The new Premier League deal for TV rights values each broadcast game at around £10m, or £2000 per second. I’m sure everyone involved is very happy.
Televised games can entertain but there’s nothing that quite matches the experience of watching live football in a veritable cauldron of visceral engagement with your team whilst enjoying the camaraderie and knowing banter of your fellow fans. The experience is priceless.
How might one evaluate such a profound life-affirming interaction? It would surely be crass to try. I think it is however possible to place a value on the experience of watching The Bluebirds currently. How does ‘bu***r all sound?’
At around 11.30 last night Sky Sports News rounded up the highlights from the night’s games in The Championship. Thrills and spills galore, an abundance of goalmouth action, free flowing football on a night when the top two battled it out an incident-packed 2-2 draw as they fight for the right to party and take their share of the PL largesse in the seasons to come.
I sat uneasily anticipating the humiliation of the inevitably truncated summary of my evening’s entertainment. Accompanying footage of a 5 second goalmouth melee the commentary ran ‘This goalmouth scramble was the closest either team came to breaking the deadlock’ as the banner at the foot of the page confirming the night’s PL results served as a roll call of starry teams forever beyond our narrowing horizons.
Make no mistake, on this performance our invitation to return to the top table will never arrive. We had our chance 12 months ago and proved to be the worst kind of social misfits - out of their depth argumentative vulgar upstarts who were forced to leave the party early by the back door, a flute of Tizer in one hand, a caviar and tomato sauce sarnie in the other.
Tan’s cut-price ambition was on display for all to see tonight. The new bargain bucket recruits, for all their endeavours, are cheap Woolworth imitations of their extravagantly gifted predecessors. Peltier, Morrison, Malone, O’Keefe, Doyle, Revell etc are lower league journeymen, squeezing the creativity out of their artisan teammates.
The blame for this shambolic display must surely be laid at the feet of Tan’s representative on turf. Slade set the team up with a lone striker against weak opposition, with a mishmash of a midfield which included a hopelessly out of form Gunnarsson, out of sorts Whitingham and out of position new boy Mc Aleny alongside out of his depth O’Keefe.
Brighton were there for the taking - a particularly poor opposition under new management and clearly floundering. Yet they managed to secure 68% of the first half possession. They did nothing with it mind, failing to register a single shot on target. The biggest cheer of the night was reserved for the fourth official holding aloft his board confirming that the torpor was to be advanced by just a minute.
The tumbleweed second half came and went in a blaze of indifference, punctuated with some gallows humour chanting, and then it was time to leave.
I was reminded that my parting shot leaving the office last night was a dismissive ‘I’m off to enjoy a 0-0 bore draw’. I hate being predictable so that’s it from me for now. I’ll clock back in in the unlikely event that I have something to say.
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