Bye Bye Setanta

I have no sympathy for the demise of Setanta Sports only sympathy for the couple of hundred Mr and Mrs 'Normal' who will lose their jobs.

I have no sympathy for those presenters and commentators who jumped ship from their previous employers to board the gravy train that was Setanta Sports.

To be honest I don't believe that LIVE football should be controlled and maintained by satellite TV companies but it is the way of the world and we live in that world.

Once upon a time, football was for the masses, now it is for the elite.

Not only are the 'real football' fans being priced out of going to matches, they have to pay a monthly subscription fee not to one satellite company but two, of course if they want to watch live games from the comfort of their armchair.

Setanta's demise has opened the door for ESPN (the sporting arm of Disney) to buy out the Premier rights for next season and beyond.

Whether I transfer my subscription to ESPN remains to be seen - I will just have to wait and see how many times Chelsea will be featured between the start of the season and Christmas.... wink, wink!

In A Fix With The Fixtures!

Wednesday morning at 10am was when football fans across the country were tuning into their TV sets or logging on to internet websites – well those media sources willing to pay the extortionate fees – to find out the full fixture list of their respective team for the coming campaign.

However in the days of saturated live TV coverage I am starting to think releasing the full dates of when teams are due to play – especially Premier League and Championship – might as well be left until the top brass at Sky and Setanta (finances permitting) get their mucky paws on them!

To be honest people requiring the fixtures to plan days off work, family functions, Christmas and basically fit their lives around their club’s games – which many people do – are wasting their time scribbling these freshly published fixtures into the trusty diary!

With Friday nights, Saturday lunch-times and evenings, Sundays and Monday evenings all now the home of live football on satellite TV, you can guarantee even the mediocre teams in any of the top-two leagues will have around four of their matches tampered with.

Fans of the ‘Big Four’ might as well bin their set of fixtures and just wait for Sky to dictate when they will be going to watch a match given the amount of times they are on the box!

I feel the simple solution is for the Football League and Premier League to print these fixtures off on a Saturday and hand them over to Sky et al. They can select their live matches until at least Christmas from the list and then give them back in time for all to be revealed by the Wednesday!

This would allow fans to know a definitive date when their team would be playing instead of swapping a shift for a match on Saturday September 19 only to find out a week later they will actually need the Sunday off work instead!

The present system is highly annoying and to be honest the remedy is hardly rocket science!

Hopefully the light bulb will flicker in the minds of someone who can actually do anything about it!



With thanks to Craig Smithson, a professional sports writer who blogs about football betting.