Shock as Channel Seven closes in several Australian cities
WIN Television and Seven West Media failed to reach an agreement for Channel 7, 7mate and 7two to broadcast in the South Australian regional areas of Mt Gambier and Loxton, as well as Griffith in NSW.
The free-to-air channel now says that 'Channel 7 programming is no longer available' for viewers in these regions.
Network Seven holds exclusive rights to huge sporting events including Test cricket, the Big Bash and the AFL among several other shows.
WIN Network CEO Andrew Lancaster said in a statement: 'WIN remains committed to serving our regional audiences with a strong local presence and programming.'
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Channel Seven programming has been switched off in several cities in South Australia and New South Wales from Tuesday
Residents will need to have a smart TV connected to the internet in order to access Seven's streaming services.
WIIN also dropped Sky News coverage in the area last year.
It comes after Daily Mail Australia exclusively revealed last week that Seven had poached the executive producer from Nine's nightly bulletin, Tanya Weingarth.
In an internal email, the network announced the one-time A Current Affair senior producer would be appointed executive producer of the broadcaster's 6pm Sydney news bulletin.
Seven's acting news director Geoff Dunn welcomed the appointment in the internal email.
'Tanya started her career with Seven Queensland, so she really is coming home,' the message read.
'We will confirm her start date in due course,' he said.
'We're thrilled she is making the switch to Sydney's most dedicated news team.'
Weingarth's career has spanned two decades in Australia after she started as a reporter at Seven News Queensland in 2003.
A Nine spokesman told Daily Mail Australia the network wished Weingarth 'all the best for her next career move'.
'Tanya continues to fulfil her current role as EP, including tonight at 6pm,' he said.
It was also recently revealed that Seven News bosses were secretly planning to sack some of their most popular and best-paid stars.
Former top news boss Anthony De Ceglie had a plan to axe every Channel Seven personality earning more than $300,000 per year in favour of upcoming TV stars, according to The Australian's Media Diary column.
It was planned that Spotlight chief correspondent Liam Bartlett, Seven News chief reporter Chris Reason and Seven News Sydney anchor Michael Usher were going to be quietly dismissed as part of a 'drastic cost-cutting operation'.
Sunrise and Morning Show presenters Natalie Barr, Matt Shirvington, Kylie Gillies and Larry Emdur were the only high-paid stars not at risk of losing their jobs.
However, De Ceglie's proposal was met with 'immediate resistance from Seven's more seasoned executives'.
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Times
23 minutes ago
- Times
Funky fields and ‘Bazball' batting — 2005 Ashes was trailblazing series
It was a series ahead of its time. 'It definitely felt like in that Test series we were playing a different form of Test cricket to anything that had been played previously, particularly in the aggressiveness of some of the batting,' Andrew Strauss, England's opener in the 2005 Ashes, says. He is right. It was not quite Bazball, which peaked for England at 5.50 runs an over in their Pakistan series in 2022, but England's run rate of 3.87 in that Ashes series is their 12th-fastest ever (the top nine are all in the Bazball era) — a series that they won, remember, against an attack of Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne and Brett Lee, with the fourth bowler (either Mike Kasprowicz or Jason Gillespie) mercilessly targeted, even though they were two very fine operators. This was a series, among many other unforgettable moments of greatness, in which Kevin Pietersen was hitting the great McGrath back over his head on debut in the first Test at Lord's and smashing rather than defending his way to a draw with 158 in the fifth Test at the Oval. England also scored 407 all out (at a run rate of 5.13) on the first day of the second Test at Edgbaston after being put in by Ricky Ponting. Whether or not it remains the greatest series of all time is a matter of opinion, but it certainly had an impact on the game. Take the bowling by right-armers from round the wicket to left-handers. It had been done before, of course, with England's Craig White having had some success against Brian Lara, and there had been some images floating around of Pakistan's Shoaib Akhtar really troubling Adam Gilchrist with that tactic at the end of a spell during the previous winter. But here was Andrew Flintoff neutering Gilchrist, one of Australia's greatest weapons, with that angle of attack. The left-hander, who changed the role of the wicketkeeper-batsman for ever, averaged only 22 in that series, without even as much as a half-century, dismissed four times by Flintoff, all from round the wicket. England's dressing room during the 2001 Ashes had a whiteboard detailing the Australia batsmen's weaknesses and, as a result, plans to dismiss them. Next to Gilchrist's name there was nothing but a question mark. It has been said that the 2005 plan came about by accident when Flintoff had to move to round the wicket because of a dodgy foothole in a one-day international at Lord's earlier that summer. Whatever the genesis, as Simon Jones later revealed in his autobiography, by the time of the first Test, the whiteboard read: 'Go around the wicket and cramp him for room.' It was no surprise that England had come up with a plan of some sort because the head coach, Duncan Fletcher, was a stickler for the importance of angles in both batting and bowling. In exasperation he once asked Marcus Trescothick: 'Did you do geometry in school?' when Strauss's opening partner was unable to fathom the gist of Fletcher's thinking, with the coach playfully slipping a couple of protractors under Trescothick's door while on tour in Sri Lanka. Before the 2005 series Fletcher had warned Strauss about the danger of the angles he was creating when playing Warne's leg spin. Strauss wanted to move across his stumps and play everything to the leg side with the spin, but Fletcher suggested, if the ball was short enough, that Strauss stay leg-side of it and punch it with a straight bat through cover. 