Arrivederci Motson

The journalist and broadcaster Danny Baker once noted that the primary role of a football commentator is to make the exasperated television viewer shout "WE KNOW!" at the television screen during matches, to the extent that it famously used to drive his father to his distraction. Sadly, Mr Baker Senior passed away earlier this year - not quite long enough to be able to raise a toast to the retirement of John Motson, the veteran BBC commentator, who has announced his retirement from live commentary from the BBC following their failure to secure major television rights ahead of the new season. He will continue to turn up on "Match Of The Day", but it is the beginning of the end of an era for someone that has (rather too much, some might add) become an iconic figure within the modern game. For those of us that are British and are in our mid-30s, the majority of the faces and voices that we grew up with have either died or retired. The likes of Jimmy Hill, Ian St John, Barry Davies and Brian Moore will (for better or for worse) not be heard in our living rooms again, but Motson's departure from the scene is arguably the highest profile retirement from football broadcasting since Barry Davies retired in 2004.

John Motson's reputation was built in the space of one match - the FA Cup Third Round Replay between Hereford United and Newcastle United in 1972. The match had been postponed three times because of the weather, and its eventual Saturday afternoon scheduling meant that Motson was packed off to Hereford to cover what had been scheduled as a filler match between more important business from the Football League. As it turned out, however, Hereford (then of the Southern League) came from a goal behind to beat First Division Newcastle by two goals to one, and the match, complete with Motson's breathless commentary, was propelled up the food chain to be that evening's featured match. The BBC had taken drastic action to overhaul the image of its football coverage in the early 1970s, replacing Kenneth Wolstenholme with David Coleman in 1971, and Motson was the final piece in their new, revamped jigsaw, alongside Barry Davies, who had joined the corporation in 1969. Coleman would remain the BBC comentator for FA Cup finals until 1976, however, and Motson didn't cover a World Cup final for them until 1982. By then, however, Coleman had been shunted sideways wo concentrate on athletics, and Motson and Davies would go on to rule the roost for over twenty years.

Motson's reputation was built upon the near obsessive manner of his pre-match preparation. In an era in which a wealth of information was not at the fingertips of the watching audience, this was a critical part of his appeal. In recent years, however, this has become less important and, of anything, we have begun to notice his mistakes more and more, especially since the rise to prominence of the internet, which gives the viewer fingertip access to a range of information that Motson would have found bewildering when he was in his statistical prime. In terms of his actual commentary style, he has become a parody of himself in some respects. During the 2002 World Cup he became strangely obsessed with the fact that many of the matches were kicking off at very early times at home, and took to throwing in many references to breakfast into his commentaries. To say that it was a stylistic disaster would be something of an understatement. Matches were peppered with references to sausages and tea, culminating in him imploring the watching television audience to start smashing cups when David Beckham's penalty beat Argentina in England's second group match.

It's true to say that the current generation of football commentators that are coming through are much of a muchness and that a commentator with such personality will be missed, but it is difficult to arrive at any conclusion other than that John Motson had gone past his sell-by date to the point of being something of an anachronism. It says something that, in some respects, he is still the best of the lot, and the BBC have a responsibility to ensure that they do what they can in order to maintain the tradition of high quality journalism and idiosyncratic commentary styles that used to make watching the football there such a pleasure. With the likes of Jonathan Pearce now being likely to be the corporation's voice of live football, the long term prognosis isn't good, and you might just be pining for the likes of John Motson sooner than you might have expected.

Jonathan Pearce, A Billion People & Several Sleepless Nights

Sometimes, comments that I have seen on the television or in the papers take lodge in my head, sit there and fester. About three weeks ago, though, a comment made on the television has started to overtake my waking hours, and it's a comment that, in an almost abstract fashion, says about as much as you need to know about the modern game in Britain. I have to say that I don't watch "Match Of The Day" as much as I probably should these days (I normally manage to catch a couple of live matches and "Match Of The Day 2" on Sunday nights) but, three weeks ago, when Chelsea played Manchester United, I thought I should make an exception. I'd been to a match that afternoon and had missed the drama unfolding live, but even I realised that this was quite an important match in terms of deciding the outcome of the Premier League title. So, cue Gary Lineker and his strangely cheap looking shirts, and the "Match Of The Day" studio, which is half-way between the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise and the Duty Free shop on a cross channel ferry. Gary winked conspiratorially and took us over to Jonathan Pearce at Stamford Bridge.

What happened next is what has been troubling me for a few weeks now. To put no fine a point on it, as the players were coming out onto the pitch, Pearce stated that "almost a billion people are watching" the match. Over the next couple of days, I had a look around to see if anyone else had picked up on this statement, but they seemed not to have done. On the Monday after the match, I took the unusual step of buying almost all of the daily papers, but no-one mentioned it. I started to think that maybe he hadn't said it at all. It all ended up in the slightly farcical sight of me frantically downloading that episode of "Match Of The Day", to confirm whether he had said it or not. He had, and I've got the proof. As the players come out onto the pitch at Stamford Bridge, Jonathan Pearce says, "nearly a billion people worldwide are watching this brunch crunch". Leaving aside the linguistic clunkiness of the phrase "brunch crunch" for a moment, this is a statement that really managed to get under my skin, and I'll have a go at explaining why.

The thing is, it's untrue, and it's untrue in several respects. Firstly, in spite of considerable amounts of debate in the letters page of "When Saturday Comes", the BBC still sends its commentators to at least its featured match. It is, therefore, safe to assume that Pearce's commentary was "live" - that's to say, it's what he said as the teams came out onto the pitch. Out of curiosity, how could he conceivably had any clue what the television audience for this match was? Indeed, global television audiences aren't just exceptionally difficult to predict. It's very, very difficult to state even days after the event what the global television audience for something was. For example, the largest ever global television audience for a football match (and, yes, I will be coming back to this) was for the 2006 World Cup Final between France and Italy, which was reported variously as being watched by between 500m and 750m people. The fact of the matter is that no-one knows what the global television audience for that match was.

Secondly, it is clearly an over-exaggerated figure, plucked, it would appear completely from thin air. As I noted above, the highest ever television audience for a live football match was between 500m and 750m, for the 2006 World Cup final. I'm not saying for a second that there is no global demand for the Premier League, and neither am I saying that interest would be slight. However, to suggest that between fifty and one hundred percent more people would be watching this match than World Cup final strikes me as being hyperbole of the first order. I recently read an article on the UEFA website which speculated on a global television audience of "over 100 million" people. Was Jonathan Pearce suggesting that more people are interested in the Premier League than in the Champions League? Nine or ten times more people? I mean, surely all Manchester United and Chelsea supporters know that the Champions League is more important than the Premier League, don't they?

Finally, I scanned the papers on Monday morning, and no-one mentioned the global television viewing audience at all. I'm almost certainly alone in this viewpoint (and I may be slightly old fashioned in this respect), but I do rather feel that football commentators are, ultimately, journalists and, as such, have a duty to at least tell the truth, as opposed to plucking random figures from thin air because they sound impressive. So, a splash of hubris, a dash of hype, and all built on an arbitrary figure that was plucked from thin air and almost certainly bears no relevance to the truth. How apt, for the Premier League.

The Wright Stuff

With its relatively recent descent into chest-beating populism, the BBC has left itself fairly open to criticism over the last few years in terms of its football coverage. This reached something of a nadir at the 2006 World Cup when England were knocked out by Portugal, and any pretence of rational analysis went out of the window. Ian Wright, sitting glumly in the studio, almost completely lost for words, was the most potent symbol possible for the crushing contradiction between expectation and the reality of the England team's limitations. The news that he has been released by the BBC comes as no surprise to those of us that have been keeping a close eye on the BBC's descent into ITV-esque tabloid broadcasting.

You could learn about much as you need to about Wright from a telling interview with Jim Rosenthal for Channel Four's "100 Greatest World Cup Moments", which was broadcast on the eve of the 2002 World Cup. Rosenthal related a story about the match in St Etienne in 1998 in Argentina. He was watching the match when it became apparent that the ITV team was being targeted for extraordinary levels of abuse by the section of the Argentine support sitting immediately below them. When he turned around, he said, there was "Wrighty", with a flag draped around his shoulders, goading them for all he was worth. The story was relayed as a symbol of Wrights "passion" but, considering what the English supporters had been up to in Marseille a couple of weeks previously (turning the French efforts to be welcoming hosts to ruin by rioting on the beach during the England vs Tunisia match), it struck me as being the crass behaviour of the worst sort by someone that, ultimately, was in France to be paid to to a job.

