Recently in Sport Category

A Media Guardian report this morning suggests that the new Government is not going to add The Ashes to the sporting Listed Events, ignoring the recommendation that they should be included in David Davies' report from last November.

The Guardian report is headlined "Ashes to stay on Sky" which is only really true of the current contract. Of course, it's probably also true while the current short-sighted individuals in charge of the ECB ensure that cricket only reaches a small fee-paying audience.

It's true that just about every major sporting body hate the Listed Events even if they've only ever sold their rights to a free-to-air broadcaster. But just about every major sporting body has in some way profited from public money in one form or another. Quid pro quo.

The Guardian report suggests that sports minister Hugh Robertson is calling for 30% of TV revenues to be passed on to grass roots. As it goes on to say, the definition for what that actually means needs some serious tightening up. Paying wages of overseas players probably doesn't consititute "grass roots". And while the FA passes on lots of cash to the grass roots, I rather suspect that - with the best will in the world - the Premier League doesn't.

Overall this is disappointing, but largely expected news. I mentioned quid pro quo earlier; is the same true for Murdoch and the Tories perhaps?

[UPDATE] The decision surrounding Listed Events has been kicked into the long grass. There won't now be any changes until 2012 when digital switchover has completed. While things like Project Canvas could be a game changer, I'm not sure what difference there'll be in the state of TV between now and 2012 apart from Freeview having rolled out a bit more. Delaying any changes for a couple of years is just avoiding making a decision now. And there can't be accussations of appeasing Murdoch by doing nothing at all. At least that's the theory.

You may be sick of the World Cup now having seen today's debacle. But I'm a bit confused about the coverage of the World Cup in the Middle East.

From what I can gather, the rights to the whole Arab speaking region - with the exception of Israel of course - were sold to Al Jazeera Sports. That station, part of the Qatari owned set of channels that also owns the Al Jazeera news channels, seemingly bought the rights from ART which is closing down.

During the World Cup, there's been something of a subplot that put's ITV's little "snafu" during England's opening game into perspective. There was intentional jamming of the signal via an Egyptian satellite distributor that prevented fans watching. This seems to have reoccurred at various points during the tournament to date.

In the UK we take it for granted that we can watch the whole World Cup - ITV and the BBC bidding jointly for the rights. The entire tournament - to FIFA's chagrin - is a Listed Event. If you look across the rest of the world, different countries have varying levels of free-to-air coverage.

As I've mentioned before, the IOC has the Olympic Charter, one of whose stated aims is to:

The IOC takes all necessary steps in order to ensure the fullest coverage by the different media and the widest possible audience in the world for the Olympic Games. (Section 49, Paragraph 1)

While that doesn't explicitly mean free-to-air on every occassion - it certainly means that more free-to-air broadcasters than not transmit the games in their local markets.

As far as I can tell, that's not the case at all for FIFA. Hence, in many localities, if you want to see every game, you need to watch both a free-to-air channel and a pay channel (e.g. France and Italy). I'll leave you to decide whether that's such a good thing to help develop football in poorer nations.

But what I find extraordinary is the pricing of the rights charged by Al Jazeera. We may complain when out Sky bills go up each year, irrespective of our pay packets not increasing. But we're not charged $100 a month for the rights to a single tournament.* Even with our relatively high standard of living in the West, I'm sure that many of us would think twice about whether we really wanted to watch the tournament if it came with a £67 bill (especially after today's performance). While some parts of the Middle East are very prosperous, many live relatively impoverished lives. Think of all the immigrant workers in Dubai, or the beggars on the streets of Morocco.

Now perhaps I'm missing something, and I'd love to be put straight on the matter if I am, but it feels to me that the World Cup is very exclusive in these countries. Undoubtedly, many will watch in bars and cafes across the region, but that's not really the same as watching in your own home.

FIFA is an enormously prosperous organisation with its expensive Swiss headquarters, and Sepp Blatter's "head of state" lifestyle. And I've no doubt someone at FIFA would wave documents showing how much money gets reinvested into developing the sport across the globe. Yet I still wonder about the avarice of an organisation that can make it so expensive to watch the biggest single sporting tournament in the world.

Please do comment if you can shed some light.

* Yes, I'm aware that a season of Champions' League or Premier League football easily beats this, but it's a cost spread over many months.

I know that a million and one other people have already talked about ITV's nightmare last night (yes - I'm conveniently overlooking Robert Green's one), but it really is worth saying a little more.

ITV1's HD channel managed to miss Gerard's 4th minute goal by playing a sponsorship credit for Hyundai (not an advert), followed by a few moments of blackness before we returned to a celebrating England team.

What has been less-reported is that apart from a period during the first path, following the mix-up, ITV1 HD dropped back to an SD picture. Was this something they could have fixed at half-time? Perhaps, but they didn't. The whole of the second half was also broadcast in SD.

Every time the BBC goes to a major sporting event, the Daily Mail loves to give the BBC a kicking about the number of staff they're sending, but I think that a belt and braces approach to technicalities is the right one to avoid technical mishaps on this scale.

ITV, of course, memorably missed a goal last year in an FA Cup fixture between Everton and Liverpool, when a scheduled ad-break started during extra-time. Again a goal was missed. At that time, Michael Grade personally apologised.

Last night, Adrian Chiles, in his first big ITV outing mumbled something about an "interruption" that we may have suffered, while the commentary team were left out in the cold and either not told anything or not saying anything.

A mistake is a mistake, but this is really bad news for ITV. World Cups come around every four years, and ITV always makes a play to get two of the three group games it shares with the BBC because that gives them some guaranteed advertising income. Those spots were sold long ago.

Indeed Hyundai, one of ITV's match sponsors, won't be happy either, as they've been drawn into something that wasn't of their making. What's more advertisers like Sony, Samsung and the big TV retailers won't be happy. They've been busily persuading us to upgrade to HD for the World Cup and many will have. An irate editor of the Jewish Chronicle was in the same situation as my good friend James Cridland in buying a new Freeview HD box to watch the World Cup fixtures in HD.

In 2008 during the Germany v Turkey Euro 2008 semi-final in Basel, lightning at the broadcast centre in Vienna caused coverage to cease on several occasions during the game. That was at least, a large scale technical problem (one that shouldn't have happened as I understand it, with fail-safes failing), with some clever workarounds being quickly found by utilising a Swiss feed and rebroadcasting that on another satellite channel. This was different, and no other country had the same problems.

Perhaps, like Robert Green, it was World Cup nerves. A few weeks ago, there was a massive drop in the New York Stock Exchange - something that still hasn't been fully explained. One excuse laid on it was "fat finger" syndrome. In other words, someone pressed the wrong button. I suspect that this was what happened at ITV.

It's the question that isn't really be asked - at least in the media. But did the Mail on Sunday's scoop last weekend fatally damage England's chances of hosting the World Cup in 2018?

Lord Triesman's words were certainly ill-advised, and, without any proof, completely unfounded. He was foolish to confide such beliefs with anyone - including people who thought were close friends. And now FIFA is carrying out an inquiry into the claims he made.

But should the Mail on Sunday have carried the report, and what long term damage might it do to the bid? We won't really ever know - and certainly not until December.

The front page of The Sun this morning is turned over to attempting to revitalise the bid, carrying David Beckham's belief that it's not all over yet (Well he would say that wouldn't he?).

Hang on Adam!

Surely it's vital that the media and journalists can report anything that happens without care for the consequences? They're just reporting it after all? A free media is one of the tenets of a democracy. And we know what happens to journalists in Russia who step out of line...

That's true, and I'd defend any journalist from reporting anything.

But there is a slightly fishy smell surrounding the Mail on Sunday's story though. The word du jour must surely be "entrapment". However Triesman did say those things and he was very foolish to have voiced them at any time - never mind at quite such a sensitive time as now.

Today's Guardian mentions an unnamed FIFA member who'll be one of those voting to decide who gets the 2018 competition as saying that he believes its fatally damaged England's chances. But as we all know - in the political arena of sport, nothing is ever quite as it appears.

Sports politics surely remains the one area in a western democratic world, where corruption remains. Just look at some previous FIFA and IOC administrations to find things that aren't really very clever, very nice, and in cases, very legal.

But I do wonder how much pressure there currently is on the Mail on Sunday to reveal - or keep hidden - any further revelations that might come from it's tape recorded conversations with Triesman? Are we seeing News International v Associated Newspapers over this?

In the end, the proof will be in the pudding. And if the average football fan begins to believe that the Mail on Sunday cost England the 2018 World Cup, then it could hit the bottom line of Associated Newspapers. And an endless supply of Phil Collins CDs won't fix that.

