Let's guess the content of tonight's ITV Premiership

Spurs to break the Boro hoodoo tomorrow, Jel ?

Although Man U will still be lead game and they will only show the goals from Wolves-Leicester.

Oh yeah...and you still have to endure Lynam, unfortunately.

Hansen every Saturday! Yay!

Which is bollocks, quite frankly. Wolves-Leicester will probably get the Guy Mowbray Treatment ("Wolves could do with a goal now - here's Camara - He's Scored! Henri Camara! Unbelievable!"). Darren is most likely bang-on in his prediction of how Taaaaahnsend will analyse it, in that it will be Utd defending poorly, thus giving him the opportunity to show off his Immense Knowledge Of Football, and leaving Big Ron to say nice things about Hernan Crespo or whoever.

Us V Blackburn was never gonna be shown. What does annoy me is that Birmingham City and the Completely Overlooked Player Of The Season Thus Far, i.e. Maik Taylor, will be ignored, despite the fact they've only lost once this season and conceded only five in ten games, putting them fourth in the table, four points off the leaders. By the time Andy has stopped talking over Clive Allen for long enough to notice, it'll probably be too late for them to get their dues... (though admittedly Steve Bruce is a bit of a bast.)

Inamoto's goal...mmmmm. Give that man a starting place, or better still, sell him to Tottenham PLEASE.

Tonight's 'show', btw - not as bad as it could have been re the "concentrate on Man Utd 'what went wrong?'" angle, but the analysis is so perfunctory as to be utterly devoidof necessity. Townsend is hired solely on his ability to state what is obvious enough for an elementary English student to be able to articulate. In other words, he says exactly what he sees. "He gets the ball, takes it down beautifully, and..wallop, top corner.". Yes Andy ..

quite. he was godlike today. i think liverpool were linked over the summer, but fulham looks a happier club to be at, for the moment at least. speaking of 'pool, that sinama-pongolle chap looks rather tasty.

I don't know if there's an archive of stats for these things, but I'd wager that United have NEVER been pushed back to the also-ran section. They're either featured or not playing on Saturday. Same goes for Arsenal, by the way.

A couple of other things on this thread: Wasn't Dennis Bailey in Musical Youth?

OTM, Darren's point about ITV analysis. And to think - it has actually improved since they first started their coverage a couple of seasons ago.

ITV pushed Wolves Leicester forward, fine, but squandered any possible respect by saying, as they went into the ad break, 'before our next main game, one of the best comebacks in the history of the premiership.' So they didn't have the decency to make it a main game, gave away the result and made it clear (to their advertisers?) that no-one needed to worry because a big club would be along again shortly. Per-thetic. What are they so afraid of? It was as if they needed a special reason to justify showing Wolves and Leicester at all. There are 20 clubs in The Premiership, for fuck's sake.

But what upset me most yesterday about ITV was On The Ball. They had a round-up of the 'Champs League' games. I didn't see the whole thing, but caught their review of Sparta Prague's win, which featured only one of the three goals, plus Lokomotiv Moscow's 3-0 win, again only one goal shown. They preferred to rush back to the 'experts' in the studio stating the obvious about the British clubs. They have rights to show football, but prefer talk to action!!

Replace United and Fulham with Arsenal and Charlton and you've pretty much got today's Sky Sports coverage spot on.

Chelsea vs. City... where the fuck's the intrigue there?

Priorities, gents...

Even then - Champions League is midweek prime-time, Premiership gets punted about late-night Saturday schedules quite merrily, which was definitely the case last season. Champions League is in by far the more valuable timeslot.

Yes, I agree that Wolves-Leicester should have been a main game, but the appeal of Chelsea-Man City is that both are flying high, both are very attacking, and lots of action was anticipated. The logic is fairly clear, even though I don't like the overarching bias towards the few hugest clubs.

But Martin is right re: City v Chelsea, they are both doing pretty well this season, it's a game that would expect to be shown. Also, it's a pretty intriguing game in that you don't expect a Keegan managed team to do particularly well against such a potent team as Chelsea are at the moment, you expect them to try and play them and get their relatively weak defence exposed, this obviously didn't happen.

- I just think sometimes that Arsenal haven't made that *step up* that you need for Europe.

- Liverpool, for me, Matt, have gone *backwards* since winning the UEFA Cup.

- I just think though Matt if you took that aggression *away* - would he be the same player?