Wright has not sought to blame the matter of his race on the issue, but that's not to say that there haven't been others to do so on his behalf, such as The Guardian's very white and middle class looking Martin Jacques, who effectively accused the BBC of being racist in getting rid of him. He chose to overlook Wright's glaring shortcomings as a football analyst in favour of one quote from Greg Dyke, made seven years ago (in which Dyke, recently appointed as the Director General, described the corporation as being "hideously white"). I don't recall the BBC being particularly racist at the time (though there have plenty of occasions in the past when even their football coverage has been), and their reaction to his outburst has been one of general bemusement. “He was a freelance who only wanted to do England matches. We have lost England matches, so his role does not exist at the moment”, a spokesman said.

It is possible that the BBC is feeling rattled by the almost total loss of live football from its schedule. They have lost the FA Cup and England's home international matches to ITV, leaving just 10 live matches from the Championship and the finals of major tournaments. Considering this, it was inevitable that they would have to trim down their football staff and, although the decision making process has been kept secret (and is more likely to do with allegations made by non-footballing programmes such as "Panorama"), it's just possible that the FA were unhappy with the way that they were showing matches. Clearly they are doing something wrong, or these tournaments would still be being shown by them.

It seems to me that the BBC have taken the decision to retire the court jester. Where Wright has woefully missed the mark is in suggesting that his removal is down to some sort of shirt and tie mafia within the BBC's football department. He seems to be so lacking in self-awareness that he doesn't even understand that football supporters tend to want incisive and articulate analysis - something which he normally appeared incapable of offering. I don't hold out too many hopes of the BBC's coverage improving dramatically in the future (and, with England's matches to be shown in ITV in the near future, the prognosis for increased levels of jingoism look bleak), but the replacement of Ian Wright and his "man in the pub" persona - and, personally, if I wanted the views of the "man in the pub", I'd go and watch football in the pub - is a step in the right direction for thoughtful analysis of football on the television. A small step, but a step nevertheless.

Crossing Swords At Upton Park

In the football anthology "My Favourite Year", Nick Hornby ruminates upon the subject of generation gap in football and the irony of seeing Peter Lorimer (in his final season at Leeds United) playing against Andy Sinton (in his first season as a seventeen year-old for Cambridge United). An icon of the 1970s lining up against a star of the 1990s. I was reminded of that this morning, whilst watching "The Big Match Revisited".

For those of you that have been living under a rock for the last few weeks, ITV4 have been showing the corresponding week's football action on Thursday afternoons for the last couple of months, and this week the featured match was a match between West Ham United and Stoke City. Quite what was going through the mind of the planner is beyond me. It was a nothing match between two mid-table clubs and it was, unsurprisingly, a poor match that ended in a 1-1 draw. The undoubted highlight of the afternoon, however, was a stunning own goal by a very young Steve Bould, who managed to loop a back-pass over goalkeeper Peter Fox from twenty yards out.

It is, I suspect, a testimony to Bould's abilities as a defender that he was able to recover his career and go on to play almost three hundred matches for Arsenal and pick up a couple of Premier League championship and FA Cup winners medals. Such was the scarcity of football coverage on the television at the time that one televised mistake could prove to be almost fatal to a player. In 1979, Burnley goalkeeper Billy O'Rourke made his debut for his club in an away match against Queens Park Rangers. O'Rourke left the pitch in tears after Burnley's 7-0 defeat and the mark that it left went on to scar the rest of his career. Sadly, he died in 2002 at the age of just forty-one. The Everton-Liverpool derby match played at Goodison Park in November is best remembered for Ian Rush's four goals in a 5-0 Liverpool win, but it was an even more significant afternoon for Everton's Glenn Keeley, who, making his debut, was sent off after thirty-seven minutes and he never played for Everton again.

For all the talk of how we have reached some sort of zenith in terms of footballing excellence, players make just an mistakes as they ever did. Tottenham Hotspur's defence, for example, has conceded four goals at home on three occasions now this season, but it almost feels as if the fact that they get paid vastly more than they ever used to leaves them immune from as much criticism as they should surely get. Perhaps we're just too familiar with them all. Glenn Keeley and Billy O'Rourke certainly wouldn't have looked out of place in white shirts at White Hart Lane on Wednesday night.

Thursday Night In With Elton Welsby

Anyone that knows me in the slightest will know just how excited I was to discover that the digital television channel ITV4 have started repeating complete episodes of "The Big Match" from 1983 on Thursday afternoons. It's probably worth pointing out (in the interests of pedantry) that there is actually a degree of being misled about this. "The Big Match" was London Weekend Television's Saturday night or Sunday afternoon football show from 1968 until 1984, whereas what ITV4 is currently showing is "Match Time", the Granada TV (that's in the north-west of England, for those of you scratching your heads) equivalent. It was, by 1983, being hosted in a grimly quiet Manchester studio by the curiously anodyne Elton Welsby, with his side-kick Dennis Law, who sits to his left, looking nervous and scribbling on a jotter pad in a style reminiscent of a schoolboy that hasn't quite finished their homework in time for the start of class.

I am a traditionalist in many, many senses of the word, and sitting here watching "Match Time" reminds me of just how much football has changed over the last twenty-five years. Football was, at the time, in a state of crisis. The lead news stories on the February 5th 1983, when this show was first broadcast, weren't about what were going on at the top of the table - indeed any concept of celebrity culture within football is conspicuous only by its absence. Everton were the lead news story in the north-west that night, with just 14,500 having turned up at Goodison Park for their league match against Notts County (at the time, their lowest ever league crowd), whilst the second biggest story was rioting at the match between Middlesbrough and Newcastle United supporters, which led to 40 arrests and 27 hospitalisations. It's difficult to know how much of it is journalistic sensationalism, but you can certainly see how people must have been put off going to the football in the first place. Later in the show, Elton reveals that the crowd at Maine Road (a shade over 26,000) was the biggest in English football that day. We've come a long way since then.

First up was Manchester City against Tottenham Hotspur. City's manager, John Bond, had just gone, and this was his replacement John Benson's first match as caretaker. It was football pared down to the very basics. The pitch was in poor condition, and the swirling wind around Maine Road seemed to have a far more pronounced effect on the game than conditions ever seem to these days. There were, it has to be said, a considerable number empty seats behind both goals and gaping holes in the crowd on the terraces. The first half was a scrappy affair, notable mostly for the continued booing of Ricky Villa and Osvaldo Ardiles (this, of course, was less than a year after the end of that nonsense in the South Atlantic over the Falklands Islands). In the second half, things began to liven up considerably. I'd forgotten how bad tempered the Manchester City goalkeeper Joe Corrigan could be - his booking for dissent was one of five bookings awarded (no yellow cards, though - this was during the period that English referees didn't carry them). Spurs rushed into a two goal lead, before a late goal from David Cross (who, as a young Martin Tyler was keen to remind us, had scored four times in one match against Spurs for West Ham United the previous season) levelled things at 2-2.

After the match, there were two refreshingly honest interviews. Cross, the City hero, explained his annoyance at having missed three easy chances prior to finally scoring, whilst John Benson confirmed that he wouldn't be applying for the Manchester City manager's job, believing being that if the board thought that he was good enough, they would offer him the job, and that if they didn't think he was good enough, he probably wasn't. Next up was Barnsley vs Wolves from what was then the Second Division. Wolves, top of the table, sprinted into an early lead, but Barnsley launched a spirited fightback to win 2-1. This vulnerability on Wolves' part was, perhaps, a sign of things to come for the Black Country club. They were promoted at the end of the 1982/83 season, but would go on to endure three successive relegations (each, presumably, more traumatic than the one that had just preceded it) and a very close shave with closure. Finally, a reminder of just how long ago actually February 1983 is, with Manchester United players lining up at Portman Road wearing black armbands on in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Munich Air Disaster. Are we reallt as far removed from Alan Brazil, Gary Bailey, John Wark and the rest of them as any of the players in that match were from the likes of Duncan Edwards and Roger Byrne? There was, however, a slightly more modern feel to this match. The sleek Adidas kits that both teams were wearing, the cautious Suffolk sunshine (as compared to the steely grey Manchester skies that seemed to suck the colour out of the Manchester City vs Spurs match) and the excellent Portman Road pitch (the Ipswich groundsman was widely known as one of the best at the time) all combined to make it feel more familiar to the modern viewer.

