Euro 2012: Spanish ayes

With football looking no closer to breaking out in this strange Scottish summer it's with some sadness that one says "cheerio" to Euro 2012.

Brutal honesty, of course, means conceding that Spain's triumph was as far removed from Scottish football as Craig Whyte is from Andrew Carnegie.

This Spanish team play, to borrow a line from Bobby Jones, a game with which we are not familiar.

The only lessons we can learn from them are long term ones. Lessons that will evade us for as long as the siege mentality of our current civil war continues.

But thinking about Scottish football only sullies the moment.

The dull, boring Spaniards. All that possession, all that winning. The dullards.

That always looked like a premature verdict on this side. On Sunday they showed why they're the best in Europe, the best in the world and the best in Europe all over again.

The possession was emphatic, the passes delivered with intent, the Italians toyed with and ultimately destroyed.

A decent Italian team that had exceeded expectation and impressed so much against Germany.

But Spain weren't going to let them upset the football odds on Sunday night.

Where the wonderful Andrea Pirlo could dictate against other teams he was frustrated here, where Mario Balotelli was so explosively untameable against Germany here he was all but sidelined.

Spain were just too good.

Andrés Iniesta just seems to get better and better. He's now won three Champions Leagues, a World Cup and two European Championships.

He's 28 years old.

He represents the freakiest reality of this side. We're already discussing them as the greatest ever - some cling to the Brazil of 1970, Bob Crampsey forever championed the 1958 vintage - but they have time on their side.

They're young. They proved on Sunday just how hungry they still are.

It's a shame not to linger on what they've already achieved. But the mind does stray to what they might yet achieve.

You can't stop debates about the "greatest." But this Spanish collective could yet provide a definitive answer.

> The tournament? Enjoyable, intriguing, exciting.

A Golden Boot for Fernando Torres proves that this was a championships defined not by the goalscorers but the creators.

Pirlo and Iniesta stood above the rest. When people are able to play football this well we can only weep about the circus that surrounds the game.

They are pure footballers, sent to thrill and amaze us. Together they offer a potent and timely reminder about what made the world fall under the spell of this game.

Watching them over the last month has been an antidote to the suffering caused by prolonged exposure to fitba'.

> Sweet sixteen.

Hard not to feel that expanding the tournament to 24 teams in 2016 will dilute what has, in 2012, been a perfectly formed championship.

It might help Scotland qualify but 24 is an unwieldy number.

Size isn't everything.

> How we watched.

Nothing new in the BBC hammering ITV in the final head-to-head.

It's not ideal though. Proof that ITV still can't get football right and also an excuse for the BBC to stick with the Lineker, Hansen, Shearer, Lawrenson diamond formation.

Lazy, smugly matey and with little new to say they let the viewer down.

Lineker is now seen as a sports broadcaster and as such is untouchable. Shearer hasn't delivered on the money the BBC paid to get him so should be jettisoned.

Lawrenson now sounds like he hates football. Time to put him out of his misery.

Replace them with people that will challenge him - Lee Dixon shows promise - and Alan Hansen might just be reminded why he was once highly rated as a pundit.

Encouraging Lineker to contribute more than being the smug ringmaster of a nineteenth hole debate would also help - he doesn't need to turn to Hansen to analyse a striker's contribution, he can do it himself.

ITV threatened interesting panels but it didn't quite come off. The Warsaw studio could have inspired but ended up making all concerned look awkward.

Jamie Carragher isn't for me but Roberto Martinez was a sound choice.

Roy Keane's views on Ireland seem to me to be a manifestation of an internal conflict between his natural superiority complex and a deeper self loathing. But he could offer something of the maverick if properly marshalled.

Sadly Adrian Chiles looks scared of both Keane and advert breaks. For an ITV football host that's a horrid combination.

Morecambe and Wise also struggled when they jumped from the BBC to the commercial channel but their place in TV history was already assured.

Adrian Chiles has given us Working Lunch and The One Show. A footnote to a footnote in the book of great TV presenters it's hard to see how ITV can persevere with him.

Until we remember that his understudy is Matt Smith, the unthinking woman's trumpet.

