Apparently Paul Gascoigne answered the door to police naked with the word ‘mad’ scrawled on his forehead. He’s also been eating day old raw liver and talking to mechanical parrots.
I assume it’s only a matter of time before we get a new reality show ‘At home with Gazza’, or ‘In Gazza’s padded cell’.
After watching Emmanuel Eboue take a theatrical flop in the penalty box against Milan last night, Richard Keys tried to stoke up his usual post-match controversy by insisting it could have been a penalty. His reasoning for this - which he gave repeatedly - was that “there was contact”.
So what? There’s quite often contact between players in the penalty area. If every bit of contact was awarded a penalty, we’d see rugby scores.
There are ten reasons a player might be penalised, but none of them involve simply making contact. Stop stirring, Keys, you tiresome sod.
So-called ‘experts’ are paid to comment on the game. Alan Hansen says:
If I had been asked at the start of the season to nominate a team to drop out of the Premier League’s top four, I would have picked Arsenal. And Tottenham would have been my choice to replace them. Look what has happened to those north London rivals since then.
Not quite up there with his classic ‘You can’t win anything with kids’ line but close enough.
If you don’t already know about 101 great goals it’s a fantastic website which provides links to football clips on YouTube and other video hosting sites.
For many fans it’s the only way they can see their teams in action. However, in this piece the gaffer over there expresses his concerns over the future of the site, and it’s understandable that he has them.
I commented recently on why streaming was so popular and the backlash that was emerging against it.
Let’s be clear here now though. 101 great goals does not upload or host videos on its site, it merely provides links. That may not be enough to save it if the lawyers get their way and it would be a real shame.
Again it merely highlights that where there’s a huge demand for a service the authorities and the bigwigs are more concerned with stopping someone providing that service than trying to figure out a way of doing it themselves. Like the record companies, like the people who close down the streaming services, they’re so focussed on the negatives they’re blind to the positives.
I hope 101 great goals doesn’t fall foul of these people. Keep it up as long as you can, Sir. We’re right behind you.
Forward to about 4 minutes in, listen to RTE presenter Bill O’Herlihy *nearly* say the word most Irish football fans associate with manager Steve Staunton.
It seems a backlash is about to begin against websites that provide links to streams of football games. Every weekend hundreds and thousands of people watch English, Spanish, Italian, German and French football via websites which offer links to the games.
Some software is needed but generally a reasonable quality picture can be found for pretty much any game you want to watch.
Now though, this is under threat. The internet police are going to do their utmost to take these websites down and prevent coverage of the matches reaching the web.
What this reminds me of is the battle that record companies have had over the years with file sharing. When sites like Napster and Audiogalaxy made it simple for people to share their music the first thought of the record companies was not ‘How can we use this technology to expand and improve our operations?’ but ‘How can we stop it?’.
It took them years to realise they can’t ever stop it as Napster was replaced by Kazaa which in turn was replaced by torrents. People will always share music but when it became easier and cheaper to buy music online we’ve seen the success it’s been. The iTunes music store, like it or hate it, has been incredibly successful and has made Apple one of the most important and powerful companies on the planet. They went with the new technology and have benefited from it.
The TV companies will say that they’ve paid a fortune for the rights, and that of course is true. However, the sheer demand for internet streams must surely be making somebody think ‘Hey, let’s look at this as another way of providing people with live football’.
As well as that you can be quite sure that the vast majority of people who look at streams already have a subscription to a TV service like Sky and use the internet to supplement their football watching. At the moment the quality is not bad but nothing compared to sitting on your couch, drinking a beer and watching on your flat screen LCD. So the impact of people watching streams is nowhere near as bad as they would have you believe.
I think you’d find most people would happily pay €10 a month to a website if you could go and watch streams of any match you wanted. €10 is just about two pints of beer in a Dublin pub and nobody would even think twice about handing over that money.
I’m fearful that football fans like us will be left without the choice that we have at the moment, even if it is just about illegal. The broadcasters need to get with reality and start providing this service themselves. They can close down as many websites as they want but new ones will keep cropping up. Their attempts to disable streams and software will only result in new programs being made to bypass those restrictions.
They are pissing in the wind trying to stop it, they need to embrace it, and it’ll mean more football for us.
After the Liverpool v Chelsea game today the behaviour of Richard Keys on Sky Sports was very strange.
As Andy Gray lambasted referee Rob Styles for the shocking penalty award, Keys was determined to play down the ineptness of the official.
‘They’re only human, they make mistakes’, he said. There was some reference to the bosses ‘upstairs’ as if criticising officials was not allowed. Now, any football fan, even the Chelsea fans I’m sure, will tell you that what happened in the game was not a penalty. And the more often you look at it the less a penalty it is.
Andy Gray was absolutely right to criticise Styles and use words like ‘farcical’ to describe the decision. As fans we hate when referees make mistakes but most of the time we can see how they might have made it. Today there was no reason to do that. Keys wasn’t just playing devil’s advocate, he was almost critical of Gray for his stance on the matter. Is it a matter of Sky being under orders to protect the image of the ‘product’ - especially now that Setanta are on the scene and they don’t hold the monopoly over the coverage?
Are they going to fudge issues like this again and again in case it displeases the Premier League and they take that into account the next time the contracts are up for grabs? If that’s the case it’s a very sorry affair.
As well as that, what was he on about when he kept saying it wasn’t Chelsea’s fault. One particular part of the conversation went like this:
Gray - “That was never a penalty, blah blah blah, rubbish decision, everyone agrees” etc.
Keys - “Ok, but I think we should make it clear that whatever has happened here today is not Chelsea’s fault.”
What? Who said anything about it being Chelsea’s fault? Why would he say that? They were talking about one of the worst refereeing decisions in recent, and distant, memory but he feels he has to make it clear that it’s not Chelsea’s fault.
How very odd and it makes me suspicious. It’s not just me is it? Would love feedback from anyone else who caught this today.
It’s real, hard as it might be to believe, it’s real. Frank Lampard TV. Jesus.
In the old days they’d have a couple of main matches then some brief highlights from the rest. Now they seem to be showing about 5 minutes highlights of each match.
Is that good? Was it just because it was opening day?
And where’s Gerald Sinstadt these days?
Forget the football, it’s Sky’s new graphics. Not only do we have grinning half-mannequins of the players as Andy Gray goes through the line-ups, we have the time and score in a new position. Look.
It says CH 1-1 MU, which means teams have been changed to two letters. Arsenal will be AR and Liverpool will be LL after new chairman LL Cool J and Bolton will be BO after their ghastly underarm smell.
What do we think though? Personally I hate it but I’m quite resistant to change.