[UPDATE]

I must admit I wrote most of that without testing the water of fan reaction. And it seems pretty clear that I'm by no means the only person pointing a finger at the Mail on Sunday.

Roy Greenslade is wondering like I am, whether this could lead to Hillsborough style boycott of the paper. Of course Linekar's left the paper, and the reaction in comments on the Mail's site seems to be flowing one way for the most part.

On Friday, a Department of Culture, Media & Sport consultation based around their Review of Listed Events closed.

This consultation was based around some preliminary suggestions on the updating of the list of sporting (and other cultural) events for which either live free-to-air TV coverage, or recorded highlights should be made available.

The big issue seems to have revolved around the inclusion of cricket's home Ashes Test series on the list of events that should be televised live on free-to-air television.

Just to be clear, this is a once every four years tournament latterly consisting of five Tests, with previous series in England taking place in 2005 and 2009.

Let's be clear - if there's a sports body who wants their event to be included on this list, I've yet to hear it. While the IOC specifically states in its Charter (section 49, paragraph 1):

The IOC takes all necessary steps in order to ensure the fullest coverage by the different
media and the widest possible audience in the world for the Olympic Games.

Most bodies do not necessarily make such claims. In some countries, for example, you will have to subscribe to pay TV to watch every game in the FIFA World Cup Finals. It's usually the case that pay TV broadcasters can afford to pay more for sports rigths. At the very least, having more potential bidders in the game mean that rights will earn them more whoever wins the rights.

So perhaps understandably, the ECB has been robustly opposing the inclusion of The Ashes on the list.

They argue that were they to be forced to sell The Ashes to a free-to-air broadcaster, they'd lose £137.4m for the 2014-2017 contract period - a period that includes one Ashes tournament. This seemingly represents a 48% drop in overall domestic revenues, even accounting for any upside in increased sponsorship awareness.

In other words, those five matches are worth £27m each!

Is that a believable figure? I don't think so. Football, for example, is far more popular on Sky Sports, yet those games cost something like £3.8m on average. Certainly, that is an average figure, and Sky's coverage of a single match is around three hours rather than five days. But it just doesn't add up to me.

The ECB may well have conducted plenty of independent research into these values, but is nearly half the value of all domestic cricket over a four year period due to five matches?

In any case, the ECB needs to face up to a significant falling off of interest in the game. It's a disgrace that the only live cricket on UK free-to-air television is the current IPL coverage on ITV4.

Does the ECB really think that they can generate interest in the game without gaining widespread coverage of it? You can go into schools as much as you like, but unless kids can see their heroes, they're not going to want to play the game.

And I'm sure none of Sky's cash is just going to bolster overseas players' salaries.

There's a legitimate question about what free-to-air broadcasters like the BBC or Channel 4 can or would pay for Test cricket these days. There are questions about fitting the coverage in - largely irrelevant as aside from other sporting obligations both the BBC and Channel 4 could easily ditch their entire daytime schedules without loss. What they really mean is that cricket has been gone from free-to-air TV for such a long time now, that there's already a lack of audience interest.

This downward spiral will only continue unless some live coverage is carried free-to-air. Nearly every other sport knows this. Compare and contrast with Rugby Union which saw nearly 6m people watching France v England on Saturday night. Six Nations fixtures, with the exception of Wales in the proposed list, aren't Listed. Yet rugby realises packed audiences, massive interest in the game, which extends down to club level, and wide exposure through a mix of premium and free-to-air coverage.

The ECB has even failed to sell Twenty20 fixtures to a free-to-air broadcaster. I'm certain that the BBC or Channel 4 would have bitten their hand off to gain solely those rights. But no - the ECB sold them to Sky too.

(It's worth mentioning, incidentally, that Sky could still buy the rights to Ashes fixtures and run them free-to-air on a channel such as Sky 3 on Freeview. In Italy, Sky there has Olympic rights which will be broadcast free-to-air).

The ECB runs scare stories about Sky losing all interest in Test cricket without The Ashes despite the fact that it'd almost certainly have the Australian hosted event every four years as well as all other Test cricket. This is the ECB snobbishly looking with a look at distain at the IPL and saying never...

The other issue the ECB needs to face up to is the forthcoming Ofcom requirement that Sky wholesales sports channels at cheaper prices to competitors such as BT and Virgin Media. Sky will fight these rules all the way, but assuming that they come to pass, that's likely to reduce the amount that Sky can pay for sports rights anyway. So come what may, the ECB is going to be looking at a reduced revenues for their next contract.

What's not clear to me at the moment is whether this whole DCMS process will be completed prior to the election, or whether it gets kicked into the long grass. A cynic might suggest that the Conservatives would be Murdoch-friendly - that's certainly the implication. But it's not quite as straightforward as that, and then there's the possibility of a hung Parliament (Vince Cable for Chancellor of the Exchequor anyone?).

The long and short of it is that if more people don't gain exposure to Test cricket, the value of those rights will diminish. Audiences will get smaller, and frankly, if someone sets up a Packer/IPL type of series, then that'll be the ECB's fault.

I don't often talk about football on the blog, but Arsenal's 5-0 demolition of Porto last night is worthy of recording. The photo above shows Nicklas Bendtner finishing his hattrick from the penalty spot in the 90th minute. But goal of the night must go to Samir Nasri's superb individual goal as he beat three players, dancing around them before scoring from a tight angle.

Arsenal won the tie 6-2 on average aggregate.

According to the Vancouver organising committee, all 1.6m tickets for the Winter Olympics are expected to sell out.

I'm always very suspicious of claims like that. Especially as I watched the USA v China Women's Ice Hockey last night, and there were plenty of seats available. And I don';t just mean a couple of no-shows at the last minute, I mean rows of empty seats. Now considering that the USA have demolished China on every occassion they've met on the rink, that's perhaps not surprising - most of us prefer not to see one-sided contests.

I'm sure the Vancouver games will be very well attended, but making claims that can disproved simply by turning on your television does nobody any good. Even the commentators highlighted the empty seats.

A good night last night at Arsenal watching them beat Liverpool. And the other results were excellent too.

So I'm really excited that today, Absolute Radio (my employer), has announced that it has won rights to live commentaries from a 3pm Premier League fixtures for three years from next season.

Read more at the One Golden Square blog, and on MediaGuardian.

Disclaimer: I work for Absolute Radio. And I am really excited about this.

I stayed up late last night to watch the Superbowl. I like American Football, and once you get over the inordinate number of breaks in play it's a fine sport. I suggest that you either diligently us your PVR in live pause mode, or do as I did last night and decide that it was the perfect time to install Windows 7 on my netbook (it went fine on my Samsung N110 thanks for asking).

But there are a few other differences. The actual game seems to be very low down the order of importance surrounding the whole thing. It's all about the specially made ads (somewhat disappointing by all accounts this year, although the Dave/Oprah/Jay promo was funny), or the half-time show (The Who playing a poor medley of CSI theme tunes. I think I'll stick to CDs thanks).

One thing I can never get over is how unexcited the commentators seem to be. I know they're professionals and they have to bring that special gravitas to the event, but a bit more life in their voices wouldn't go amiss. Sometimes Motty might be a little over the top, and Sky will make a deathly-dull game sound more exciting than everyone watching knows it is, but at least they try to convey some of the excitement. Even the sound mix seems to minimise the crowd noise. Of course the fans don't tend to songs, and it being the Superbowl, actual honest to goodness fans are few and far between since the world and their mum has bought tickets. And they're not cheap.

But the real difference comes at the end. For a country who presents sport with enormous professionalism, the scenes at the end of a regular season game are frankly chaotic. This is only increased in the Superbowl where there are already several hundred player, coaches, officials, journalists, cameramen, photographers and others prowling the touchlines.

At the final whistle all hell lets loose. Everyone brings their families on too.

Yet it's at the presentation that things really change. With the FA Cup or the Champions' League, journalists are kept in roped areas. A stand might be built, or the steps are ascended at Wembley. And then the players go up to collect the trophy. You know - the guys who've been running around and entertaining us for the last couple of hours, plus all those weeks and months leading up to the final. The team Captain receives the trophy and raises it aloft. Then the rest of the players will get a go, and among them, the manager will bashfully accept it too.

At the Superbowl, a small podium is built in the middle of the pitch. The trophy is brought out to the middle of the pitch and players try to touch it as it goes by. Just as well, as for the time being, this is the closest most of them will get to it.

