex/status/391583527109931008

Many of the Tweets had four letter words in them so I couldn’t reprint them, but you get the idea. Canadian football fans were irate. You can see for yourself if you search for “#tsnfail” or “TSN Arsenal” or “TSN United” to see for yourself on Twitter. In fact, TSN trended on Twitter within Canada for all the wrong reasons while this was going on. Now the ultimate reason for interruption of these football matches came not from TSN officially, but from one of their on-air talent:

CTV News Channel and TSN TV have been down. Significant power/electrical issues.

— Gareth Wheeler (@GarethWheeler) October 19, 2013

Now I will give Gareth Wheeler credit for stepping up and providing this information. But shouldn’t his employers be doing that? Clearly TSN had failed public relations 101.

Now, by the end of it, TSN was able to restore service so that the last three minutes of the Manchester United versus Southampton match. But Arsenal fans were out of luck as the match had ended by then. To soothe angry Manchester United or Southampton supporters, they said this:

@TragicallyNFG Due to tech difficulties 2nd half of Man U game can be seen after the ManCity game on TSN &in its entirety on TSN2 at 430pm

— TSN (@TSN_Sports) October 19, 2013

That’s great for those supporters. But for Arsenal and Norwich City supporters, they’re out of luck. You can expect the rage to continue online from those supporters. If TSN was smart, they’d put that match on TV to take that off the table.

The fact that TSN had a power failure is unfortunate. But they didn’t handle this well. Thus they got this sort of vitriol aimed at them. Hopefully they learn from this going forward.

In the meantime, Arsenal beat Norwich City 4-1 to remain top of the English Premier League via three second half goals. Meanwhile a late goal from Southampton crushed Manchester United supporter’s hopes of a win. Instead they had to accept a 1-1 draw leaving them lower in the standings than they’re used to.

Too bad nobody in Canada got to see it live.

This entry was posted on October 19, 2013 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags TSN, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.