At we are planning to make a film in the new year about who you want to win this year’s . Be honest now, is it or ? (For the purposes of this blog I’m discounting the possibility of a ‘third’ challenger.)
If you actually support either of the league’s top two, your choice is obvious. If not, you may well have spent the last decade or so resenting Man United’s success. All that money and popularity. All those trophies. Difficult to accept graciously.
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I spent a chilly afternoon earlier this month at the New Den with my mate Rod, watching his team Millwall play my team .
I hope forgives me, but Bradford were pretty wretched and 2-0 down after half an hour. Why do we put ourselves through watching it? Well, I suppose it beats being in the Saturday checkout queues at Sainsbury’s.
It’s also about the endless battle between hope and reality – the belief that one day in sport we’ll make it, however much the odds are against us. But this past year has tested the optimism of English sports fans to the limit. From Twickenham to Perth via Gelsenkirchen, 2006 was a catalogue of disasters.
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Having explained last week why we nearly always transmit Match of the Day live, I thought I'd deal with another subject raised in a number of responses, and even in the letters column of this month's "".
It concerns the people who are on the air for 80% or so of most football programmes: our old mates, the commentators.
An urban myth seems to have spread that we don't always send our commentators to the matches for MOTD and MOTD2.
I can exclusively reveal that we definitely do - every single Saturday and Sunday since we regained the contract, we have had a commentator at every game.
So too, I believe, have . If you find yourself at a weekend Premiership game, have a look up at the gantry and you should see at least two worried-looking individuals in headphones up there, clutching a set of notes and talking ten to the dozen for ninety minutes.
And, with any luck, not just to themselves...
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At Football Focus we’re planning to make a film looking at football grounds old and new. I thought this blog might be a good way of asking what you think about clubs moving about?
Is it for the better? Is it just a financial necessity? Or is it eroding some of the history of the game?
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I’m the Series Editor of Football Focus and I'm the latest author to join the cast list writing regularly on this blog.
As you know, Focus goes out on 91Èȱ¬1 on a Saturday .. so what do I do for the rest of the week you ask? Well, typically on a Tuesday morning I chair the Focus meeting. John Motson, Jonathan Pearce, Steve Wilson, Garth Crooks and Mark Bright gather with the rest of the production team to chat through what we should put in the weekend’s show.
I then have to choose which stories to commission off the back of this often excitable, always entertaining session. Ideally, at least one of our interviews will become the lead story on the 91Èȱ¬ Football website come Friday.
By Friday afternoon, Mark Lawrenson will pitch up to tell me that I’ve picked all the wrong things.
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I'm writing this with some trepidation. A few days ago I thought it was another good news story for 91Èȱ¬ Sport: following the return of cricket to 91Èȱ¬ television, the reappearance of another old favourite.
But now I realise there'll be even more suspicion that we're a bunch of royalist horsey types. After Zara Phillips's victory in , which has generated a lively response, we're bringing back showjumping to primetime television...
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One of the questions I'm most often asked is "What time do you record Match of the Day?"
In fact, it is (almost without exception) transmitted live - a fact we take as read in 91Èȱ¬ Sport. So I thought I'd try to explain the rationale behind the policy.
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Some of you have already given us your verdict on last night's show in the posting below this one. They range from Adam's "brilliant" to Dan's "awful" with Chris in between with his "very entertaining" but accompanied by some interesting points of criticism.
So let me give you some of the figures before inviting more bouquets and brickbats.
In the , it was an emphatic victory for Zara Phillips. The figures we had just before 9pm last night were:
1st Zara Phillips 221,514 (32.5% of the total vote)
2nd Darren Clarke 144,310 (21.2%)
3rd Beth Tweddle 88,352 (13.0%)
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When I was growing up, the 91Èȱ¬ Sports Review of the Year was one of the first signs of Christmas.
This was a time - difficult to believe, I know - when shops didn't start selling mince pies in September and when my dad put up the Christmas tree a couple of days before Santa was due, as opposed to people festooning their homes in fairylights as soon as Bonfire Night's over.
So a Sunday night in December was the real signal that the year was ending and it was time for a festive review of great sport.
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Thanks for all your comments on the 91Èȱ¬ Sports Personality Team of the Year award - and votes for the three contenders.
They are: ; , who did the County Championship and C&G Trophy double; and , winner of all three of rugby league's domestic titles.
Voting has now closed and the winner will be announced during Sunday's show, which takes place from 7pm to 9pm on 91Èȱ¬ One.
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The idea of this blog is that we explain ourselves to the licence-fee payer, and that the replies are one of the means by which you can give us feedback. As you'd expect, not all of it's positive, but it is taken on board.
So I thought it was worth responding to John Phelan's comment last week (#14) which claimed that Match of the Day says "how great the big four are" followed by "a quick whip round the rest". If that was ever true in previous incarnations of 91Èȱ¬ or ITV Premiership highlights, I really don't accept it as a description of what we've done since August 2004. On regaining the rights, we introduced a full commentary and minimum five minutes' edit for every game. The intention was not to "whip round" any game ever again!
John also claimed that MOTD is a "load of rubbish" which, if true, is a sad indictment of what our team does for a living. Either way, it may be a "load of rubbish" but I don't agree that it's a big-four obsessed "load of rubbish"! Just ask the fans of Liverpool - presumably one of "the big four" - who've been complaining about our placing of their recent matches in the running order.
In the past, the usual gripe was (with some justification) that certain teams' games often ended up as 30 seconds in the round-up. Now it's that a given edit of several minutes was too late in the running order. However, there is a real issue behind all of this, one which I will now try to address.
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We have today announced the award.
The list of seven sportsmen and three sportswomen, compiled by a combination of votes from the general public, newspaper and magazine editors and a panel of sporting experts, is sure to ignite feverish debate over the next few days.
Voting will only take place during Sunday's show live from 7pm to 9pm on 91Èȱ¬ One. The public will be able to vote by phone and text with the numbers announced at the start of the programme.
Roger Mosey, director of 91Èȱ¬ Sport (ie the boss), made an interesting speech this week outlining how we are transforming what we do in response to the changing media landscape (such as phasing out Grandstand in place of on-demand services), and underlining our commitment to sport long-term.
It is posted on the 91Èȱ¬ press office website so we haven't repeated it here, but feel free to comment on this blog.
Inevitably from the England coach's job has been virtually the only story in the rugby world this week.
The feeding frenzy for responses to fill the 24-hour, multi-media news outlets of the day leads equally inevitably to some wide-ranging views on what is now best for English rugby if it is to ever climb back to that vaunted position it occupied just three years ago.
One of the most controversial came from everybody's favourite chirpy, World Cup winning scrum-half/ TV chef/Q of S captain/dancer/Five Live pundit Matt Dawson who warned that England's remaining coaches John Wells, Brian Ashton and Mike Ford lacked the medals and experience as players to lead England back to the top of the .
This has picked at an old sore - do great players make great coaches and leaders?
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