Then the trophy is presented... to the team's owner. Yes the "franchisee" is the person who accepts it. Yes - he pays the bills, and without him or her, there'd be no team, but it wasn't him (let's face it, it is a "him") running around out there. Next the head coach of the team - the manager figure - gets his turn. Finally, the MVP (Most Valuable Player) gets a turn. And that's it.

And all around, everyone's wearing slightly tacky T-shirts or baseball caps proclaiming the winners (another box, should the other team have won, is quietly boxed up and recycled or sent to Africa for charity), while the local newspaper distributes copies proclaiming the winners.

As I say. I like American Football, and enjoy the spectacle and the occasion. Perhaps the charm of it is the lack professionalism at the end. The memorable images tend to be grabbed from the midst of a scrum of cameramen with the camera pointing upwards. But it could be better done.

I was lucky enough to go to the evening sessions at the O2 of the ATP World Tour Finals in London earlier this week - attending on both Monday and Tuesday.

Overall I had a great time - not exactly hindered by the fact that I had superb seats. While the upper level seats were cheap, I'm not certain I'd want to go up there and attempt to keep my eyes on a 130mph serve.

Monday night saw Novak Djokovic beat Nikolay Davydenko in three sets (more on this later). And there was lots of Serbian support inside the arena - and some Russian support too. But despite that loss, Davydenko was the man who would end up reaching the final today.

On Tuesday there was the really tasty fixture of Roger Federer v Andy Murray. Once again, this went to three sets with Federer really raising his game after Murray had taken the first set.

Overall it was good fun, with one small exception - the match timings.

The evening sessions began at 7pm with a doubles fixture. This was followed each evening, not before 8.45pm by the singles match. To speed along the doubles fixtures, they play a "no advantage" rule at deuce, whereby once deuce is reached, the receiving pair elect who will receive and the game is decided on that single point. The rights and wrongs of this, I'll leave to others, but this is clearly to ensure matches finish on time as much as possible.

In Monday's evening session, the doubles fixture still ran on a bit, with the result that Djokovic v Davydenko only actually started after 9pm. Djokovic isn't the fastest player on the tour - bouncing the ball lots of times at every service.

The match was destined to run to three sets, with the result not in until 11.45pm. As we ran to North Greeenwich tube, we were implored not to because the last tube wasn't until 12.16am and there was no need. But that didn't allow for changes and connecting tubes and trains. I ended up getting home shortly after 1.30am as a result of all this, having to wait nearly 40 minutes for my final train home.

Even the following night's action, which was over around an hour earlier, still saw me getting home at close to 1am. And I live in London!

The arena certainly emptied early on Monday, and even on Tuesday.

The O2 has this excellent tournament in London for the next four years. But they need to amend the timings. I can't work out why 8.45pm is a good TV time for anywhere else in the world. Champions' League fixtures start at 7.45pm and that seems to work well for most of continental Europe. It doesn't help Asia particularly, but neither does 8.45pm. Even the US timings can't be brilliant, taking place in the mid-afternoon. In which case, start the matches earlier.

With the best will in the world, the doubles weren't well-watched, but if they got under way at 6pm, I'd make an effort to get there for them.

Lots of people travel long distances to watch tennis, and they should be able to stay to see the whole game. So switch the timings next year please!

On Monday there was a Radio Academy event in London with Matt Wells asking the questions of BBC Radio Five Live's controller, Adrian van Klaveren.

The obvious area for questioning surrounded Five Live's forthcoming move to a new facility in Salford.

As someone who listens to an awful lot of Five Live, I'm still unconvinced, although van Klaveren put up some persuasive arguments. BBC Radio probably is too metropolitan in its outlook, with some programmes coming from outside London based on all sorts of mistaken logic.

But I wonder if it wouldn't have been smarter to move a station like Radio 2 up there? When all is said and done - and this was a theme at the interview event - it's clear that Five Live is going to have to do an awful lot of "Down the Line" interviews.

While technically these will be fine, as anyone who's ever heard a Radio 4 Today interview with someone sitting in the radio car in a remote place knows, it's never the same as having the interviewee facing you in the same room. As things stand currently, Five Live often shares major interviewees with Radio 4 - especially politicians.[UPDATE: It's probably worth noting that sometimes politicians are in other London studios - White City, Broadcasting House or Millbank and are doing "Down the Lines" - but the argument still holds]

Van Klaveren was at pains to point out that politicians do venture north and that they'll be able to interview people up there. But if a major event is taking place in parliament, then it's London where the people concerned will be found.

Partially as a result of all this, Five Live is about to see a significant scheduling shakeup as Simon Mayo heads off to Radio Two (and there's no doubt that his loss will be felt), to be replaced by Richard Bacon, who's late night programme will itself be replaced by Tony Livesey.

Gabby Logan also finds a place on the schedule in a lunchtime slot that means that Victoria Derbyshire's programme loses an hour. That in itself probably isn't a major issue, as I personally find the full-blooded phone-ins the worst aspects of Five Live. Although I've yet to be fully convinced by Logan listening to her Sunday programme.

And the recent "Rules of Chat" TV ad for Five Live does concern me. Previously the station has been about news and sport. Yes, it handles lighter stories, including entertainment news, but it was primarily news and sport. "Chat" seems to have sneaked in of late.

Logan remains an uncertain choice in my view, and the cynic in me wonders if, like the recent return of Anne Robinson to Watchdog, it's not more about getting fuller value from an expensively contracted presenter - her TV commitments having dwindled a little with the decline in quantity of live football on the BBC.

Richard Bacon is less of an issue to me, and I well remember the howls of protest that met with Simon Mayo's arrival at Five Live. They proved to be completely unfounded. But as Wells indicated, he will need to "step up" his game when he makes the move in January.

I was interested in Stephen Nolan's situation. By far the worst programme on the station, with its pointless "White v Black" arguments which tend to go along the lines of this:

Caller A: "White is definitely better than black. It's so much whiter!"

Nolan: "How can you say that when black is so dark? That makes no sense at all!"

Caller B: "No. Black is definitely better than white. The darkness of it wins everytime."

Nolan: "I can't believe you said that. White is surely the most light of the two and clearly better."

Repeat - ad nauseum.

Specious though those arguments are, they're nothing to the waste of flying Nolan across the Irish Sea to Manchester each week where his show is made and broadcast from. Nolan is a broadcaster on BBC Radio Ulster each weekday morning, and so on Friday he hops on plane to Manchester to make his weekend shows.

Having heard that "Down the Line" interviews needn't be so bad, Five Live still feels the need to make his show out of Manchester rather than Belfast even though it's technically perfectly straightforward for a predominantly phone-in show to come from pretty much anywhere. Yes - his production team are in Manchester, but there can't be that many of them, and it just seems a waste.

Van Klaveren was adamant that presenters would not be trained or flown up to Manchester and put up in hotels. If they retained homes in the South East, that was their lookout.

Interestingly, this question cropped up again in a Q&A session with him on one of the BBC's blog pages later in the week. And once again van Klaveren stoutly defended it.

An issue that I did ask him about in the open Q&A at the Radio Academy event was the scarcity of sporting journalism on the station. I still fondly remember On The Line, which started out on Five as weekly investigative standalone programme, before making a transfer to BBC Two. Unfortunately, once it was ditched by TV it never did really return, and yet it's just about the only serious sports news outlet. Much of the rest of the coverage surrounding sport is based on panel discussions - usually with ex-pros. Per se, there's nothing wrong with these, and they make entertaining listening. But taking a hard look at sporting issues and the sometimes touchy politics behind it, is something that only the BBC can really do, and there's a scarcity of that.

The only other true coverage of these kinds of issues is to be found in an occasional Panorama from the likes of Andrew Jennings who specialises in investigating bodies like the IOC and FIFA.

Even if commercial broadcasters actually wanted to seriously address some of these issues, they'd be more concerned about damaging critically important commercial relationships - it simply wouldn't happen.

I've said before that running a major global sport is the closest you can legitimately get to being an internationally recognised dictator these days - particularly in the West. Look at the people in charge of the Olympics, football (UEFA and FIFA) and Formula One. People treat them literally like visiting heads of state such is their power and influence, however "democratic" or not their sporting bodies are. Jack Warner of Trinidadian football association is the foremost of these wretched characters.

That's why we need a BBC who'll take on these bodies and not run scared. The Kennel Club is a relevant case in point, as has been coverage of greyhound racing.

Van Klaveren said that in fact this kind of coverage does exist but that perhaps it's not signposted clearly enough. Where once a programme like On The Line (which successfully spun off at least two excellent companion books by the way) would exist in its own right, today's Five Live tends towards broader programmes that are less distinguishable in the schedule.