Time for another ITV rethink.

Free For All?

Continued gnashing of teeth over England's lost bid for the 2018 World Cup. It appears that the English bid wasn't beyond the odd bit of deal making though. Including on the issue of free-to-air sport on TV:

The BBC and ITV were set to join forces to battle a secret government decision that could have handed Sky the chance to air the 2018 World Cup. It has emerged that the government guaranteed to football body Fifa that it was prepared to waive listed events regulations for the 2018 tournament as part of England’s failed bid to host the event. Under current rules, the World Cup is on the Crown Jewels TV sports list, meaning that it can only be shown live on free-to-air television. However, at the request of Fifa, England’s 2018 World Cup bid document contained a promise to allow pay-TV companies, such as BSkyB and Disney-owned ESPN, the chance to bid for rights. Neither the BBC nor ITV – which traditionally share coverage of the World Cup – were aware of the guarantee at the time of England’s bid.

Seems it wouldn't have extended to the whole tournament. But it does show that for all the moaning and outrage that followed Fifa's decision the English bid team and the government were not completely naive about how these things work.

And they were prepared to dilute one of the country's great sporting shared experiences to get their way.

You can find an interesting analysis of all this on Twohundredpercent.

The Scottish Football Blog News Feed

2010 World Cup: Commentary

I've done my ITV round-up and I've done my BBC round-up.

But I've not mentioned the commentators or the co-commentators.

There is a reason for this.

They are almost all dreadfully bad.

Clive Tyldesley annoys and infuriates. Jim Beglin bores. Guy Mowbray seems awed by the job. Mark Lawrenson has become a parody without actually ever being that good in the first place.

I was almost pining for Archie McPherson.

I'd be tempted to award a knock-out victory to Radio Five Live. And their coverage was superior but the awful Alan Green casts a long shadow that the station struggles to escape.

Even then Five Live wins on points.

A massive fail for World Cup TV commentary.

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.

Watching the future

If something amazing happens in tonight's England match will people remember where they were?

"When Rooney stabbed the referee? I remember it well. I was sat in my study, on my own. I remember Skypeing my best mate to talk about it but he wasn't online."

"Of course I remember where I was when Capello punched John Terry. I was lying on the couch in the front room watching it on my laptop with a cup of tea."

It's clear, with tonight's England game showing online only, that our shared experiences are on the verge of changing. This is a meaningless game, the dead rubber of old, but it represents a massive night in our understanding of sports broadcasting.

Scotland almost got there first. The original plan was to show this morning's Japan clash live online for free. For technical reasons the SFA failed to pull this off (No comment – Ed.) so BBC Scotland, somewhat grudgingly you feel, stepped into the breach.

Watching matches online is not new. Illegal streaming sites are increasingly popular and consistently one step ahead of the authorities trying to shut them down. Major championship games online offer office workers the chance to preserve their holidays but keep up with the action.

But these are alternatives, additional online broadcasts, used by those who can't get to the TV or who can't or won't send their hard earned cash into the deep, deep pockets of Rupert Murdoch and his ilk.

Tonight there is no other way to watch England and Ukraine. Online is the only show in town.

That the technology so far only allows one million people to subscribe is unfortunate. That the quality of the picture means watching the game is likely to be a fairly solitary experience removes something crucial from our enjoyment of watching football as well as striking another blow against the embattled pub trade.

Our surprise, however, shouldn't be about the game being shown online, only that it has happened so quickly. Circumstances, Setanta going bankrupt, ITV's financial woes, scrutiny of the BBC's expenditure (and lingering resentment within the corporation over the loss of the FA contract), left this match without a traditional home.

For any enterprising organisation that vacuum left an opportunity and, as is increasingly common, it was an online company that stepped into the breach.

In doing so they have given us a glimpse of the future. The traditional media is facing untold competition from the new media. Witness the Murdoch clan's increasingly hysterical attacks on the BBC. The focus of their ire now – whether they choose to admit it or not – is the BBC's online presence and the major obstacle it puts in the way of Rupert charging people to use his inferior websites.

It's clear that many traditional media outlets don't know how to react to an online world. New media companies are ahead of the game. That gives the consumer more choice but it will also change aspects of our life that had previously seemed sacrosanct.