So, is football "better" now? Well, it's certainly played at a higher pace now, there are fewer mistakes, and there are certainly more fancy tricks and skills on display. However, something of the human element and a large amount of the charm to the game has been lost. The mistakes are part of what makes it enjoyable and I would say that anyone that could only sit through a modern Premier League match and couldn't sit through this isn't a real fan. The sponsor-free shirts (1982/83 was the last season in which shirt sponsorship was banned on television cameras), strange advertising hoardings (who, for example, were "Jubb & Co", and what do/did they do? You'll never guess unless you Google it) and cardboard cut-out graphics all seem like a million years ago, yet also like my oldest friends in the world. Will I be back next week? It's Liverpool vs Ipswich Town, Coventry City vs Manchester City and Celtic vs Aberdeen. Of course I will.

"The Big Match Revisited" is on ITV4 at 12pm and 4pm every Thursday

On How The BBC Got It So Wrong

Earlier this week, apropos of nothing, really, I sat down and watched the 1979 FA Cup Final between Arsenal and Manchester United. It was like a breath of fresh air, and a reminder of how good the BBC used to be at broadcasting football. I've watched their recent coverage, however, with increasing dismay but they managed a new nadir last night with FA Cup coverage that lurched into the realms of farce, leaving the corporation looking like your trendy uncle at a wedding, wearing a medallion and asking the bride's friends if they've seen The Blurs play lately.

More or less anyone with any nous could have told you that Manchester City vs West Ham United game was going to be terrible. Manchester City are the kings of the 1-0 win, and the first match between them at Upton Park last week was an absolute shocker. Yet again, though, the BBC failed to see the wood for the trees, ignored one of the stories of the round (in the form of Conference South Havant & Waterlooville playing Swansea City for the right to a trip to Anfield after the two sides played out a bad tempered first match at the Liberty Stadium) in order to put the names of two Premier League clubs in their Wednesday night schedules. The match kicked off in a half-empty and disinterested City Of Manchester Stadium and, my word, it stank the place out. This feeling that something altogether more interesting was going on elsewhere was further emphasised by the
regular score updates coming from in from Westleigh Park, where reports were coming in that Havant were two up and that Swansea had missed a penalty. Guy Mowbray, the commentator, sighed audibly and almost expressed that he would sooner be anywhere else.

This was kind of forgiveable, considering the BBC's record in just picking the wrong match. What was singularly unforgivable was their decision, at half-time, to ignore what was going on in Hampshire in favour of a brief look at what hadn't happened in Manchester followed by a twelve minute long hagiography of Kevin Keegan and a thinly-veiled job application from Alan Shearer. It was at this point that I switched the television off and put the radio on to listen to the Havant vs Swansea match on BBC Radio Wales, via the awesome power of the internet. I wonder how many other people did the same thing? All you needed was an internet connection, and off you went.

I wasn't disappointed. The second half of the Havant & Waterlooville vs Swansea City match was absolutely pulsating. It was like being there, with an insane Welsh commentator who sounded as if he was more or less on the verge of a heart attack for the whole of the second half. Swansea had shots cleared off the line, hit and post and the bar and, in the end, Havant won by four goals to two to earn (and, by that, I mean earn) a trip to Anfield in the Fourth Round. It was an absolutely magnificent match, and a credit to both teams. Not that you'd have known much about it if you'd kept the television on BBC1 all evening.

As a quick aside, I'll be writing a weekly column about non-league football at the esteemed Pitch Invasion from now on. The first one is already up on there.

Five Quick New Year Wishes

Obviously, in an ideal world I'd say "knickers" to football and go for the alpaca (see left), but this isn't really an option and, besides, this place remains a football blog rather than an alpaca blog (although I'm open to suggestion on this subject as well). Anyway, I'm still a little feverish, so here are a handful of hopes for 2008.

1. That the BBC and ITV take the European Championships as seriously as they should do, even though England aren't there. The big television companies should welcome the opportunity to get away from the jingoistic nonsense that has blighted every major international football tournament since at least 1996. They should grasp the nettle and do something that journalists should pride themselves in doing - telling you things that you didn't already know. Obviously it will be much easier for them to go on and on about how many of the players of view are from the the Premier League and "how much poorer" the competition will be for England not being there, but hope springs eternal.

2. Somebody, please, other than Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool to win a domestic trophy. I am fully resigned to the fact that it is now asking too much for anyone other than the aforementioned foursome to win the Premier League or, indeed, take the top four places in the Premier League table, but I don't think that it's asking too much for somebody else to win the FA Cup or the League Cup. West Ham United bottled it in the FA Cup two years ago, and the jury is still out on whether Spurs are good enough to beat Arsenal's academy team (this is how far we've come).

3. Milan to get knocked out of the Champions League at the earliest opportunity. Everybody knows that Maldini is too old, that Ronaldo is too fat and that there are too many anonymous players in the current Milan team. It's a damning indictment on the current age that a team so average, below half-way in Serie A, have become a trophy winning machine, with just enough genuinely great players (such as Kaka - and even he manages to annoy with me with his seemingly constant exhortations to Jesus) to be able to keep grinding out the major trophies. Over the last two or three years I have come to the opinion that European football ain't all it's cracked up to be, and Milan are living proof of that. If we can get rid of them early on, it will be a sign that there's life in the cadaver yet.

4. Leave Fabio Capello to get on with the job of managing the England football team. Look, I remain steadfast in my belief that the England football team is in a slow, terminal decline but, in taking on Fabio Capello, the FA have at least given themselves a degree of a chance of winning a major trophy. They have got a coach that is of the calibre of the coaches that appear on peoples wish lists - the likes of Mourinho or Wenger. So, this message is for the English press (and I know that it will be ignored), leave him alone, and let him get on with his job.

5. I know that this might be pushing the boat out a little too far, but can we get rid of the two-footed studs up tackles that seem to be happening in every single match at the moment. Look, I know that at the current rate football will have completely converted into competitive pinball by approximately the year 2020, but can professional players stop trying to commit ABH on each other, please? Oh, and while I'm about it, a rule which says that only the captain can speak to the referee or anyone on the opposition team would be nice, as well.

Look At What You Could Have Won

Talk about a fall from grace. The blog of the BBC Sport Editor Roger Mosey has got very excited this evening about the new Football League television contract. Having lost the rights to England matches and the FA Cup earlier this year (wiping out their live domestic football at a stroke) they have at least managed the small consolation of securing some access to the Football League and the League Cup. You don't have to be an expert on such matters to be able to appreciate that such deals are a fall from grace for BBC Sport, no matter which way they try to spin it.

The details of the new BBC contract are as follows:

- Ten exclusively live first-choice Championship matches per season, the first time The Championship has been live on BBC television.
- The League Cup final live from Wembley - simulcast with Sky.
- Two legs of the Carling Cup semi-finals exclusively live.
- Football League highlights all season.
- Carling Cup highlights all season.

The bulk of the contract has, you'll be unsurprised to hear, remained with Sky Sports, who have picked up the bulk of the £88m bill. There is no question that the BBC are the junior partners here, in much the same way that they are over the Premier League package. But is this a good deal for the BBC and, more importantly, is this a good deal for the Football League? Well, on the one hand, it is a good deal for the League. The money is up yet again (either these TV companies are impossibly bad negotiators in such matters or Brian Mawhinney has got some very compromising photographs indeed of Mark Lawrenson) and, more importantly still, the League will be back on live terrestrial television for the first time in over a decade. The League needs such publicity - the enduring cache of being broadcast on the BBC may well have a positive knock on effect for it, and may provide more interest in football outside of the Premier League (the beginning of the up-turn in the FA Cup's fortunes coincides quite neatly with when it returned from the BBC from ITV).