It would be good if Five Live was able to gather together some of this journalism and house it - perhaps on the web - under a specific label.

[UPDATE: The full audio of the Radio Academy event is available either on their website, the Five Live blog, and here!]

And so it has come to pass - this weekend's dead rubber between the Ukraine and England, will only be available online or at your local Odeon cinema.

The prices seem to range from £4.99 if you book now to £11.99 if you book on the day of the game. Odeon cinemas seem to be charging the higher of the two prices.

There's been a combination of teeth gnashing and apathy today. The game is pretty much meaningless since England has qualified (although it might subtly affect our "co-efficient" for determining things like group stages draws in future tournaments).

That said, I certainly can't be bothered.

The reason given for the match not finding a television home with the BBC, ITV, Five, Sky or ESPN is that "broadcasters were willing to pay the asking price to screen the game." In other words, if none of those guys - even someone like ESPN which is surely trying to create a new business, isn't willing to pay to screen it, then clearly too much is being charged.

What's actually happened is that when the draw for this round of group stages was made by FIFA a couple of years ago, a few sports agencies dash around and purchase the rights to games from individual nations' football associations. They move quickly since if a footballing "minnows" have games against larger football-mad nations. Rather than selling group stages to one rights holder, individual nations can sell their own home games separately. So whatever the English FA would like it to do, it's the Ukranian FA that gets to sell its home rights.

So it was that back in November 2007 a company named Kentaro snapped up the rights to a number of England games. Setanta came along and bought them. There was probably a hope that if it came down to the wire, this could be a critical game for England to qualify for South Africa. A high fee was probably demanded and paid. In the event, England strolled the group, and the match is meaningless, as is the final fixture against Belarus. Meanwhile Setanta went bust and rights reverted to Kentaro who were then left with a problem selling them in a down market at a time when England were strolling to qualification.

Kentaro has taken a gamble and it hasn't paid off*. So now, rather than cutting their losses and accepting the highest offer from a "traditional" football broadcaster, they're trying the direct-to-consumer route. They claim that they'll limit the number of streams they sell to a million which represents a minimum of £5m revenue if they get to that number.

In the future, we'll perhaps see more of this kind of selling, although there are plenty of regular pay-per-view platforms available like Sky Box Office, Virgin Media and BT Vision. None of these seems to be being employed. So unless you're able to hook up your PC to your TV, you're reduced to watching the game on a smaller screen - quite possibly a laptop sized screen. Not your 42" plasma. A pay-per-view option would also have enabled some pubs to show the game.

Will the feed be stable? Who knows. The BBC has struggled at times during key Wimbledon fixtures that take place during office hours. Sky's Player also struggled at certain points during The Ashes. These are large broadcasters with big IT teams who are used to serving significant numbers of simultaneous streams. Sport will always show up a poor digital picture - I'd always want to watch some sport on any prospective flatscreen TV I was buying for example.

How strong is Kentaro's backbone? It's possible that we won't find out, because I'd be amazed if all that many pay up.

The Odeon idea is interesting, and I assume that it'll be an HD stream - certainly not an internet stream. In the past Odeon cinemas have simulcast live football in big tournaments, as well as HD Formula 1 coverage. They also regularly show live opera from places like the Met and Glynebourne.

But let's see what happens at the weekend. I doubt we'll ever learn how many streams are sold. However, it will be interesting to see what happens when the draw for the group stages of Euro 2012 are made in February 2010. Will we see some higher profile away games going online?

*Clearly, I have no real insight into Kentaro's business plans, but I think that's a safe assumption to make.

Yesterday evening, England won the final Test at the Oval, and doing so regained the Ashes.

It was a fine moment.

And it was a moment that I experienced via the radio listening to Test Match Special on Five Live Sports Extra.

As it happened I spent most of the weekend at the V Festival in Chelmsford where Absolute Radio had an exclusive area. What we didn't have was a satellite dish, although thanks to the Sky Player, I was able to keep checking on the score when I wasn't listening to the radio (and watching and listening to bands playing obviously). I've moaned before about Sky's Player only being available to those Sky Sports subscribers who either buy a triple-play package from Sky or pay a supplement for an extra box - multiroom as it's called. I'm happy with my phone and internet providers, and living by myself, I don't need multiroom thanks very much.

But for July and August, Sky extended access to Sky Sports on the Sky Player to all subscribers meaning that all the Test cricket has been watchable via your PC.

But back to yesterday. Media Guardian this morning reports that Sky Sports' audience peaked at 1.92m viewers as the final Australian wicket was taken. An hour or so later, 2m watched Five's highlights of the same event.

These are both excellent numbers for the respective stations. But in 2005, when Channel 4 still carried live Test cricket, 7.4m viewers watched England win.

As I've made clear previously, I've no bone to pick with Sky who's coverage is excellent - particularly from a technical point of view. Although I much prefer Aggers and the TMS radio team to the dull David Gower and over-eager David Lloyd (his ridiculous trailers for the laughable England XI/Stanford Superstars damp squib have permamently lowered my apppreciation of him). And Mark Nicholas on Five's highlights is very good indeed. In the end, that's all a matter of taste.

The key point here is that far fewer people got to see any cricket this time around. And this cannot be good for the game.

Defenders of the ECB's short-sightedness will talk at length about how Sky's money is being ploughed into the roots of the game. But over the same period we've also seen an influx of highly paid overseas players.

We should also remember that cricket is state-sponsored. Sport England gives the ECB a lot of money (details of a recent £37.8m deal can be seen here), so I think that public at large should see some benefit of its munificance.

And even if we remove the "emotional" part of the equation, in pure commercial terms, do sponsors like Vodafone, Buxton and nPower really get full value for money by having their potential audience limited?

With cricket having been off-air to the "free-to-air"* masses for a number of years now, I can't see Test cricket making a return even if it wanted to. Channel controllers aren't eager, getting better ratings for vapid fare like Deal or No Deal, The Weakest Link or Loose Women.

But the lack of even one-day or Twenty20 games is surely going to cause the game long-term damage.

Are more schools playing cricket than before? Or have they sold their playing fields to developers (a major issue for all school sports)? Can they afford to maintain cricket pitches and have practice nets? And even if they do have the kit, do kids aspire to be the next Freddie Flintoff or Stuart Broad? Or have they perhaps never seen them do their stuff?

Which other Test playing nations in the world have no live cricket on free-to-air television?

Football's clearly the biggest sport in the country, and even though the Premier League is not live, there is free-to-air coverage of FA Cup, Champions' League, Europa League, international and now Championship fixtures. Rugby sees decent pay-TV returns from the Guinness Premiership and Heineken Cup fixtures, but highlights are available, and the Six Nations and Rugby World Cup are still free-to-air.

Other "minority" sports like tennis, golf, and athletics all reach much larger television audiences than cricket does, even if they only have a handful of tournaments broadcast every year.

Yes, some of those events are protected, but others aren't and the sporting bodies, rights holders and sponsors understand the value of making at least some of their sport available to a far broader audience. Even boxing has slowly realised that they simply won't attract a new audience in if they price the next generation of fans out.

The ECB should realise that now they've placed all their eggs in Sky's basket, they run the dual risk of both losing a potential new fanbase of young cricket followers, and lose cash in the medium term as sponsors don't reach wider audiences, while Sky can effectively hold them over a barrel next time around (if there's nobody else interested in your sport, then you're not going to maximise returns). It should be a matter of priority to get at least one tournament onto free-to-air television.

For slightly different reasons, horse-racing actually pays to ensure that Channel 4 continues to cover their sport. Yes - that's for betting income purposes, but it comes down to keeping an audience interested.

But in the end, the proof will be in the pudding. In 2005, the streets of London were lined wtih thousands of people who cheered on the winning side as they paraded in an open-top bus, culminating in a packed Trafalgar Square. Will we see the same scenes this time around I wonder?

[UPDATE] Just after posting this, I notice that in fact there'll be no open top bus tour this year:

"The team still have a packed schedule ahead of them and are flying to Belfast on Tuesday for a one-day international."

Hmmm.

*Some ECB defenders will point out that TV in this country isn't "free-to-air" because we are all required to pay for a TV licence. This is true, but in the same way that car drivers have to pay a vehicle licence tax, there's a difference between most "free-to-drive" roads and "premium" toll-roads. I also have to pay for my TV set, and electricity to run it, so that's frankly an irrelevant point.

I went for a nice walk in Cambridgeshire yesterday, and here's a map of where I went.

View Cambridge to Shepreth Walk in a larger map

There are a couple of sections towards the end that are a bit too much on the road to be honest. But it starts and finishes on a trainline that allows easy access to London, even on a Sunday.

