STV Sports coverage

STV has been talking about beefing up its sports content. Thing is, why has it taken so long?

Currently, STV hires in presenters and commentators from other broadcasters for champions league soccer coverage, and for its Celtic legaue rugby union coverage, uses the BBC commentators from BBC Wales.

STV used to showe a preview show, Extra time.

It doesn't even have a sports department, and lost the scottish rally championship to BBC Scotland in 2009, and gave up the junior cup final the yerar before.

A lot of work to be done to beef things up me thinks.

They could add the FA Cup for starters.

They do have a lot of work yet, but Sports Centre was good on Friday and it's not just for football. I think they're doing daily updates as well after the News at 10

The new sportscentre will be a good thing. What I'd like to see is a return of Extra time, the preview show, looking at all sports, not just football. It looked at Racing, and Rugby.

Except it was all football, apart from one "betting tip" which was a horse, and a short piece sucking-up to Colin Montgomerie.

The Barry Ferguson interview was badly edited and clearly wasn't undertaken by Sheelagh McLaren, who was dubbed in afterwards over library footage. Stuck out like a sore thumb.

The set looked like some sort of STV Casino knock-off and the whole show really just gave Gerry McCulloch and the woman another chance to dribble on about Rangers and Celtic. The Larsson interview was sugary sweet and completely irrelevant to this week's sport.

If STV doesn't have access to any decent footage, or isn't going to actually preview the weekend's sport then they just shouldn't bother. You'd get more sports insight from conversations overheard at your local sport centre than from the STV Sports Centre.

I agree that the Barry Ferguson interview was a bit long winded, but I doubt many people care about the studio, considering it's only used as a link to the interviews. I thought the studio was pretty good considering STV don't have the same facilities as BBC Scotland. I assume it's the usual studio with a CGI backdrop to make it look larger.