Having said all of that, though, I would criticise the League for not going far enough. With the cost of Premier League football continuing to spiral ever higher, the Football League should have been braver, and frozen Sky out altogether. On the surface of it, £88m looks like a lot of money, but it isn't, really. It's a fraction of the money that even the Premier League's overseas television contract brings in. The Football League could have gone out on a limb, and put the whole thing over to free-to-air television. The BBC has the capability to offer a first-rate digital service, and could have worked a deal with the League to promote the Football League as "football for the masses". As it turns out, the vast majority will continue to be watched by pitiful audiences on Sky Sports.

I'm minded to think that all concerned have missed a trick, there.

Sharpen Your Elbows

Right. First up, here is tonight's FA Trophy results service:

Aveley 0-2 Ilford
FC United of Manchester 1-4 Bradford Park Avenue (what the hell happened there, hmm?)
Newcastle Blue Star 1-0 Woodley Sports
Redbridge 0-3 Bury Town

I can't imagine how relieved you must all be to know that. In lieu of any of the above matches being covered on the BBC (well, on the television, at least), I had to seek my thrills elsewhere. Fortunately, due to the wonders of the internet, I haven't been short on material. I downloaded some videos of Manchester derby matches from the 1960s and 1970s a few weeks ago (City seemed to beat United all the time then, I can tell you), and had a few other bits and pieces that I needed to catch up on - England-Argentina from the 1986 World Cup, an "Official History Of Arsenal FC" (which was switched off when I opened Winamp and saw that it's two and a half hours long) and some BBC3 nonsense called "Goals Galore" which mixed some interesting archive footage with the sort of "cheeky chappie" voice-over that makes me want to gouge my own eyes out with a cheese knife.

I eschewed all of these delights in favour of the 1958 FA Cup Final. It is, after all, the Third Qualifying Round of the FA Cup this weekend. The Conference Premier joins in the Fourth Qualifying Round, and the bottom two divisions of the Football League join in the First Round Proper, so we're moving in the direction of the "tournament proper" now. It's not, by and large, roped off park pitches any more. The 1958 FA Cup Final was one of the most emotive Cup Finals of the post-war period. United's team had been decimated by the Munich air disaster just four months previously. Indeed, the first match that they played after the crash was a long-delayed Fifth Round match against Sheffield Wednesday at Old Trafford. Their make-shift team had propelled itself to Wembley seemingly on emotion alone, beating West Bromwich Albion and Fuham (after a replay) after Wednesday to take their place at Wembley.

So close was the match to the Munich disaster that Sir Matt Busby, although at Wembley that day, his assistant, the doughty Jimmy Murphy was in charge. This was still a Manchester United team largely made up of make-weights and reserve team players. Only four of United's starters had been involved in the accident (including Bobby Charlton - still resplendent with a headful of hair), and a fixture backlog had also taken its toll on the players. There are many people that say that the Munich air disaster as the catalyst for what would come to be the "United legend", and it is well documented that the wave of popular support was very much behind them in the build-up to the match. It was, however, to be a game too far.

The match coverage that I watched was from the BBC and, in spite of the warming familiarity of commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme (whose clipped tones are simultaneously enormously reassuring and utterly, utterly alien sounding), it's like watching a football match that was played five hundred years ago, and on another planet. The BBC seem to have invested a massive three cameras in what must have been the biggest televised sporting event of the year in Britain. There's a small hand-held camera (which one or two of the United players walk straight into as they come out of the tunnel at the start of the match - ah, to return to such innocent days), one camera in the stand, on which the whole match is caught, and one above the stadium, which is used for largely pointless long shots of Wembley stadium. There are no graphics of any sort whatsoever (Wolstenholme hurriedly - indeed, I rather suspect absent-mindedly - reads the teams out just after kick-off, and there are no action replays whatsoever (these weren't introduced for another decade).

Wembley itself is only distinguishable from the huge, voluptuous goals at either end of the pitch. The perspex roof (which, such was the colour that it was by the time that it was torn down, should surely have been examined by bacteriologists at some point - I suspect that they might have found whole new civilizations coming to life in some of the darker spots) wasn't put on it until 1963. The noise around the ground is more or less constant from when the players take the pitch until the end of the broadcast, and what is really noticeable about the pre-match is how perfunctory everything is. There are no memorials for the fallen of Munich (the players don't even wear black arm bands), and it's just the players, Prince Philip (who seems, surprisingly to those of use that have grown up with him as a grumpy and occasionally racist old man, very chipper, to the point of being pretty happy to be there) and a brass band.

Within three minutes of kick-off, Bolton take the lead through Nat Lofthouse, and as the match progresses... well, it's pretty good. Especially considering that the players are wearing boots made of oak and kicking a ball that weighs about as much as a modern medicine ball. Bolton are clearly the stronger of two good teams, and Harry Gregg pulls off a string of excellent saves in the first half to keep United in the game, before Lofthouse bundles both Gregg and the ball over the line for Bolton's second and ultimately conclusive goal. With both teams playing the de rigeur 2-3-5 formation, the play is fast and fluid and with only the occasional stray pass (no more than you would get in a modern Premier League match, certainly). In short, if you can see past the grainy, black & white picture, it looks like more like a modern match than you might expect.

There can be few complaints about Lofthouse's controversial second goal. To modern eyes, it looks like a horrific foul, but there is no question that it was legitimate at the time. Lofthouse had been charging Gregg every time the ball went anywhere near him (with no complaint from the United players) and the charge passes largely without comment from Wolstenholme itself. There is no argument from the United players. After sustained treatment, Gregg did eventually play one, though I would guess that he was seeing at least two of everything for at least the rest of the match.

So, no fairytale end to the season Manchester United. Bolton won 2-0, and United would be back at Wembley five years later to beat Leicester City 3-1 in the FA Cup Final, and ten years later to beat Benfica in the European Cup final. One can't help but feel a little sorry for Bolton Wanderers. Their part in the magnificent 1953 Final was overshadowed by Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortenson, and their deserved victory in this final was overshadowed by the tragedy of Munich and, on the day itself, the injury to Gregg. They would never hit such heights whilst, within ten years, Manchester United would become arguably the most famous football club in the world.

The Sunday Roast

As some of you may have noticed, I have spent this afternoon "pimping this place up". I should point out that I'm not even sure whether "pimping this place up" is still the correct terminology to use (for all I know, I am now coming across like my dad doing an impression of Will Smith as The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, or whether I have subscribed to the right things or not. Over the last eighteen months, I have almost made a virtue of the fact that no-one reads this blog, but I have come to the conclusion that this is probably a "bad" thing, so I am going to have a going at whoring it out. Flashing a bit of thigh, if you like. I'd try not to concentrate too hard on that mental image, though, if I were you.

So, this football weekend, then. I spent this afternoon luxuriating on the sofa eating ice cream straight from the tub and keeping one eye on the football. Poor old Spurs, eh? Stop sniggering at the back, by the way. It is a tad concerning, a week before another important round of international matches, that Paul Robinson has started playing as if he has been learning from the "Coco The Clown Big Book Of Goalkeeping Funnies". Fernando Torres' last minute goal cost Martin Jol four places in the Premier League table too, but equally fascinating was Liverpool's temporary blip. Coming hot on the heels of a home defeat by Marseille during the week, Benitez's expensively assembled team is starting to resemble most other Liverpool teams - so much fluff, but still lacking the killer touch.

Manchester United and Arsenal may have won with varying degrees of easiness (United took almost an hour to get torn into the strangely still-dislikeable Wigan Athletic, while Arsenal were strolling against Sunderland until the defensive frailty which will, if there is any justice in the world, prevent them from winning the league this season), but mid-table Chelsea (savour those words - savour them) struggled again, this time to a 1-0 win at Bolton that came about thanks to some hilarious Bolton defending. The game is up for Chelsea, though. The Premier League isn't scared of them any more, and that was a good seventy-five percent of the reason why they steamrollered more or less everyone for three years. Hell, even Spurs could give them a game at the moment.