There's a diversion at one point to Byron's pool near Grantchester which is a beautiful spot and very quiet compared to the river walk you've just been along.

In total the walk is 11.6 miles.

OK - so I'm mainly doing this to see how I can work Google Maps a little more neatly into things like this blog.

England finished off a great victory this morning (well technically, this afternoon) at Lords. And you'll just have to watch it on Five this evening - or on news bulletins.

Great coverage from Sky: and they even opened up their Sky Player to all Sky Sports subscribers for a couple of months - something I wish they'd make permament (It did fall over for the crucial final wicket though).

But I think David Mitchell in yesterday's Observer makes my feelings on the matter clear - if they weren't already:

Why did the ECB make this insane choice? For money. It forgot about building on Test cricket's growing popularity after 2005's triumph, about keeping it a presence in our national life on a channel people receive automatically, and it took a big cheque. It's as if it was getting out of cricket - selling up for a fast buck, taking the money and running. But it can't run - it's English cricket's governing body - so it's left holding the money while it stares at the diminished popularity and, therefore, significance, of English cricket as a result of its actions.

On Sunday I was at my parents - who are retired - as the conclusion of the first test was reached in the unlikeliest of manners. England hung on to claim a draw. A friend even texted me to make sure that I was watching.

It was nail-biting stuff, but I wasn't watching on Sky as my father doesn't subscribe to it. Instead we found ourselves staring at a scorecard on BBC Interactive while listening to Test Match Special.

I thought about this as I read this piece by David Conn in The Guardian.

I won't run through my reasons about why the ECB is doing its level best to destroy the future of cricket in this country. But the distribution of that Sky money is interesting, and we all know that interest in the game, Twenty20 notwithstanding, is likely to decline.

Yes Ashes series will sell out. But few enough people could tell you more than three names in the current England team.

So Setanta's finally died - or at least gone into administration. It's as good as dead.

It won't be missed by many. It did itself no good by having a reputation for truly awful customer service. In particular, cancelling it proved near impossible with, at times, people being asked to write a letter (no phone calls - no email). I never subscribed, but I heard enough other people talk about the dreadful customer service to mean that I never would.

Where does that leave premium TV sport in the UK?

Well ESPN has picked up all Setanta's Premier League rights for next season and the three following seasons. But is that enough?

Rumour has it that they've paid essentially what Setanta paid for the rights going forward (allowing for the fact that Setanta had already paid some cash in advance for next season which is seemingly non-refundable).

Then there are all the other sports that had deals with Setanta.

So ITV will pick up some England games that they'll no doubt be happy to show. The fact that England is going to quality for the World Cup in South Africa at a canter probably won't help audience figures, but England games are always worthwhile. Will ITV also hold on to those FA Cup games that Setanta had? Or will they go to someone else like ESPN or Sky?

This season it felt that the free-to-air operator didn't have the strong hand that the BBC had previously had on the FA Cup with big fixtures going on pay-TV. With ITV losing one of its two weekly Champions' League games, they might want to make up some of that shortfall.

Scottish Football must be worried. Although Sky is rumoured to be coming in to make a bid, they're effectively going to just take what they're offered. ESPN - even if it has to build up a decent sports offering from scratch - can't just replicate what Setanta had by picking up precisely the same rights. Well they can, but will they want to?

Likewise, my previous employer, STV, will be concerned as they had the contract to produce all that Scottish football. Will they hang on to those contracts?

Other sports will be less hurt although I can't honestly say that I know the value of the Blue Square League fixtures.

So what does this all mean for Setanta. This morning on Five Live I heard some thoroughly misleading information regarding ESPN's US service. They've just lost Champions' League football on their US service; it's now all on Fox Sports. This is a UK only deal.

From what's being reported, it seems ESPN will launch a new UK only service and not use either ESPN America or ESPN Classics. They could certainly fill it up with other sport like French and German football, but it probably needs a more attractive pricing policy than Setanta had.

In the US, ESPN is considered a basic cable package, and you'll almost certainly get it without playing a specific premium for the channel. They get their revenue by the vast majority of cable customers effectively paying $3-4 a month without choosing whether or not they specifically get ESPN. A low per user value, but it adds up.

In the UK, Sky packages channels differently with customers choosing packs. Eurosport, for example, gets a small amount of my sports subscription, while Sky One gets cash if I choose the Entertainment pack. Perhaps ESPN could be funded this way, but I doubt it. It'll be a bolt-on of some description.

Previously Virgin Media offered Setanta as part of its XL package - giving them a decent level of viewers but at a very low price. I suspect that this is an offer that won't be repeated.

The price creep to £12.99 per month for a number of channels, few of which people were interested in, was too steep - particularly as most subscribers already had Sky Sports. The additional games are in the "nice if you can" category. Unless you had an allegiance to a team they were showing, then you didn't mind missing the games. As an Arsenal fan, I'd just go to the pub if I felt radio commentary wasn't going to be enough for me.

With the number of games falling to just 23 from the 2010 season onwards, it seems that ESPN is going to have to swallow some costs and try to build an audience. They have to come up with a good deal to build an audience in these troubled economic times.

Setanta also offered a way of many of the club TV stations to be packaged. I never subscribed to Arsenal TV because it effectively would cost be £12.99 a month. How these are going to be funded going forward is another interesting question. The same was true of ESPN America - I quite like the odd baseball game, but I wasn't prepared to deal with Setanta.

ESPN does have an interesting offering, but pricing is going to be key. And they don't have long with just 8 weeks until the first games of the 2009/10 season. I look forward to hearing their proposition.

The DCMS has for the last couple of months been conducting a review into the listed events - those events that must be covered live on free-to-air television - Group A Events. That's event like the Olympics, the World Cup and so on. It also includes events to which highlights must be made available on free-to-air TV - Group B Events.

You can see a full list of these events here (PDF).

I've previously argued long and hard about the recklessness of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) when they sold pretty much all their rights to Sky - meaning that we no longer see any live cricket on free-to-air TV at all. Yes, Five shows nightly highlights and at the moment the BBC is showing late night highlights of the ICC World Twenty20 competition. But that's not the same as free-to-air live coverage. The ECB was greedy, and I won't accept any excuse otherwise. They looked to the short term of their sport and not the long term. If England win the Ashes this summer, do not expect another ticker-tape procession in Trafalgar Square like last time. Most people won't have seen it.

Anyway, today Sky released its response to the consultation. You can read the full document here, as well as a speech given by Jeremy Darroch given at a Sports Industry Group breakfast this morning here. Or if you prefer, read The Guardian's summary here.

Unsurprisingly, they don't want Government shackles put on what sports bodies are and aren't allowed to sell them. They argue that many bodies will continue to sell their rights to free-to-air broadcasters.

But I'm not sure that's the case. There are a lot of very short-sighted people in charge of sports. Look at all the sports that might be losing millions because they didn't learn from the ITV Digital fiasco when it came to negotiating with Setanta - reportedly close to going into administration. The Scottish FA has already doled out £3m which should have come from Setanta. Will they get any cash from them if they do go to the wall? It remains to be seen.

But given that Fifa and Uefa have both in the past argued against the Listed Events system employed in different countries across Europe, it's safe to say that they'd happily sell more of their European Championships or World Cup rights to pay TV broadcasters if they could. Indeed they might sell all those rights.

It's true that horseraces like the Derby and the Grand National would of course remain on terrestrial TV - this is a sport that essentially pays Channel 4 to retain coverage. Without widespread broadcasting, its betting revenues would dwindle. But the Derby in particular has been broadcast across more than one free-to-air channel over the years.

I'm similarly unconvinced that a free-to-air commercial broadcaster wouldn't be interested in carrying cricket. Channel 4 revolutionised cricket coverage in this country, and was simply outbid by Sky. The ECB might have wished that the BBC had entered the bidding and pushed prices even higher, but you don't always get what you wish for. There's certainly no question that the BBC could bid for Test Matches again in the future - there's plenty of space to broadcast them (look at the efforts they go to with their red-button scorecard service employing the Test Match Special radio commentaries).

Sky's response is, of course, completely self-serving. They need exclusivity to drive subscriptions. Sport is fundamental to their entire business. They want as much opportunity to build that business as possible. Look at their recent sponsorship of British Cycling. Although Sky's coverage of the sport is limited, the Olympic results from Beijing and the likely success in London in 2012 mean that even though they haven't carried much of the sport, they're getting involved and pushing further. If that means getting some of the World Cup matches or a piece of Wimbledon, then so be it.