'I'd just got a hundred against [Stuart] MacGill [another Australian leg spinner] six months before and I remember thinking, 'I think I'm OK here, mate,' ' Strauss says. But then in the second Test at Edgbaston, Strauss was spectacularly bowled around his legs when trying to pad up to Warne. He changed his mind about Fletcher's advice and turned to the Merlyn spin-bowling machine for hours of practice. 'Warne didn't get me out at Lord's but I did think, 'These angles are tricky for me,' ' he says. 'At Edgbaston it became increasingly obvious that I had to play it differently. Fletch was very counter-intuitive in that sense of looking to score off the back foot through the off side rather than looking to hit everything leg side. That was Fletch's genius. He was the only coach I think who really told me things I'd never really considered in the game of cricket before. 'It was like learning a different language but it certainly did help me. We had that Merlyn bowling machine and I remember facing thousands of balls off that. But it's one thing doing it against the Merlyn machine and another doing it against Shane Warne in the middle of an Ashes Test match.' Playing against the spin, as long as the length is right — either short enough or full enough — has now become an accepted coaching tip at the top of the game, with Rahul Dravid's famous email to Pietersen when the England batsman was struggling so badly against left-arm spin containing just that advice. Mind you, those problems of Pietersen's were mainly brought about by the introduction of the Decision Review System, which was not in place in 2005, and caused players to think about playing finger spin very differently, representing a huge change in the game from that time. 'It didn't affect me quite as much as some others,' Strauss says. 'I was always trying to get my bat in front of my pad anyway. Back in the day people used to squeeze the ball between bat and pad, but you couldn't play like that any more.' The round-the-wicket to left-handers theory was much more of a problem for Strauss, as South Africa's Morne Morkel later exploited it remorselessly. Gilchrist's weakness would undoubtedly have been acted upon more quickly these days. England may now be reining in the size of their analysis team a little but there is still a whole heap of data out there for teams to use. Back then there was very little. 'Obviously we'd worked out that Gilchrist really struggled with that angle,' Strauss says. 'What we didn't have at that stage was the deep statistical analysis to back up our hunches. In the latter stages of my career it became obvious that was an angle that was hard to contend with. In those days we were very much using Fletch's eye, where technical weaknesses might occur. 'Increasingly these days you will find out a player's weakness very quickly in a way that probably took longer back in those days. I was a good example. You come into Test cricket, you have a good run and then after a year or so people start working you out. That time is definitely shortened now. To a certain degree everyone knows everyone anyway because of franchise cricket, but there's fewer places to hide these days.' As Mark Garaway, England's analyst from the following winter onwards, tells me, we now know that Gilchrist was a right-eyed-dominant left-handed batsman, and so the angle from Flintoff round the wicket and reverse-swinging the ball away meant the ball was constantly going into the line of his less preferred left eye. The solution would have been to close off even more in his stance. Nowadays bowling round the wicket to left-handers for right-arm bowlers is almost de rigueur, but as David Warner consistently showed in his horror times against Stuart Broad, it does not mean that batsmen can counter it successfully. That 2005 Ashes was the first time in living memory for most of us that Australia were really rattled by an England team, particularly by the reverse-swing from Flintoff and Jones. Both of them achieved that reverse-swing in both directions, away and into the batsmen, which was quite a new phenomenon after the years of booming in-swingers from the likes of Waqar Younis (there were no wobble-seam balls yet), but they also bowled a good length doing it, rather than just the toe-crushing yorkers of yore. Australia just could not generate that reverse-swing in that series, and so they set about pinching the Australian bowling coach Troy Cooley back after that series. When they played England for the first time thereafter, Cooley said to the Australian players: 'Boys, today, eyes in the middle, no looking elsewhere. Just worry about us.' As Gilchrist later recalled in his autobiography, 'It was like a boxing glove came out and smacked me in the head and said, 'You idiot. That's what you were doing for the best part of three months in England — worrying about what the opponent is going to do.' ' The field placings by the captain, Michael Vaughan, contributed to this too. There are some funky fields these days, but Vaughan startled Australia with some of his arrangements, placing a short extra cover at Edgbaston for Matthew Hayden, who immediately hit one there to Strauss, and constantly playing on Hayden's ego that thrived on the boom of a straight drive by placing a catcher so straight that he was almost on the cut strip. Much was made of Pat Cummins's Bazball-spooked immediate use of sweepers at Edgbaston in the first Test of 2023, but it was the smart use of sweepers and in-out fields by Vaughan that also cornered Gilchrist back then. 'They were agile with their field settings,' he said. 