Some sort of congratulations should be awarded to ITV, who demonstrated their commitment to top quality football coverage by cutting down their show "The Championship" to less than thirty minutes so that they could cram in a repeat of the grand prix before the rugby internationals started this afternoon. Their featured match between Sheffield Wednesday and Leicester City was notable for Leicester scoring two of the scrappiest goals of the season and the resounding boos that reverberated around Hillsborough at full-time. Brian Laws: Dead Man Walking. Watfoed and Charlton are occupying the top two places (although Charlton did concede a last minute equaliser against Barnsley). Even funnier than that is the continuing crisis at Sheffield United. We all had a good chuckle when they took on Bryan Robson during the summer, but they are now sitting just above the relegation places after a 2-0 defeat at Bristol City.

Swindon Town beat Gillingham 5-0 at The County Ground in League One and, if rumours are to be believed, they're going to need all the points that they can get. Leyton Orient are still top in spite of a 5-0 home defeat by Swansea City (it's not often you can say that, is it?), and Carlisle United, who took on, in John Ward, their third manager of the season in the week, kicked off in style with a 4-0 win against Millwall. In League Two, Franchise stay top (the only small satisfaction to be taken from that is that their success has meant that a consistent rumour that QPR are sniffing around Paul Ince - terrible when people use their money to take what is rightfully yours, isn't it?). Finally, in the Preliminary Round of this year's FA Trophy saw Bradford Park Avenue play out a 1-1 draw against FC United of Manchester in front of a bumper crowd of 1,310, whilst there were six other matches played out in front of crowds of over 1,000 below the Conference (at AFC Wimbledon, AFC Telford United, Kettering Town, Boston United, Southport and Kings Lynn, in case you were wondering). Draw your own conclusions.

Channel Four Think You Are Idiots

The gentrification of football over the last fifteen years or so has been well documented. Buying a season ticket nowadays requires a complex system of vetting and credit checking, and that's just the start of it. You will also be expected to fork out on merchandise, food, drink and so on. It's a rich man's game, now. The other cultural shift that happened within the game was the rise of the "lad". This was a broader social phenomenon, but it manifested itself within football with the rise of "Fantasy Football League", the Friday night BBC2 TV show that ran from 1994 until 1998. The programme was a reasonable enough way to spend half an hour, but "lad culture" (and there's a contradiction in terms if ever I saw one) left me largely baffled. The worst thing about "Fantasy Football League" and the "fan culture" thing that sprung up around it was that it strangled the emerging fanzine culture that it aped, and turned it into a load of unfunny chants (Jason Lee might not have been a Premier League quality footballer, but he didn't deserve the vile heaps of abuse lavished upon him in about 1997), whilst giving celebrities the chance to (yawn) expose their "football credentials". The game was fashionable again, and there was no way that the rich and famous were going to miss out on that bandwagon.

Almost ten years on, though, it's back back back, in the form of a new programme on Channel Four called (deep breath) "Fanbanta". And it's terrible. Dreadful. And worst of all, they've got plans. You see, "Fanbanta" isn't just a television series. It's a website and a message board, too, as well as a nascent social networking site. And the thing about "Fanbanta" is this - it treats you as if you are an idiot. It's produced in a studio which has been constructed to look like a big, empty pub. Each week there is a guest host who acts as the "landlord" of the pub, standing behind the bar and distributing pints to the hosts and "bantering" with the hosts, Joe Mace and Kirsten O'Brien. The "celebrity" guest was Shaun Williamson (who might like to think that he'll be best remembered for his part in "Extras" when everybody knows that he'll have the name of Barry from "Eastenders" engraved on his tombstone), who proceeded to tell his hosts that he only started supporting Fulham because everyone else he knew liked football. He went on to give a damn good impression of someone that still doesn't really give a toss about the game.

Elsewhere, they put together a fake press release from Roman Abramovich (with the voice done by someone pretending to be Borat, of all people) followed by Avram Grant's wife making a fool of herself on Israeli television. There was some barely masked homophobia in inviting the braying audience to laugh at Faustino Asprilla's (somewhat brave, if you ask me) decision to pose naked in a gay magazine, a fat man called Jeff Winter reading an excerpt from Rio Ferdinand's autobiography in the bath, a sub-YouTube clip of a man taking a penalty and doing a somersault as he did it, and a shout of, "what's the worst thing in modern football?" which was answered with a shout of, "FOREIGNERS!", from a neanderthal in the audience. Seemingly running out of material to fill their twenty-four minutes, they then "exposed" David Mellor as having switched the club that he supported from Fulham to Chelsea. Never mind the fact that Mellor hasn't been in government for over ten years and that this is news only to supporters that have been living under a rock for the last fifteen years (I remember it being mentioned in "When Saturday Comes" in about 1990). The saddest thing about it is that we were expected to be surprised by this "revelation".

Worst of all, though, was their campaign to bring John Sitton back into football. Sitton, you may remember, was the, shall we say, "vocal" in his criticisms of his team whilst managing Leyton Orient in the 1990s in the BBC documentary "Club For A Fiver". Never mind that, on one level, it's simply unnecessary to drag Sitton (who is reportedly now a London taxi driver) back into the limelight for something from thirteen years ago - it was also a shameless attempt to create an air of authenticity about a programme that is about as fake as it comes. The other "campaign" on their website, by the way, didn't warrant a mention on the programme - to allow pubs to show illegal Norwegian feeds of Premier League football on Saturday afternoons. Never mind that true supporters should, if they are going to watch a match on a Saturday afternoon, perhaps actually go to one rather than sit on their behinds in the pub watching Manchester United or Liverpool. Consider this, from the Fanbanta website: "They [the Premier League] claim it is illegal to show Premiership football in a UK pub unless the publican has a valid commercial agreement with BSkyB. The landlords and ladies across Britain have jumped cleverly through this law by paying foreign broadcasters about £800 a year for the access to 3pm games. In any case, the FAPL refuses to sell rights to these Holy Grail matches". Well, yes. It is illegal, as it goes, and (before anyone starts on about me putting copyrighted material up to download - I make no money whatsoever from this site, you'll be unsurprised to hear) landlords don't do this out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it to make money. The Premier League doesn't sell the rights to all of its matches as one of its last altruistic acts - they could do in theory (and I'm certain that they will in time), but they don't because of the drastic effect that it would have on crowds elsewhere. Fanbanta doesn't care about this, though. It cares more about the rights of the fans of big clubs to sit in pubs on Saturday afternoons and watch illegal feeds on the television.

Channel Four are complicit in this wretched car crash of a programme. They've sold the name of it to Fanbanta (to be exact, they've effectively sold them a thirty minute long advertising space), and allowed them to dump a steaming load of crap on our screens. I don't like the Fanbanta web site, but I can ignore that. I inhabit a separate universe to these people, and never the twain shall meet. That's fine. However, there is (as ever) a dearth of quality football programming on British television at the moment, and this programme offers nothing at all that anyone that cares about the game can''t obtain in about a million other places. Channel Four, however, seems to think that we are all idiots, though. Looking at their schedule, this doesn't much surprise me, but it doesn't mean that I shouldn't be profoundly unhappy about it.

If You Don't Want To Know The Score, Look Away Now

Right, so, football on the television. Nothing else has influenced the way that we all watch football as much as television. It still seems difficult to believe that, as recently as the early 1980s, there were only about three live matches on the television (typically the annual England vs Scotland international match, the FA Cup Final and the European Cup Final), but it's true. In less than three decades, we have gone from the League going through something approaching an existential crisis over whether to allow clubs to have sponsors' names on their shirts while the cameras were there to record what was going on to having matches beamed into our living rooms twenty-four hours a day from all over the world. You'll need to right click and save the files below, by the way - almost all will play in any media player, but a couple will require something that plays Real Media files - I would suggest Media Player Classic for these purposes.