Look - I'm a subscriber to Sky Sports. I think they provide an excellent service, and they cover what they do with excellence (even if they do employ Andy Gray and Jamie Rednapp). But that doesn't mean that I don't want to see sport reaching as wide an audience as possible.

Sport gets a lot of state aid and public money via a vast diversity of routes from Lottery funding to local authority grants, tax breaks and many many more areas. Sport has to give back to the population. It's more than just another business.

Anyway, Sky's put its response into the review. So I've just put mine in too. And I've reproduced it below.

Note: The responses to these questions are based around this document.

Q1. Do you think that the UK should continue to protect certain major events through live or deferred coverage on free-to-air television? Please give a reason for your response.

Yes it should.

Sport is an important part of our culture, with millions regularly enjoying and watching major sporting events throughout the calendar. The biggest TV audiences are regularly reserved for major sporting occasions.

Sport also encourages our children to participate. At a time when there's a major obesity problem with children, promoting and encouraging sport at any level should be key. Seeing sport on TV is a motivating factor for children, and indeed all adults, to take part in healthy activities.

Sport is not just a commercial business; despite what some pay TV operators might think. Most sports have in some way benefited from public money - via grants, transport infrastructure, policing, and many other ways. Therefore sports have to "give back" to the public, and this can be done through free-to-air broadcast rights.

Q2. Do you think that events other than sporting events should be listed? If so, please give your reason. You will have an opportunity to suggest appropriate events at a later stage in this consultation document and do not need to do so now.

Anything that is historically of strong importance to a UK society should be listed. So, yes, that might extend beyond solely sporting events.

Q3. Do you agree that this should remain the essential criterion test? If you do not agree, please explain why and please indicate what you consider should be the essential criterion in a sporting context.

I agree that these should remain the essential criterion, although I'm not certain that having a national team or national representatives in the sport concerned are enough. In the case of Wimbledon, although we currently have a world class contender in Andy Murray, for many years that hasn't been the case. So although the "national resonance" clause may apply here, it's possible that the tournament would not be included on that measure.

Q4. If your answer to Q2 was that non-sporting events should also be considered for listing, what might an essential criterion be?

Historically appearing on free-to-air TV would be an obvious criterion. Attracting a large television audience should not be a key measure however. Some events may resonate more with different demographics of society - the elderly population for example.

I believe that some kind of "measurability" should be put in place, but it's not clear to me exactly how that might be framed in legislation. Perhaps a National Importance Index determined by means of independent research?

I would also suggest putting together a broader advisory panel than the one created for this consultation for non-sporting events, since the criteria for picking this panel seems largely sports based.

Q5. Do you consider that these characteristics remain appropriate? If you do not, or consider that additional characteristics should be included, please explain why.

I don't agree that these characteristics remain appropriate. Saying that an event is "likely to command a large television audience" is nebulous. What is large these days? 3 million? 5 million? 15 million? Depending on the event and the channel, any of these might constitute a "large" audience, and they're all larger than a Manchester Utd v Liverpool fixture on Sky Sports would be.

I also believe that simply using an event's historic likelihood of being broadcast on free-to-air TV is not enough. That would remove the likelihood of, say, Twenty20 Cricket tournaments ever being listed (I'm not suggesting here that they should), since they're a relatively recent innovation with little free-to-air broadcasting in the UK.

I think additional measures should be used such as sport's overall popularity. Special attention should be placed on sports with widespread appeal to children.

Q6. Are these the appropriate other factors that the Secretary of State should take into account when considering whether or not to list an event? If not, or you consider that additional factors should be taken into account, please explain why.

These are largely appropriate factors but with some heavy provisos. For example, season-long championships might be hard for a general channel to carry in full. I wouldn't expect a free-to-air channel to carry full Premier League coverage for example. However, ITV has shown how significant coverage of a tournament like the UEFA Champions League is perfectly possible on a general channel. It shares the rights with BSkyB, but still shows significant hours of coverage throughout the season.

Pay TV competitors like BSkyB will always be able to argue that listing an event does reduce the potential income a sport is able to earn. It's always likely that a subscription channel could pay more than a general free-to-air channel. So that should only ever form part of the factors used to weigh up which events are listed and which aren't.

I'm unsure why radio commentaries are included in the factors alongside delayed coverage or highlights. I don't believe that access to a sport on radio should be relevant here. It's possible, for example, that an event's rights holders might refuse to sell rights to a radio station, or that the price charged makes obtaining those rights commercially unviable.

Look at London, for example, where no local commercial radio stations carry any Premier League football commentaries, despite upwards of five clubs being based in the capital.

I think that the potential for increasing participation in a sport should have more weight placed on it. Depriving viewers of free-to-air coverage effectively means that the poorer members of society are deprived. That has a direct impact on the overall health of the nation.

Q7. Do you agree that both an A and B list should be maintained? If not, please explain why.

I think that maintaining both the A and B lists is a fair system. Although I'd argue that with digital switchover being completed within the next three years, digital television will offer free-to-air services the ability to cover these events irrespective of the difficulty broadcasters may have found in scheduling them previously. For example, BBC Red Button services, BBC Three and ITV Four are already regularly used for major sporting occasions.

Q8. Are there any issues that you would wish to bring to our attention in regard to the way in which the listing arrangements are given practical effect by Ofcom?

No.

Q9. Do you think that the Secretary of State should:
• leave the current arrangements unchanged;
• move existing events between the A and B lists;
• add any entirely new events; or
• remove any events that are currently listed? Please give reasons for your answers.

Broadly, the list as it stands should be left unchanged. In particular, none of the sports in Group A should in any way be diluted with elements pushed down to Group B. However, I believe that a few amendments should be made to it.

1. Wimbledon should be broadened to include the entire tournament and not just the finals. When Tim Henman or Andy Murray have performed strongly in the past, it's as much of a national occasion as many other sports, yet neither has reached a final (so far!).

2. Cricket Test Matches in England should be moved up to Group A. Cricket is our summer national sport, and currently there is no live cricket on free-to-air UK television. I must admit, I mostly put this blame on the authorities, and in particular the ECB. That said, cricket is a national pastime, and it has benefited from plenty of public money.

3. The Six Nations Rugby Tournament Matches involving Home Nations should be moved up to Group A. This would ensure that UK viewers are guaranteed at least some live rugby beyond the World Cup Final every four years. Obviously all this tournament's fixtures currently are on free-to-air television, but it would be detrimental for them to be lost.

4. The Open Golf Championship should be moved up to Group A. Again this would enshrine the availability of at least one tournament on free-to-air television in the future.

Q10. If you have suggested that live coverage of any such tournaments should be listed do you think that:
• the entire tournament should be listed; or
• only selected stages, events or matches involving national teams or representatives?
Please give reasons for your view and, if you favour selected listing, please specify which tournaments and which stages, events or matches.

Of the sports I've suggested should be moved up to Group A I would argue:

1. At least a number of England Test Matches should be broadcast completely live. A split of a Test series between a free-to-air broadcaster and a pay TV operator would be acceptable.

2. All the Six Nations Matches should be shown live featuring Home nations.

3. The final two days of the Open Golf Championship should be shown live.

Q11. Please suggest which non-sporting events you would like to see listed and why.

The events I believe would be worthy of inclusion would be:
The Trooping of the Colour
The Chelsea Flower Show
The Edinburgh Tattoo

All of these would be popular amongst an older audience and should be protected from a pay TV station that might want to benefit from the kudos (if not viewers) that carrying such an event might provide.

Q12. Do you have any other issues that you would like the Panel to take into account in considering what its recommendations should be?

I think that the panel should consider the wider social ramifications of making significant changes to the Listed Events.

As a society we are aging, and an elderly population is less able to pay to watch premium sports channels. Neither are the poor. Pushing sports into the hinterland, where they may earn the rights holders more money is not the only answer.

Everyone knows the famous Bill Shankly quote concerning football: "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that."

That remains true of many national sports. Sport has a quality that brings large sections of society together. It can generate great happiness and sadness as the whole country gets behind a particular team or sports man or woman.

It's been a big week in the biggest club football competition in the world, with Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal all featuring in the second leg of the quarter-final.

Last night I was returning late from the cinema and realised I was without a radio to listen to the Chelsea v Liverpool fixture. Perhaps I could listen to Five Live via the internet I thought as I stood at the bus stop. I had my phone with me, but most sports commentary is broadcast on AM, and phones only ever have FM radios. But much surfing around the BBC's mobile website (it rather insisted I use the mobile website) did not reveal a link to their audio stream in Real, the preferred format of many phones. I know it's there somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I perhaps could have visited Talksport website, but they seem to prefer Windows Media which is pretty useless on any phones except Windows Mobile.

