Poor mobile UEFA Cup service from the BBC

Everybody knows that the UEFA Cup is the poor man's "Euro Vase" to the "Big Cup" of the Champions League, but I'm not sure why the BBC's coverage of the competition has to be so poor on their WAP mobile service.

Last night I wanted to find out what time the Blackburn vs Red Bull Salzburg tie kicked off. So the obvious thing to do on my phone was to go to the BBC's Football menu, the European menu, then the Fixtures page. Except, that only displayed the next Champions League fixtures for the 17th October three weeks away, rather than the European fixtures taking place in a few hours time.

In fact I eventually found the kick-off time by going back to football, and navigating through My Club to B to Blackburn to Blackburn vs Red Bull Salzburg.

Annoyingly for me, despite involving the biggest local team, the game didn't appear to be on the free-to-air TV I can get in my hotel room in Salzburg. So, once the game had kicked off, I went back to the BBC WAP site to get the latest score.

Well, with Tottenham, Newcastle, Blackburn, West Ham, Rangers, Hearts and Derry playing in the UEFA cup, you might expect coverage of one of the matches to make the 'Top 10 football stories' index on the BBC's phone service.

Well, you'd be wrong.

So I went back to the Football menu, then European, then choose Scores/Results, hoping to get the latest scores from all the games, in the same way that on the phone the previous evening I could get up-to-the-minute details as the goals went in during such crucial ties to the British audience as Shaktar Donetsk vs Olimpiakos.

No such luck. Whilst the UEFA Cup matches were on, on a WAP phone the BBC's latest European Scores/Results display was the previous evenings Champions League results.

I wouldn't mind, except that I know all of this is being covered in detail on the 'world wide web' version of the site, where you can track the scores of all the British teams taking part in the competition. Whilst on the WAP service even navigating through Football > My Club > B > Blackburn > Blackburn vs Red Bull Salzburg simply gets you a statement 'Match report to follow later' during the game.

I don't know why, but somehow the main BBC Sport site's WWW content about the UEFA Cup just does not map to the WAP site, and you simply can't get hold of it. I guess it is just a case of second-rate coverage for a second-rate competition.

Posted by Martin Belam, September 29, 2006
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