The BBC were, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first people to football on the television. In 1937, just over a year after they went on air, they broadcast Arsenal playing Arsenal Reserves, and followed that up with the England-Scotland match and the FA Cup Final between Huddersfield Town and Preston North End the following year. Broadcasts were sporadic until 1960 often on "Sportsview" or "Grandstand" (which offered a full results service at 4.45 on Saturday afternoons), when ITV signed a deal to show 26 matches with the Football League. It wasn't terribly successful. The first match between Blackpool and Bolton didn't bring good ratings, and had a very negative effect on the crowd. Clubs started to withdraw access to the grounds, and the scheme was quietly dropped after the League tried to negotiate drastically higher appearance fees for the clubs. A couple of ITV regions experimented with highlights in 1962 and 1963, but the BBC finally got around to covering the game properly in 1964 with "Match Of The Day".

"Match Of The Day" has become an institution in the years since then (rather too much for my liking), but in its first incarnation it was a rather humble affair. It was the highlights of one match, introduced by commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme from the stadium to save on money. The early credits demonstrate its humble beginnings (this curio, from a documentary about the history of Manchester City, shows the last day of the 1967-68 season with a quick explanation of how, even though City needed just a point to win the League, the cameras went to Old Trafford to record the United match instead), but by 1969, ITV had received something of a shake-up and was taking football more seriously. The format of "Match Of The Day" would remain unchanged until 1983. There would be highlights of two matches, introduced by Jimmy Hill, and with a round-up of everything else that had happened in the Football League with Bob Wilson (no action - just Bob sitting behind a desk telling you what had happened). Which matches were to be broadcast would be decided several weeks beforehand (and, to prevent crowds from falling, was kept secret until just before the programme started), and the BBC and ITV took it in turns to have first pick of the matches. Here are some opening titles from 1982 (note the BBC's traditional use of Loftus Road - the nearest ground to Television Centre - for the specially recorded segments).

Highlights ended in 1983, when Spurs played Nottingham Forest in the first live First Division match on ITV. The BBC and ITV shared live duties until 1988, when ITV won a four year exclusive contract to exclusively show League football, while the BBC were left with just the FA Cup. In 1992, though, with the formation of the Premier League, it was back on Saturday nights, providing highlights of every Premier League match played on Saturday afternoons while Sky showed the live action on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights (these opening titles, from 1993, show the BBC already becoming pre-occupied with the show's "heritage" - on top of their grandiose "BBC Sport" ident, the titles feature some of the show's great moments from the past, including Jimmy Greaves, George Best, Justin Fashanu and Glen Hoddle). They lost these rights on 2000 to ITV (more on the debacle that was "The Premiership" tomorrow night), but won them back in 2003, returning "Match Of The Day" to its traditional 10.30 Saturday night slot. Throughout this period, "Grandstand" (here's a little something from 1980, an Olympic Grandstand from the games that Britain chose not to boycott and won a couple more medals than they might have done had the USA bothered to show) had continued to be the ballast of the schedules, featuring "Football Focus" (the weekly preview insert that ended up outliving "Grandstand" itself) and the "Final Score" results service.

It hasn't all been about the League. The FA Cup final has been an annual event on British television since before even I was born (here are 1980s pop stars Marilyn and Boy George looking mortified in advertising it on the BBC - note the withering sarcasm in George's voice). As TV coverage has expanded, so the range of football that the BBC shows has grown with it. They now also cover the African Cup Of Nations as well as the World Cup (there'll be a World Cup special on here in a couple of days) and the European Championships (here's how we saw Euro 96 and Euro 2000 in this country on the BBC). Currently, they are showing the Women's World Cup from China (I sat and watched the England team maintain a proud tradition by losing to the USA in the quarter-finals last Saturday). I'm scared about what ITV will do to the FA Cup when they get their grubby mitts on it, but the BBC have got used to sporadically losing their football broadcast rights over the years. It'll be back on there when the next contract runs out.

Tomorrow night: ITV.

Themes Of The Unexpected

It's probably fair to say that I have developed a bit of a "thing" for football on the television. I also think that it's fair to say that quite a lot of you lot have as well. I put a load of links to the TV themes from football shows from over the years up on here last year, and even now a decent amount of the traffic to this place comes from people looking for this, that or the other. I'd never got around, however, to putting it all in one place until now. You can download this 90 megabyte pack via Rapidshare here. It's a .rar file, so use Winrar to unpack it.

The track listing is as follows: ABC Wide World Of Sports (from the USA, no less), BBC Snooker, Grandstand (the original and the more famous updated version), It's A Knockout, Match Of The Day (the original and an updated version), Pot Black, Rugby Special, Ski Sunday, Sport On Two (that's BBC Radio 2, for our confused overseas readers), Sports Report, Sportsview, Sportsnight, Star Soccer, Superstars, The Big Match (versions from 1970, 1974 and 1980), The Match (ITV's live football show from the late 1980s), World Of Sport and World Cup themes from 1966 to 2002 (including the ITV theme from Italia '90, which is making is debut here). I know that they're not all football music, but I figured that I'd just put them in anyway. This week, we'll have be having a look at some video highlights from down the years (BBC, ITV, Sky Sports & World Cups), so tune in for those too.

Finally, here's some Baker & Kelly from the 12th of September 1998. More of that to follow later in the week, too.

The idiot box

This past week, I’ve watched quite a bit of televised live football by my standards. Both of England’s Euro 2008 qualifiers (Frank who?), plus England Women’s opening game in the World Cup against Japan. In all honesty, the latter proved the more refreshing experience, as the Chinese director chose to focus the majority of their efforts on the on-field activities, rather than anything else. However, he or she was still unable to save us from the tyranny of the BBC half-time pundritry panel, with Gabby Logan teeing them up for Karen Walker and Jo Potter to head in. Also on hand was the excellent Gavin Peacock, whose even-handedness and obvious research into the subject at hand was undermined by a 15-minute long buzzing sound in the studio, which I can only assume being vacuum-cleaned by a wizened, tabard-wearing cleaner with a spitty roll-up dangling from the corner of her mouth.

As may be becoming apparent, there is much about televised football that I find irksome to the point where my brain just can’t tolerate any more. Indeed, it somehow managed to send me into a deep sleep for the entire half-time interval of England-Israel. If I could work out a way of replicating this artificially, perhaps by means of a battery powered hat containing a number of electric probes, it would surely make my fortune.

However, my hardline aversion to the half-time “analysis” of Messrs. Wright and Shearer is by no means worthy of note. It is a common condition, documented frequently elsewhere by people more knowledgeable and eloquent than I. My increasing dislike of live televised football is in fact based on much more petty gripes. Five in number.

1. Camerawork
Showing the reactions of the players and coaching staff is, of course both reasonable and desirable. The obsessive glimpses at the crowd as they go through the full gamut of football emotions, however, are very much less so. I don’t need some gurning bloke with a flag painted on his beer belly as a guide to how I should feel about what’s happening in the match. Of course, the increasing number of grounds with big screens inside has led to another, even more insidious, evil. Namely: people in the crowd spotting themselves being shown on TV, and stopping reacting just to wave at the screen (no human has quite yet grasped the principle of the video camera, have we?). I have, honest-to-god, seen agonized, nail-biting people who, upon appearing on the stadium screen, are suddenly transformed into a grinning, waving freak. I’d like to thank all these people (and their “nudge-smile-point-jump up and down” neighbours) for demonstrating far better than my words ever could the worthlessness of these glimpses of the crowd during the match.

And as for the “look what happened in the studio when England scored!” films – the less said that about the better. OK, Gary Lineker supports England, he’s just another ordinary bloke like us, we get it. Frankly, I’d be concerned if anyone had ever reached a different conclusion.

2. Graphics
Time was when the only graphics to appear on screen were an occasional reminder of the score, or the game time. For the most part, the screen was unfettered. Nowadays, the ever-present idiot bar in the top left answers all the questions that I personally have never heard anyone ever ask whilst attending a match. Also, the Sky TV “little pint of beer” logo in the bottom right hand corner makes me want to explode.

3. I miss Barry Davies
This is more of a personal plea, but good god, I loved Barry Davies’ football commentaries. He was knowledgeable, measured and concise, with a delightful sideline in schoolmasterly disapproval. “He’s wearing number 43… what an absurd number to see on a football pitch”. Amen, Barry.