So it was in vain hope that I switched to FM and discovered that BBC Radio London were broadcasting the game (Nik Goodman also listened - but switched to FM driven by the broadcaster itself!). That got me home until I could watch the second half on ITV1 - and what an outstanding game it was!

Anyway, on to tonight's games, with Manchester United out in Porto while I was at Arsenal watching them play Villarreal. Now I often like to listen to radio commentaries of games in the ground. Arsenal is very good about showing replays of major incidents - unless they're in any way contentious when the big screen certainly won't show them so as not to incite the crowd.

I tuned into Five Live on my little DAB radio and perhaps unsurprisingly, they were covering the Man Utd game. Never mind. Let's check out Five Live Sports Extra - the BBC's digital sports channel. Surely they'd be covering the game?

No.

Hmm. OK. Much as it goes against the grain, I thought I'd give Talksport a whirl. I know that they've also been covering Champions' League fixtures which aren't sold on an exclusive basis like TV fixtures are. Despite the cost of sending out commentators and an engineer to Portugal, that's where Talksport went with their commentators sitting no doubt a few feet from Alan Green and his Five Live team.

OK. Let's try BBC London. I know that they'd done a deal with Chelsea previously for all their Champions' League fixtures, but maybe they'd be covering it. Nope. They didn't even seem to have a sports programme on.

I flicked around at this point but new it was useless. There are no other radio stations in London that cover football. Certainly no commercial station does. [Capital] Gold once used to, and I listened to that station regularly. But they stopped years ago, and I've not listened since. Xfm has aired a few games in the past, but no longer. Forget Heart or Magic. My own station, Absolute, has never covered live football. And nobody else was doing so either.

So on Tuesday, three stations in the capital were covering the same game featuring a London club - a game that was being broadcast on free to air terrestrial TV.

Tonight there was another London club playing. The game was only available on subscription TV (Sky) meaning that millions of potential listeners were unable to hear it.

It's a sorry state of affairs - it really is.

I'm surprised that the BBC didn't find space on Sports Extra for it, but I'm also disappointed that commercial radio is in such a state that it won't bother with sport at all - the exceptions being Talksport and some local services in big football areas like the North West and North East (I can't imagine that Man Utd playing in the Champions' League would not be covered locally as well as nationally).

I know that RAJAR - the radio ratings system - doesn't serve one-off fixtures very well, making it hard to sell to sponsors. And for all I know Arsenal or UEFA charged a fortune for the rights to this game. But I rather suspect that nobody was interested. And it's the public that loses out.

Arsenal won 3-0 on the night at 4-1 on aggregate. They'll meet Manchester United in the two-legged semi-final. Those games will be on the radio.

[Update] Amusingly, a work colleague was driving back from somewhere on Tuesday night and was trying to find the Arsenal game. He couldn't of course, but on AM he did find a Spanish station that was covering it. Despite not speaking Spanish he was able to listen just picking out the names: "Fabregas.... Van Persie... Walcott!"

Interesting piece in today's Guardian about how the ECB is going to use social networks to popularise cricket this summer: Facebook and Twitter are both bandied around.

All very noble and forward thinking, but to use a massively over-used expression, they're ignoring the elephant in the room.

"This is the biggest summer of cricket ever to take place on these shores. This really is cricket's time. There's no World Cup, there's no European Championships, there's no Olympics," said the ECB's head of marketing, Will Collinson.

He's right. There really are no major sporting events to clash with. So will everyone be watching the cricket?

Er. No.

It's not live on terrestrial, free-to-air television. No cricket. At all. Not a single ball.

Just nightly 45min highlights packages on Five.

The ECB did a massive deal with Sky, and then moaned that the BBC didn't compete. Yes, there'll be radio coverage, but if you want your sport to be followed avidly by a nation, you have to put it on TV.

The World Cup, European Championships and Olympics are all available on free-to-air TV.

When England won The Ashes in 2005 the team got a ticker-tape parade.

In 2005, some of the sessions were watched by as many as 2.5m people live. In 2008, the largest audience for a Test on Sky came on the Saturday during the Third Test against South Africa when 0.58m watched.

While I'm not comparing like with like, it's clear that fewer people watch when it's all on Sky.

Again last summer, only two highlights packages on Five broke the 1m mark - getting 1.00m and 1.02m respectively. C4 got higher viewership for their morning sessions when they broadcast live. That's the difference.

Incidentally, I'm not having a go at Sky. They're entitled to their rights, and they'll be promoting The Ashes like mad. Lots of people cancel their Sky Sports subscriptions when the football's off-air after all. But even Sky probably realises that the reason they sell fewer pay-per-view boxing fights is because there's a generation that's grown up without ever seeing a free-to-air fight. So why would they take an interest?

Perhaps all this will change following the Listed Events Review. Perhaps not. But next time around, the ECB might want to try much harder to get their sport into as many homes as possible. If they want it to have a mainstream future that is...

There I was earlier today, reading the sports section of The Guardian - the printed version. As well as lots of coverage about tonight's game between Chelsea and Liverpool (and what a thriller that turned out to be!), there were a couple of pieces about tomorrow night's quarter-final second legs.

The piece about Manchester United and Porto was larger, but there underneath was a piece filed by Dominic Fifield about Arsenal's second leg at home against Villarreal - I game I'll be going to.

At the foot of the piece, in both the printed and online versions I read:

Arsenal v Villarreal is available in high definition on Sky Sports HD3 from 7.30pm. To upgrade call 08442 411 333

Huh?

That's an ad for Sky appearing in editorial space in The Guardian. What's going on?

At first I thought: times are tough at The Guardian. Perhaps Sky, who are indeed covering the game live, flew Fifield out. Then I remembered that this was the home leg, and the trip between The Guardian's new Kings Cross headquarters and Arsenal's stadium in North London was actually completely walkable.

The piece is based around an interview with injured captain Marcos Senna. That can be the only answer. There are compulsory press conferences with the managers that are dictated to by UEFA (even Fergie can't back out of those if he's fallen out with Sky or the BBC - something the Premier League should take notice of). Individual player interviews might be separately organised, but I really do think that if a newspaper like The Guardian is getting an interview due to the arrangements made by a host broadcaster, that should be made clear in the copy. Simply printing HD upgrade details really isn't enough.

I was right down in the corner today watching Wasps beat Harlequins 24-18. To be honest, my lens is too slow for the high shutter speed you really need for rugby. Hence, even though there was a try right in the corner where I was sitting, the shots were blurred because I should have been shooting at something like 1/1000 sec instead of 1/250. That meant needing to use a high ISO later in the game when I caught the action a little better. No wonder all the pros use such expensive lenses. More photos here.

Last week, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided that it wouldn't award the EBU the rights to the 2014 winter Olympics and the 2016 summer games. In the past the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has collectively bought the rights to the Olympics for the past fifty years. All the public service broadcasters chip in and they get the rights between them.

But the IOC is something of a money grabbing beast, and they've decided that they can do much better if they individually negotiate with each of the countries in Europe rather than go with a single deal.

Reports talking about the BBC not getting the rights to the games are probably very wide of the mark. In the UK the Olympics are still a protected event, and as such, have to be made available free to air, to the whole country. So ITV could bid in theory, but that seems incredibly unlikely - they've just decided that even the relatively low costs of covering the boat race are too much and have pulled out after next year. They'd be hard pushed to garner enough advertising to cover the costs. The production costs alone are enormous, with thousands of hours coming from Beijing this year, and even more likely to come from London.

In theory, an operator like Sky could bid for the games, but it'd have to broadcast them free-to-air. That might mean using DTT (the only service it'd have full national coverage with) to broadcast to most people with more on satellite, but that'd probably cause an outcry. That said, I noticed that Trevor East, previously head of sports at Sky and now with Setanta, doesn't see anything wrong with Sky going for the rights. He correctly points out that Sky Italia has the Olympics in Italy. However, Sky Italia is required to subcontract free-to-air rights, probably with RAI (the state broadcaster).

It seems a strange time for the vultures at the IOC to playing fast and loose with their games. We're entering a global recession which means that everyone's re-examining what they're able to bid for, or to what extent they expect advertising to cover costs of future games. And with London getting the games in 2012, the 2016 summer games will almost certainly not be at a favourable time for Europe. We won't know until next year who will be getting the games, but if most events take place in the middle of the night or during the day, that's not going to make European broadcasters want to pay more.

Of course UEFA and FIFA have done the same thing recently.

