Television coverage of the new Premiership season
So the Premiership started today apparently ;-)
Tonight Match Of The Day returns after an absence of a couple of years whilst ITV had exclusive highlights rights. The BBC has been aggresively promoting it, with TV and Radio trails based around that famous theme tune. Mind you, if you watched the Match Of The Day at 40 documentary the other day, you'd know that the national anthem of football wasn't actually the original signature theme when the show launched on BBC2 back in the sixties.
Meanwhile the new service that I am interested in is Sky's Football First, which launches tonight at 10:15 - 15 minutes before MOTD. It has been promoted with a presenter-to-camera explanation of the features of the new service, so I'm pretty sure what I'm going to get. It allows you to choose via the red button which of the matches you want to watch the highlights from. It is an attractive proposition - I'm pretty sure that had they introduced this last year when Leeds were still in the Premiership I would have been opting for the guaranteed 50 minutes of my team's match, rather than the haphazard approach ITV's The Premiership took to showing matches (i.e Manchester United, Arsenal or Chelsea every time they played on a Saturday as the main match, plus a random smattering of teams they happened to be playing at the time).
D'oh! I'm glad I'm not the person responsible for the way MOTD was transmitted on DSat, with a big black screen gap in the middle of the Middlesbrough - Newcastle match followed by a cut to a post-match interview that gave away the fact the Jimmy Floyd Judas was going to score, followed by a cut back to the match highlights as if nothing happened.