The Sport Thread

But not many pubs with no TVs show football.

They tend to gather round a radio broadcasting 5 Live.

Sky Germany has won exclusive rights to the UEFA Champions League in Germany and Austria, albeit with certain games to be sublicenced to Perform Group.

France - England

Have we got a dual pitchside presentation again tonight? All the 'far side' pitch ads are UK centric, those on the nearside at the ends are in French, which leads me to believe the French rights holders are operating on the 'other side' from ITV.

That's pretty much always the case, especially in glamour friendlies of this kind - I think it's more or less a condition of England organising the friendly in the first place that they get to sell all the adverts on one side.

When I bought a DVD player in 2002 it came with a free DVD of England's 2002 World Cup campaign which as well as including the match against Finland with u>direct DOG (and probably more people saw it on that DVD than on u>direct) also had Germany 1 England 5, but it seemed a bit weird because it was filmed from the "wrong" direction. I certainly remember watching Wales vs Germany in Cardiff a few years ago when one side had German adverts which you saw when they showed something from the reverse angle.

The other thing about that 2002 campaign, which was quite an eventful one football- and telly-wise, was that the match away to Albania was the first one with the animated hoardings that we now know and love, and I remember reading they'd had to transport them through a war zone.

I think the Mirror are reading way too much into the story that Rachel Riley has left Sky Sports. She was probably on a one year contract anyway.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/countdowns-rachel-riley-gives-tv-10618101

She also co-presented the Fantasy Football Club programme that went out on Fridays, I'm sorry to see her go from that.

Friday Night Football is painful to watch, even Jeff looks out of his depth on it. I think Rachel's 'bottle boys' comment, as unintentional it was didn't do FNF any favours.

Interestingly enough she was absent from the final Friday Night Football, just one week later, which ditched the entire format bar the name and was presented solo by Stelling from the stadium.

There's no reason why football on a Friday night shouldn't work (the Bundesliga has Friday night games, as has the Championship) but for whatever reason Friday Night Football on TV hasn't been a success. Maybe Sky will rethink their presentation for the second year of the contract.

Indeed, though it's worth pointing out the whole format was misguided and Rachel was hardly the cause of its problems - Stelling was just as ill at ease with it, and if Stelling could have done it on his own, so too could Rachel have done it on her own.

The problem with Friday Night Football is just that they overloaded it with so many useless gimmicks first time round, all of which got swiftly abandoned - the pub link-up, Chris Kamara running around - and so it just became the same as any other match only there were two presenters and they didn't wear ties. I think a lot of the issue with football on telly and why we keep on having these ropey formats - Saturday Night Football on Sky with its studio audience is another one - is because, perhaps uniquely among sports, there's virtually nothing you can do with a live match to make a difference. Football on TV desperately wants to discover something like The Analyst on the cricket or the gridwalk in F1 when they can actually make a difference to the coverage of the sport while it's taking place and get awards and kudos. Unfortunately for them, there just isn't the time or opportunity in football to do anything like that. So we end up with gimmickry like this.

If you look at the winners in the sport categories at the BAFTAs or Broadcast Awards, football programmes almost never win, and that's because there are no amazing technological or editorial innovations they can bring to the table, unlike other sports where the coveage can be quite heavily produced. But the broadcasters are convinced there must be, hence these constant bright ideas that are swiftly abandoned.

Talking of football on TV notice last night after years of resisting video refs due to them "disrupting the flow of the game" now they're trialing them they're not letting viewers or fans, or ref for that matter, see the pics or hear the discussion meaning it is just a minute of the ref stood in silence.

Works for cricket, tennis and F1 (albeit on a heavy delay sometimes) so I don't see why it shouldn't work for football. Took a long while for goal-line technology to be bought in and even then I don't think at the moment that's universal, only appearing in certain matches/games/tournaments IIRC.

In fact F1 is so technologically-advanced by its nature compared to a lot of sports they could probably introduce a "no farting in the car" rule and be able to police it.

Sunset and Vine did a great job on the ICC Champions Trophy, they had a world feed, star Sports English feed and Hindi feed a very comphrensive operation, was this covered at all in Europe, I couldn't find any other broadcaster other then sky covering it.