4. Replay technology
Football and television. Their relationship is best described as that of a pimp and a prostitute, with each believing the other to be the prostitute. How is it that a game which has become so interwoven with TV still refuses to use the best thing it can offer – instant replays – as a way to help with the proper running of a game in progress? Don’t anyone give me this “you can’t just apply one law for the league ‘haves’ and not at the bottom of the pyramid ‘have-nots’ rubbish, either. I’ve seen football from both ends of the pyramid, and I’ve got to tell you that in Sussex County League Division 2, nobody cares. A hotly contested decision will be seen just once, by everyone. You know that coming in. Get some beer in you. The reason why the teams who CAN offer such technology SHOULD is that they are precisely the ones who, when they don’t, cause such a national outburst of heart-thumping, chest-burning agony. No Midland Alliance referee ever receives turds in the post or death threats about a dodgy penalty call. The much-maligned Premiership referee, however, is in a position whereby he can’t use the 50-foot high TV replay right in front of him to amend his decisions, as pies and coins rain down.

5. It’s Monday night. It’s 8 o’clock. It’s SOCCER TIME
Football and television. Their relationship is best described as that of a pimp and a prostitute, with each believing the other to be the prostitute. However, only television is correct in its beliefs. The rampaging absurdity of kick-off times so that, with the right TV package, you can watch a live match every SINGLE DAY OF THE WEEK… argh…. AARRGGHH. I’ll be coming back to this final point on Saturday. Saturday! There’s a good day for a football match…

Thanks to Mushybees for the picture of Richard “I had to shave my hands” Keys. Please visit his website here and check out the rest of his stuff.

Arrivederci

Not a lot to say about this one, really. Suffice to say that we should all be saddened by the death of Luciano Pavarotti yesterday. In a football context, he was recognised as a passionate supporter of the game, having had a brief career as a professional player for Modena in Italy, before switching his career to opera singing. It is, however, for his performance of "Nessun Dorma" that was used by the BBC for the 1990 World Cup that he will be best known.

It's difficult to properly explain the effect that "Nessun Dorma" had on football in 1990. After Heysel, the Bradford Fire and Hillsborough disaster, English football was in a pit of depression by the 1989-90 season. After their disastrous performance at Euro 88, the press were clamouring for Bobby Robson's removal, and a tough group in the World Cup finals (Holland and Ireland were regarded as both potentially sticky wickets for a team short on confidence). As the tournament wore on, though, something changed. An average looking England team fluked their way to the semi-finals, beating Belgium in the last minute of extra-time and Cameroon thanks to two penalties, and put in their best performance against Germany before losing on penalties.

Off the pitch, football, the game of bores, yobs and idiots, was subtly being repackaged as the sporting form of ballet. In truth, Italia 90 was a terrible tournament - the worst since Chile in 1962 - but the strains of Pavarotti singing "Nessun Dorma" played its part in shifting people's perception of the game. This was sport as art, as high culture, and the knock-on effect was to send Pavarotti into the top ten in the UK singles charts. Since then, we have slid slowly back into boorishness but, that summer, "Nessun Dorma" was the brilliantly unexpected soundtrack to long, warm days of unforeseen optimism and hope. Luciano Pavarotti's voice played a crucial role in changing the image of English football for the better, and we should all raise our glasses to the memory of a man that was, ultimately, a football fan, just like you and I.

One more time, here's "Nessun Dorma".

Video Nasties

Nowadays, the vast majority of football matches are recorded by some sort of camera. Walk into any non-league ground and you'll see a hastily-erected camera gantry, and most clubs manage to put out a review of the season of some description or another. Of course, you wouldn't guess this from your local DVD & CD mega-store. With a couple of notable exceptions (such as the BBC's excellent three disc "Match Of The Day" compilation and the exhaustive "The History Of Football" series), it's all about the glitter, the gloss and the fluff. If you landed an alien in the middle of HMV in Brighton's DVD selection and told them to learn about football, they would report to their home planet that there are five teams called Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Brazil and England that matter, and that the rest of the teams are mere bit players. There is, I guess, an element of truth in this, but that's a different story. What I'm talking about here is the proliferation of a new cottage industry that came about in the late 1980s: the club video.

There was a time when the only matches recorded by camera were those caught by BBC and ITV cameras - at most, six or seven matches across all divisions, in addition to the "big" matches. In the late 1980s, though, portable video recording technology became more and more affordable, and before long many clubs were stuffing their club shops with videos of anything that they could film. Were you at that terrible 0-0 draw against Barnsley on a cold Tuesday night in November? Well, now you had the opportunity to own a slightly grainy copy of the whole match for posterity, with (at best) no commentary at all or (at worst) a shrieking, hysterical "club commentator" there for accompaniment. A cottage industry had been spawned. Large numbers of people (all of whom should have known better) suddenly found themselves building up unwieldy collections of videos in cheap boxes with badly photocopied covers. Where did you stop? If you bought the "big" matches (and ever got around to watching them), you had little choice but to start getting the rest of the set, and before you knew it you had an entire bookcase full of the damn things.

The craze had filtered down to the non-league game by 1992. St Albans City had been promoted back to the Vauxhall-Opel Isthmian League Premier Division in 1986 after a twelve year absence and had endured five years of narrowly avoiding relegation before finishing in thirteenth place in the 1991-92 season. At the start of the following season, they released a video of the highlights of 1991-92 and, buoyed by their good start to the next season and the fact that I was starting at University, I bought it. I could write a good thousand words on the subject of this video, but I will shorten it down to the following six points:

1. Okay, so thirteenth place was an improvement on the previous years' showings, but was it really necessary for this video to be four hours long? I did manage to watch it all in one sitting once, but had to receive fairly extensive counselling afterwards. Every single match was covered, including County Cup and AC Delco Cup matches - every match, that is, apart from those that the cameraman missed because he went on holiday. I bet BBC Sport never have this problem.

2. Each match featured more or less every shot at goal St Albans took (no matter how wayward), as well as extensive shots of goalkeepers waiting to take goal kicks. On the other hand, opponents were limited to just their goals being shown, giving the pleasing (if inaccurate) impression of every match having been a miscarriage of justice of epic proportions. It also gave the (somewhat more accurate) impression of St Albans' goalkeeper being a incompetent buffoon who was incapable of stopping any shots whatsoever.

3. Each match was preceded by a still shot of a carpet with the names of the teams and the date that the match was played on arranged on strips of white paper in Letraset, whilst a voice that I can only describe as being "Mr Bean's idiot younger brother" intoned, "Diadora Football League Premier Division. Seventh of February 1992. St Albans City versus Harrow Borough", or some such.

4. I was reminded of the existence of Michael White. Michael was a man of limited... well, suffice to say that, at over fifty years old he still had a paper round, who regularly watched St Albans and would spend the whole of home matches circling the ground shouting abuse at players. At away matches, though, he would excel himself by taking a trumpet with him, with which he would serenade the players by playing an exceptionally out of tune version of "When The Saints Go Marching In", whilst the rest of us almost died from the resultant laughter and embarrassment. The trumpet makes an unscheduled appearance during a particularly windswept trip to Windsor & Eton that season.

The following season, City shot up the table and narrowly on the league title to local rivals Chesham United, and at the start of the 1993/94 season they produced two three hour long videos of the 1992/93 season, which proved to be a step too far even for me, though I have had pause to regret this on a couple of occasions since. The 1993/94 season saw them resort to the headache-inducing four hour format, but this one (personal highlight - a 9-1 demolition of Wivenhoe Town in the second match of the season) was the final one that they bothered with. Nowadays it's all DVDs and streaming video, of course, and even down in the Unibond League, FC United of Manchester have run into problems over showing goals from their matches on their website. In this day and age, though, the capacity for storing all of these matches online exists, in the capacious area that is the internet. All of this is giving me a very worrying idea. We should collect these all together on a website somewhere, and... no. I should put idea out of my head right now.