That includes how we consume (and yes I hate using that word but in this context it seems right) our football. The technology will get better, games will become cheaper, online firms will become more tenacious and online football will become more and more common.

The BBC iPlayer and its commercial equivalents are the beginning of the merging of our computers and our televisions. Watching football online will become as common as catching up with EastEnders or Coronation Street.

It will give fans more choice and it will increase the already seemingly endless coverage of the game. It will also change the way clubs interact with broadcasters. It will have a huge impact on the way in which rights are distributed and the sums of money involved.

Clubs should already be looking in to the ways in which they can exploit this new terrain. I'm still not convinced many, or any, clubs have quite managed to get their online presence just right yet. Live football online could be one way of taking a club's web strategy to the next level. Are we too far away from a big club negotiating opt outs in central TV contracts to show their big matches online?

I don't think we are. Today is the opening salvo in a battle for broadcast football that will dominate the next 15 years.

Some fans won't be happy and some will miss out. Some clubs will make a better fist of maximizing their earnings than others. If you're watching the game today or not in the years to come you'll remember where you were when England played in Dnipro. Today's the day that football changes.

Rant 3: TV or not TV?

Well, I’m on a roll so why not.

If a country gets the TV it deserves then we are a very bad bunch here in Scotland.

Let's leave BBC Scotland out of this for just now (although a lot could be said, right Chick?) and concentrate on the excuse for a modern broadcaster that is STV.

With terrible programmes and terrible presenters (I wouldn't wish an hour with Stephen Jardine on my worst enemy) the channel has long been in the doldrums.

But last night's inability to show the Rangers game was insulting to Scottish football and, once more, displayed STV's inability to provide a service for their viewers.

I’m sure not everyone will agree but I think the Scottish representatives in Europe’s top tournament should be shown on terrestrial TV. And I speak as someone who has laughed long and hard at some of the drubbings handed out to the Ibrox side over the years. This year we'll not get one Rangers group match. Not a single one.

Instead we get Liverpool. It was definitely Scottish though and we had a Scottish presenter (backed with an English pundit) to prove it.

STV are blaming ITV for failing to negotiate the correct deal with UEFA. This is a bit rich as STV are currently falling over themselves to not show anything from ITV and are instead devoted to an output seemingly designed to appeal to nobody apart from a few sheep on Skye.

Apart from some highlights of rugby’s Magner’s League STV have shown themselves to have absolutely no commitment to Scottish sport. At the same time they are denying Scottish viewers the right to watch programmes that are freely available in Berwick, Leeds, Belfast and Cardiff.

If they can't provide the service that viewers want, if they are financially incapable of showing live football with Scottish teams then they should stand aside and let another broadcaster take over. Because right now the fabled potter's wheel would beat anything that STV can make.

Perhaps we’re on the road to independence and perhaps not. If we are then Alex Salmond should be stepping in. If STV is going to be the national broadcaster of an independent Scotland then the time to run for the (English) hills has already arrived.

Arsenal v Celtic preview

Battle of Britain Part Deux tonight then. 2 away goals look a lot. Celtic need an early goal. Chasing an early goal will expose the defence. It's a Catch 22 for Mr Mowbray.

Anyway if you want a slightly more indepth preview then click here to be taken to ITV's big, shiny football site where they've been kind enough to let me witter away as a guest blogger.

And if you were to push me I'd say Celtic will score. But it won't be nearly enough.

Mysteries

Football's obsession with the big names means that the star men are always on display.

No surprise then that the ever predictable ITV Champion's League coverage should scan the crowd for Fernando Torres when Liverpool went 1-0 down.

Truly a case of millionaire footballer is expressionless when paymasters lose goal to former paymasters.

The intriguing thing was young Torres appeared to be sitting next to Tony Booth. Was it actually him?

What were they talking about? Was Fernando asking how Tony's son in law was finding retirement? Was he asking about Tony's tempestuous love affair with Coronation Street's Pat Phoenix? The travails of socialism in Spain and England?

ITV should get their best man, or failing that Matt Smith, on the case.