2010 World Cup: ITV - Chiles Play

Football. It's all about results.

So the BBC will be busy celebrating their trouncing of ITV in the World Cup final face off between the two channels.

A slightly pyrrhic victory though given the lack of quality at the commercial channel. Much like Celtic beating Tranent Juniors 7-0, it would be unseemly for there to be any gloating.

ITV went into the tournament full of expectation. £6 million had secured the services of Adrian Chiles to revolutionise their football coverage.

Even before the twin disasters of the phantom England goal on ITV HD and Robbie Earle's strange dismissal that was a looking like a dodgy gamble.

Chiles has built his career on a grumpy bloke next door image and an apparent refusal to turn down work.

The very public hissy-fit that helped engineer his transfer meant some of that "ordinary bloke" veneer was lost. In booking their pundits ITV also overlooked that much of the success of Chiles' Match Of The Day Two was dependent on the quality of his guests.

Gareth Southgate seems like a decent chap. But he's the last person you'd want if you needed to provide some spark in a television studio.

Andy Townsend's continuing employment must largely be down to his ability to say so little of any consequence that viewers don't mind ITV cutting to an advert.

Marcel Desailly, who has impressed as a pundit previously, was reduced to being a cheerleader for Africa while Edgar Davids offered little in the way of insight or charm.

All this left Chiles looking cut adrift, even his apparent great gift of channelling the "voice of the fan" failed. Any fan who watches as much football as Chiles must do would surely have developed a more refined understanding of the game.

From the moment he appeared in a questionable skit before the England v USA game Chiles looked like an uncomfortable fraud in his new surroundings.

He left the BBC because Chris Evans was going to replace him on The One Show on a Friday evening. Say what you like about Evans but at least he now realises he was once an uber media twat.

When Chiles resurfaces in a decade filling in for Steve Wright on Radio Two we might surmise that he's made that same journey of self discovery.

Chiles' one saving grace was his new employers unerring ability to cook up failures. As long as he could promise "James Corden next" at the end of his show he looked OK by comparison. But only just.

And a big question remains for ITV: Who in Britain would want to wake up with this man?

On the Robbie

I was going to write a post giving my verdicts on the TV coverage of the World Cup so far. But I'll save that for now. (Sneak preview: poor.)

Instead I'll just ask: "Robbie Earle, what the hell were you thinking?"

Long, if not particularly distinguished, playing career leads to what is shaping up to be a long, if not particularly distinguished, punditry career.

It's all going right. If ITV use focus groups then they obviously have a bizarre preference for nervous looking former Wimbledon players with a fine line in studious blandness.

Still he looked effortlessly handsome next to Gareth Southgate, a man who first brings to mind the word equine and then various phrases involving knacker's yard and glue factory.

Anyway Robbie's blown it. And how:

"Following claims by Fifa that official 2010 World Cup tickets may have been used for ambush marketing, ITV has reviewed its entire ticket allocation for the tournament," said ITV in a statement.

"Immediate investigations indicated that a block of ITV tickets would appear to have been used for unauthorised purposes during the Holland v Denmark match," it added.

"Further enquiries have revealed that a substantial number of tickets allocated to Robbie Earle for family and friends have been passed to a third party in breach of Fifa rules."

It is understood that between 35 and 40 tickets allocated to Earle ended up in the hands of the marketing company said to have orchestrated the ambush marketing effort on behalf of the beer brand Bavaria via a third party.

Thirty-six women in orange mini dresses were ejected from Soccer City during yesterday's match when Fifa officials decreed they were part of an organised ambush marketing scheme. They were questioned for several hours until after the match had finished. Bavaria denied the women had any links to its campaign.

Robbie's been sacked with immediate effect.

He denies knowledge of what happened, blaming a "friend." Who was no doubt a big boy who then ran away.

And what the hell are ITV doing giving Robbie Earle 35 to 40 tickets for a game?

When I first read about Bavaria's ploy I was quite impressed. But then you hear that a marketing company was behind it all.

I bet these guerilla marketing men think they're quite the cool cats. But taking one corporate shilling to try and steal another corporate shilling is not all that, is it? It's hardly the stuff of Robin Hood.

One thing we have learned is that Robbie Earle is a prized tit. That will be why he fitted in so well in that ITV studio.