My Afternoon With Sky Sports

I have to say that, on Saturday afternoons, I usually have better things to do. If I'm not at a match, I'll be found in a pub, or out shopping in Brighton somewhere. Saturday afternoons aren't much of a time for sitting around doing nothing, in my household. This week, however, was different. Hamstrung by the cost of a holiday, though, I had to eschew the joys of the FA Cup Preliminary Round yesterday and opted instead to spend the afternoon in the surreal company of Jeff Stelling and Sky's "Soccer Saturday". It's not, I have to say, a completely satisfactory arrangement. I don't like the creeping feeling that you get watching it, that something of critical importance is going on elsewhere, and the sense of helplessness that comes with it. I'm not amused by the fact that I am sitting at home, watching men watch football matches and telling me what is happening. It strikes me that this is a pretty neat metaphor for the modern game - this week, I can't afford to go to a match, so I am reduced to the people that broadcast it telling me what is happening.

Stelling, the host, is pretty difficult to fault. The words "consummate professional" spring immediately to mind. He growls like a recently awoken tiger and purrs like a contented walrus. He is enjoying his job, and he wants to share that enjoyment with the rest of us. The puns that have sealed his "cult" reputation (though I do find myself wondering how much of this have been propagated by the Sky Sports marketing department) may be thin on the ground, and he may have been asked to cut down on the references to his home town team Hartlepool United (their 4-1 thrashing of Oldham Athletic barely warrants a mention and, when it does, it's largely to point out what a disappointing start this must have been for Oldham's new - and recently released from prison - striker, Lee Hughes), but he manages to carry the programme along on his own, buoyed by ebullience and his own enthusiasm for his job. It's a good job that he does because, frankly, the array of ex-pros sitting around him carry the gravitas and personality of a box of cornflakes. Sitting across the studio from Stelling are Phil Thompson (formerly of Liverpool), Matt Le Tissier and Charlie Nicholas, watching a Premiership match each. Every five minutes or so, a stifled shout or gurgling noise comes from behind Stelling as something happens in one of these matches, but the assembled "experts" seldom offer anything more than we can tell ourselves from, well, looking at the scores. So, Liverpool "completely outclassed Derby in every department", did they, Matt? Thanks for that, but I'd kind of guessed as much from the fact that they won 6-0. This is about as good as it gets - at 3-1 up away to Fulham, Phil Thompson was purring over Spurs, but he made no mention of their brittle self-confidence and, well, you know what happened next.

The programme certainly has depth in its coverage. It brings updates of all the goals in the Premiership, Football League, Conference Premier, Scottish Leagues and the Welsh Premier League, and also brings half-time and full-time scores from the Conference North and South, and the Isthmian, Southern and Northern Premier Leagues. For the supporter of the lower league club, though, this presents a real problem. A score update at half-time revealed that St Albans were goal-less, and it took until nearly five to five before the news filtered through of their inevitable 1-0 home defeat. However, it was a fairly eventful afternoon across the board - the late Fulham equalizer against Spurs brought forth a strangely aroused-sounding squawk from Thompson, followed by a post-coitally incoherent description of the free-kick that levelled things up at Craven Cottage - so there was plenty going on elsewhere, with a flurry of excitement as the late goals and full-time scores coming through, followed by slightly more relaxed results service and review of the afternoon's proceedings.

It's difficult to say whether "Soccer Saturday" is either a good or a bad programme. It does its job adequately, though I continue to believe that there must be more insightful and articulate former players that could be hired to report on the afternoon's proceedings. It does, however, have to be said that it will never be a satisfactory programme to watch. By ten past three, I wanted more than anything to be at a match (any match) and, whilst this might not be Sky's intention, it is certainly an indication that they are doing something right.

WATCH THE FOOTBALL.

There is something fundamentally beautiful going on here, courtesy of Mitchell & Webb. Keep it in the back of your mind and you'll never be able to take Sky Sports seriously again.

WATCH THE FOOTBALL. IT'S GOING TO MOVE.

Hugh Johns

I stand to be corrected on this, but unconfirmed reports are stating that the former ITV football commentator Hugh Johns has died at the age of 83. In the 1990s, retrospectives about the history of football on ITV staked a claim that Brian Moore was a behemoth of British sports broadcasting in the same way that Kenneth Wolstenholme and John Motson were for the BBC, but the truth is somewhat more complex than that. Moore commentated on the FA Cup final for ITV for many years, but this was primarily because his employers, London Weekend Television, were the company that produced the coverage of it. When ITV covered live league football in the 1980s and early 1990s, Moore more often than not shared the live commentary duties with Martin Tyler. When the World Cup final came around, though, there was only one man up for the job - Hugh Johns.

It says a lot for the resonance of Kenneth Wolstenholme's "They Think It's All Over" commentary at the 1966 World Cup Final that Hugh Johns, a commentator for thirty years, was best known as the answer to the old pub quiz question of who was commentating on the other side for ITV at the same time - and what was he saying at the exact moment that Wolstenholme was etching himself into the national consciousness? "Here's Hurst, he might make it three. He has! He has! ..... So that's it. That is IT!". Maybe not quite as memorable, but anybody with an ounce of love for the game should take Johns as their favourite football commentator of all time. He would go on to commentate on a further four World Cup finals, as well as being the voice of ITV sport in the Midlands until 1982.

Some of the great "What If"s of British broadcasting come from questions over the allocation of contracts to ITV companies, and one of these arises when one considers ITV's first big shake-up, in 1968. Prior to 1968, Johns was ITV's main man. He commentated on their first three live FA Cup finals as well as the aforementioned World Cup final but, when ITV shunted their companies around in 1968, Johns' company, ATV, was unceremoniously booted out of London and up to the Midlands, allowing LWT and Brian Moore in. Johns became the voice of football in the Midlands during the last Golden Age of football in the area. Merely mention his name to anyone from that part of the world and you'll see their eyes mist over straight away. ATV's Sunday afternoon show, and "Star Soccer" one of the lynchpins of their schedule. Hosted in turn by Billy Wright, Trevor East and Gary Newbon, and with "expert" analysis from Jimmy Greaves (the reputation that Greaves earned on "Star Soccer" would persuade ITV to shove him into the dreadful "Saint & Greavsie" pairing in the 1980s), the show was often criticised for its emphasis in clubs from the west of the area at the expense of their rivals in the east. However, it was successful enough to be exported to, amongst other places, Australia and Egypt.

In truth, "Star Soccer" was always going to find it difficult to satisfy the viewers in its sprawling region, which stretched as far north as the Potteries, east to Derby and Nottingham, and south as far as Oxford and Swindon. In the twelve years that the show ran, Nottingham Forest, Derby County and Aston Villa all won the League Championship. On top of this, there were brief golden periods for Stoke City, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Birmingham City. The cost of sending the Outside Broadcast units was prohibitive to sending cameras to more than one match (and, indeed was impossible if there were other events such as horse racing to be covered). "Star Soccer" was always likely to run into problems in this respect.

Johns himself had a rich and authoritative Welsh accent. Although deep-voiced, he was more than capable of getting lost in the excitement of a match (I can't find any specific examples, but he appears to have had a penchant for shouting "BOFF!" at the moment of particularly powerful shots on goal), though his controlled commentary style was in sharp contrast to the absurd histrionics that we are subjected to these days. You can hear some classic Hugh Johns over this match between Derby County and Burnley from 1975. In 1982, ATV were forced into a shotgun marriage and a name change to Central, and Hugh was put out to pasture as the "new" company brought in the man with the most nasal voice in the history of mankind - Peter Brackley (now best known as the commentator on the Pro Evolution video game series). After commentating at the 1982 (he was on particularly fine form during the notorious match between West Germany and Austria, which was played at walking pace to a 1-0 win so that both nations could qualify at the expense of Algeria, who had already beaten the Germans - I've never heard such heartfelt outrage over the desecration of the game) Johns would return home to Wales to commentate for the Welsh company HTV until into the 1990s. It was always a rare treat to find that ITV were sneaking in a Cardiff City match, so that we could hear his dulcet tones.

Some of you, I dare say, will think that I'm being needlessly nostalgic. I would counter that the current crop of commentators are a bunch of buffoons, capable of doing little more than shouting, screaming and announcing what programmes will be following after the match has finished. You wouldn't caught Hugh Johns doing that, and this is just one of a multitude of reasons why his passing is another small chip away at the game that we all used to love. In a very literal sense, we shall not see his like again.

And for the shameless nostalgists amongst us, here's the theme music to "Star Soccer" once more.