'I certainly always felt traditionally that field settings to me tended to follow a certain path and then evolve through an innings, but it felt like they were setting quite unique fields to me in that 2005 series. There might be one slip and a floater and almost a fly slip or deep backward point, clearly targeting an area, on or just outside the off stump.' We sometimes bemoan the lack of bouncers and physical threat in today's game, and it has become an understandably sensitive subject since the tragic death of Phillip Hughes in 2014, but 2005 was not for the faint-hearted. The first morning at Lord's was a brutal examination for the Australia batsmen. As the opener Justin Langer has said: 'It felt more like an AFL grand final or a State of Origin clash between Queensland and New South Wales. Everything seemed to be racing in fast-forward. Matty Hayden was hit in the helmet, Ricky [Ponting] had his face cut open. It was more like a war than a chapter of the gentleman's game.' 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Strauss is unsure whether the standard of slip catching has improved in Test cricket and statistics in that field are scarce and sketchy, simply because one man's drop is often another man's refusal. As for the changes overall in the Test game, especially in these Bazball times, he makes some good points. He is not anti-Bazball but, like many of us, he did watch Sam Konstas's Test debut for Australia and say: 'That risk/reward doesn't make sense to me.' Indeed, it didn't. 'It's still a five-day game and it's still a risk/reward game,' he says. 'You still have to decide whether the reward for the risk you play is the right one. Sometimes the England team have got that wrong. We've come up against some teams that, man for man, we are not as good as, and we have asked them some serious questions because of the way we play. It has really ruffled people. But because it is such a long-form game you are still going to get to the point where the better team come out on top most of the time. 'To win a Test match you don't have to do anything radically different from what we did in our day, which was roughly to find a way of taking 20 wickets in changing conditions over the course of two innings and you have got to get 600-plus runs on the board. How you do that is an interesting question.' It sure is, but 20 years ago, England, unexpectedly and stunningly, certainly found the correct answer.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Crows handle the hype to break Collingwood hoodoo in strange thriller that had the lot
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Chris Hemsworth's Centr app shuts down Melbourne HQ and sacks 15 staff after $100m sale to Jeff Bezos's brother
Chris Hemsworth's wellness empire is slimming down after his fitness app Centr has officially closed its Melbourne headquarters, as the company shifts the bulk of its operations to the United States. The move comes just over a year after the actor, 42, sold the app for a reported $100m to HighPost Capital, a private equity firm co-founded by Mark Bezos - the brother of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. A spokesperson for Centr confirmed that the Melbourne office will no longer operate, and only a few Australian employees will remain on board in remote roles. The spokesperson said: 'As Centr continues to scale globally, we've made the strategic decision to consolidate operations in the US to improve operational and geographic efficiency.' 'This transition affects 15 roles, with a few team members continuing remotely as part of the US–based team. Centr remains focused on continued growth across its digital platform, performance–grade equipment, and global partnerships.' Nick Robinson, Centr's digital general manager, added that the company planned to 'continue to drive towards business goals' through 'streamlining operations' and hiring top talent in the US. It's the second wave of job cuts to hit the Australian team in just over a year, after a previous round of layoffs saw around 20 roles slashed. Until recently, the Melbourne office served as Centr's hub for content creation, customer service, and sales and marketing for Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. Daily Mail understands all 23 remaining staff in the Melbourne office were summoned to a meeting and informed it would be their final day with the company. One senior creative, who is currently five months pregnant, took to LinkedIn and claimed she was given no warning before being told her role was being terminated immediately. The brutal timing of the layoffs also raised eyebrows given Chris has been spotted vacationing in Spain with wife Elsa Pataky and their children in recent weeks. It comes just a month after former Centr CEO Zsofi Paterson departed the company and announced she had taken up a new role with children's photo–sharing startup Tinybeans. Chris launched Centr in 2019, leveraging his global fame and shredded physique to attract subscribers to the platform, which offers high-intensity workouts, meal plans, meditation routines, and wellness tips. The app charges $119 annually or $20 per month and still prominently features Chris in marketing campaigns, despite his reduced involvement in the day-to-day running of the business. When it was acquired by HighPost Capital, owned by David Moross and Mark Bezos, the company moved its headquarters to Los Angeles but kept a team in Melbourne. In April 2022, Chris told his 54 million social media followers that he was 'thrilled' Centr had been acquired by Mark Bezos. At the time of the sale, a Centr representative said Chris would keep an active role in the company and that he was still a major shareholder. The company's website retains the actor's image as founder and carries his endorsement. It reads: 'As one of Hollywood's leading men, Chris is known for diverse roles that require serious physical transformations.' 'He attributes much of his success to his team of world-class experts in fitness, nutrition and wellness. With Centr, his team is now your team.'
