stevegrant

But then we run the risk of having the likes of Brian Woolnough as a prime-time regular. That, frankly, is an even more horrifying prospect. Also, let's not forget that a lot of national newspaper journalists have as many conflicted interests as the ex-pro pundits, desperate to appease players and managers for that lucrative ghost-writing contract, etc.

Neville's very good as a studio pundit on the Monday night games, but as a co-commentator he's not great. Wilkins is awful

And you've only just noticed this?

Point of order: BSkyB makes absolutely nothing from Premier League games being broadcast overseas. The Premier League makes in the region of £500m a year from doing so. It's important to distinguish between the Premier League and Sky, even though the two have been intrinsically linked since the PL began in 1992.

But that returns us to exactly the same situation as we have now. Sky cannot enforce such a clause, it's the very definition of anti-competition. They probably will buy up the pan-European rights and sublet them to local broadcasters where they see no business sense in entering themselves, but they won't get an even spread of revenue across the EU as countries like Greece simply don't have the money. At the moment, Greek broadcasters pay less than £10m a year for PL coverage (and that gets them all 380 games), Sky would be lucky to get the same again in the next deal, assuming a pan-European deal would cut it down to around 150/160 games (380 wouldn't be viable as most of the games would be unavailable to the UK market because of the blackout). The same problems would still exist, it would still be cheaper for you or I to buy a Greek decoder and subscription and install it at home (perfectly legal) than to get a subscription to Sky Sports. Of course, there's also the problem that Sky wouldn't own all of the rights anyway, due to the last legal case they were involved in in Europe, which resulted in a ruling that no one broadcaster could own the rights to all of the games, hence ESPN have a token gesture of 23 live PL games a season.

The EU accounts for around 10% of the total non-UK broadcasting revenue (and about 5% including the UK), so not a massive amount in the grand scheme of things. However, the UK alone accounts for nearly £600m a year, which is around 55-60%. If the rights are to be sold as one across Europe, it seems plausible that the value of UK rights will be diminished as BSkyB will no longer have "exclusive" rights to sell to customers in the UK. While Sky as a whole (including its Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia operations which are also massive - albeit not quite on the same scale as BSkyB) may acquire the majority of the pan-European rights, because someone in the UK could buy a decoder and subscription from Greece or Romania for a fraction of the price as BSkyB charge, that potentially has an effect on the price Sky will be willing to pay. Anyone thinking that it'll drive down the price of a Sky Sports subscription is, sadly, very much mistaken.

We have that situation at the moment, as you can acquire a decoder for a European satellite broadcaster and watch their coverage of games that fit into the UK "blackout" period (i.e. Saturday 3pm kickoffs), but when the rights go pan-European, it's almost certain that those games will be removed from the rights packages for live games. Of course, you could still get the content from non-European broadcasters, but you're then in danger of copyright infringement prosecution.

The Sky product in the UK might be devalued in pubs for the remainder of the current contract (to summer 2013), but it'll become a pan-European deal from that point onwards, so little Greek broadcasters won't have a hope in hell of getting the rights, unless they sublet from someone like Sky, ESPN or Canal+.

I don't think this ruling will actually make much difference in the long term. Sure, for the duration of the remainder of the current TV deal (i.e. until summer 2013), you'll be able to watch Greek coverage of the Premier League for much less than the cost of Sky Sports, but from the 2013-16 deal, the Premier League will almost certainly sell the rights on a pan-European (or at least pan-EU) basis. Currently, they get around £1.7bn over three years for UK rights, and £375m over three years for European rights (which accounts for only 10% of the foreign revenue). Also worth bearing in mind that the current UK deal covers only 138 live games per season, whereas the foreign rights currently allow all 380 games per season to be broadcast live if the local broadcaster chooses to do so. Any new pan-European deal, which would obviously include the UK, would remove all of the Saturday 3pm kickoffs from the European deals, but as a trade-off, would probably up the number of games shown in the UK, perhaps to 150/160. Not entirely sure how they'll fit all of those in, but I'm sure they'll find a way. As these are now combined rights for the whole of the EU, including the biggest market in the UK, the local broadcasters won't get a sniff and it'll be left to the big guns, i.e. Sky, ESPN and Canal+, to fight it out for the rights. As there would be genuine competition between them, that could see the price rise rather than fall. Worth bearing in mind that the situation remains unchanged outside of the EU, so a broadcaster in the Middle East will probably still be able to show all 380 games live. However, the likes of Karen Murphy won't be protected by EU freedom of trade legislation as the decoder and content would be arriving from outside the EU, so could be pursued by the Premier League for copyright infringement.

Nor does it take a sane person to realise that the club's wall of silence to the very person who organised the fundraising and presented the thing to the club to use is wrong on many levels.

Or for you to have racked up more than anyone else despite claiming indifference to the subject.

Akin to phoning ClubCall for accurate news content

Data roaming would suggest that you've been using Orange's data services while abroad. If so, yes, it's ridiculously expensive. Somewhere in the region of £3 per megabyte unless you pre-buy a data package. When I went to Switzerland in the summer, I bought a 30MB roaming bundle (domestic data use is included in my contract) for £15, which took the per-MB cost down to 50p, but I underestimated how much I was going to use and ended up paying an extra £90 for the 30MB over that original bundle amount I used. If you've not been abroad recently, they're billing you incorrectly.

Why was it agreed that it would be at the club's discretion if/when it was ever shown the light of day again after the ML tournament when the majority of it was paid for by the fans? Further to that, what percentage of the cost did the club contribute towards it?

To be fair, I don't think there are many who have ever doubted Wigley's ability as a coach. It was just as a manager that he was proven to be utterly inept

I thought he'd ballsed up the one against Birmingham the other week, it hit a bit too much of the post for my liking

Disinterested. From what I gather, on his day he's one of the best strikers in the division, but if it's not his day, he's a waste of space. Watford reminded me of us in 2008-9, start the game brightly, miss a few good chances, have a couple of decisions go against them and then collapse in a heap later in the game.

5-2 win for us

Depends if he negotiated a fixed-term contract - you rarely see news articles on club websites heralding the contract extension of a member of backroom staff, so it may be that he was employed on a full-time salaried basis (like most employees in most other industries) rather than a fixed-term contract. My assumption is that Downes brought a claim for wrongful dismissal and the club has ultimately settled out-of-court. I believe a number of former SFC employees went down the same route last year and the club eventually offered them all a suitable settlement, coincidentally also the day before the hearing.

I thought Guly was our best player by some margin on Wednesday night. Always involved, and was a key focal point of our attack as Lallana was nullified pretty well by Cardiff. It would be fair to say that his work-rate and defensive work has rarely won him plaudits, but I lost count of the number of headers he won in our area from their set pieces and the number of times he chased back to win possession back (sometimes from his own mistake, admittedly, but he was far from the worst offender in that regard).

It's not his business these days, but I assume he was simply asked a question about it (like most of the other PL managers will have been) at a press conference and he answered. I think Gary Neville mentioned that he was somewhat "difficult" in his last season at Man United, so to be fair to Fergie, he's got experience of Tevez so is probably in the best position of any other manager to comment.

I'm not a massive fan of Harding, but from what I've seen of Fox so far, I'd much rather have Harding at left-back.

You almost move a yard there

He told me he wanted to play in midfield, which, given the number of defenders already in the squad, I'm fine with.

I've got one, but it's fair to say the shirt is proper fat bastard size, so probably worth bringing your own if you've got one