And all of them would like to see the review of sporting "crown jewels" be reviewed with significantly fewer events on the schedule. David Davies just been appointed by culture secretary Andy Burnham, to review the list. Currently it looks like this:

Group A - must be covered live:

• Olympic Games


• FIFA World Cup finals tournament


• European Football Championship finals tournament


• FA Cup final


• Scottish FA Cup final (in Scotland)


• Grand National


• Wimbledon tennis finals


• Rugby League Challenge Cup final


• Rugby World Cup final

Group B - highlights must be available free to air:

• cricket test matches played in England


• non-finals play in the Wimbledon tournament


• all other matches in Rugby World Cup finals tournament


• Six Nations Rugby Tournament matches involving home countries


• Commonwealth Games


• World Athletics Championships


• Cricket World Cup


• Ryder Cup


• Open Golf Championship

FIFA and UEFA would like only the final, and perhaps semi-finals and other matches involving the home nations to be included on the list. They'd happily sell the rest of the tournaments to Sky or Setanta.

Meanwhile England tests don't have to be broadcast live. Has interest in the national summer game lessened since it disappeared from free to air? I think it has.

The boat race isn't on either list, and Premier League highlights aren't guaranteed either. I'd be surprised if we saw much change. Ofcom recently published the equivalent list for the rest of Europe and they're equally as comprehensive with some events specific to their nations - e.g. The Tour de France or Giro d'Italia, and even the Ialian Grand Prix in Italy (F1 is otherwise free to go where it likes).

What's still clear is that if your event relies heavily on sponsors, you probably still want to stay free to air, as the coverage dwarfs anything that paid for television is able to give viewers. Indeed, if I was in charge of a sport, I'd perhaps be thinking more about how I can persuade the BBC or ITV to cover it rather than lusting after Sky's millions and forshortening my sport's future (Yes, cricket, I'm looking at you again).

According to Media Guardian, Setanta is broadcasting free-to-air highlights of Croatia v England later this evening on its own channel!

This is very odd. They're reported to have turned down an offer of £500,000 from ITV. And now, at the very last minute, they offer these free highlights.

The story on Media Guardian was published just before 6.00pm this evening, and I can't see many outlets* advertising that fact now. So basically aside from a few people reading various forums and websites, nobody will know.

And I think it's fair to assume that we'll be bombarded by ads for subscriptions. Still, something is better than nothing, although I can see that something being the goals on the respective Ten O'Clock newses.

[*UPDATE] Well my employer's mentioning it in the 7.00pm news in fact!

"We always intended to make highlights available, and were disappointed that we were unable to reach agreement with any of the terrestrial broadcasters," said the Setanta director of sport, Trevor East.

Hmmm.

[UPDATE 2] Roger Mosey talks about both the Setanta situation and Paralympics coverage over at the BBC Sport blog.

Here's a stat for you:

Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Olympics on US television: 3,600 (2,900 of which was live)

Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Paralympics on US television: 1.5 (0 of which is live)

That's right. Of all the US TV channels, there is a single 90 minute highlights in the middle of next month. That's it.

The BBC, incidentally, is showing 5-6 hours live a day (albeit on digital) alongside a nightly one hour highlights package on BBC2, with more live action at the weekend.

In the 2012 London Paralympics, I think it's a fair assumption that the US team will probably include a significant number of athletes who are ex-military and have been injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the Setanta issue rumbles on with no terrestrial highlights likely to be available for a terrestrial service for the Croatia away game for England on Wednesday, I've just had a scary thought.

Essentially Setanta purchased both live coverage and highlights of the fixture. But they've declined to sell on those highlight rights. The radio rights were sold separately and the match will be on BBC Radio Five Live (I don't think that Talksport is also covering it, but I'm happy to be corrected).

The radio rights are obviously significantly cheaper than television rights. But what's to stop Setanta buying up those rights as well? Is there any reason they could buy them and not use them? Or perhaps just put the "radio" out on their own subscription TV channel to show that they're using them.

That'd incur even more wrath of the fans, but they could do it. Of course we might see the return of the old Talksport trick of reporting what's going on from a television.

Just a thought!

Neilsen Media Research - a fine media research company who I have contracts with via my employer - has released details of a story suggesting that 4.7bn people watched at least some of the Olympic coverage last month. That's out of a rough estimate of 6.6bn for the planet's population.

I'm always deeply suspicious of stories like that unless you have some really strong material to back it up.

As ever, there's no obvious detail on their website.

Let's try to break down the data a little. In China, the most populous nation on earth, we're told that 94% of their 1.4bn people watched at least some. That's high, but not unfeasible since these Olympics were in China, and the state TV company pretty much carried nothing but Olympics for the duration. If you watched TV in China, then you watched the Olympics. Perhaps that missing 6% don't actually own or even have access to a TV?

The next most populous country in the world is India with around 1.1bn living there. But the Olympics are not popular in that country, and it seems unlikely that even with India achieving its first ever individual gold, that the Olympics will have had strong viewing figures.

The next biggest countries are the US, which had strong viewership, and Indonesia.

Viewing was said to be strong in South Korea and Mexico. But how many of Pakistan's 165m or Bangladesh's 147m were watching?

The population of the entire African continent is just under 1bn. What proportion were watching the Olympics?

I'm always suspicious when global audiences are guestimated - 1bn for a domestic football cup, 1bn for a sport not widely played outside North America, etc. So I'd just like to see some detail to determine how these figures were derived. Apparently 37 markets were used. But which 37, and more importantly, which countries with large populations were excluded?

The 2008 edition of the Tour of Britain kicked off today with a 10 lap circuit of London running down the Embankment from Big Ben to the Tower of London and back.

So if you don't have Setanta, and can't make it to a pub that's showing Setanta, the only coverage you're going to have of England's World Cup qualifiers against Andorra on Saturday, and Croatia next week is going to be goal clips on the news. There is, of course, radio coverage too.

Media Guardian reports this morning that Setanta still hasn't sold terrestrial highlights of the games to either ITV or the BBC. They're fulminating that the offers they're getting don't exceed what the stations paid for Champions' League qualifiers. Last week BBC Three showed Arsenal's game against FC Twente (effectively a dead rubber since Arsenal were a comfortable 2-0 from the first leg, and they won on the night 4-0 to go through 6-0 overall), while ITV had the more attractive proposition of Liverpool's must-win game against Standard Liege which ended with a last minute extra-time goal. But these were live games and thus more valuable.

I would have previously said that Setanta will come to a last minute deal to sell on terrestrial coverage, but with the bigger of the two games being next Wednesday's Croatia fixture, I'm not so sure. Setanta desperately need those subscribers - it's never clear how many they really have, and what price they're paying. So I don't think that this time we're going to see the games on terrestrial.

I would hope that the FA are a little embarrassed about this. They've just entered into a big new deal with ITV and Setanta, and yet here are one of their partners effectively denying much of the football viewing public the chance to see even highlights. Of course Setanta are perfectly within their rights to do what they like, but I think using phrases like "emotional blackmail" makes it obvious that we're not going to see any capitulation from them.

A sorry state of affairs for the national game...

Well - as things stand, England's World Cup qualifying games against Croatia and Andora will not have so much as highlights coverage on either BBC or ITV according to a piece in The Times.

It comes down to the fact that while England's home games were sold to ITV as part of a larger deal that ITV and Setanta signed with the FA which included coverage of FA Cup fixtures, away fixtures are sold by the various overseas rights holders. In this instance, Setanta purchased the majority of those rights last year following the draw for the qualification groups for the 2010 World Cup. In reality, they were probably bundled together by a rights organisation and sold on behalf of the Croatian, Andorran and other football associations.

Anyway, Setanta paid top dollar for those fixtures and they're now in a position where they want to use them as a big driver for subscriptions. Arguably, this is Setanta's make or break season. With those rights, the FA rights previously mentioned, and their Premier League rights, Setanta needs to reach a critical mass of subscribers.

There was talk about Setanta being sold - perhaps to BT or ESPN. But the market isn't right for that, and with a recent rise from £9.99 to £12.99 a month for the Setanta package, they need to start earning some of the money that they've paid out.

So the question is this: can they hold ITV or the BBC to ransom to pay something for highlights. Or do they consider it worthwhile to keep the price out of reach and try to gain subscribers. England's been looking a little lacklustre of late - friendlies are not being sold out. Would you pay £30 to see England play Kazakhstan for goodness' sake?

But on the other hand it's embarrassing for the FA to see the majority of the interested population only able to catch goals from news highlights. I suspect that a deal will be done at the eleventh hour, but you can't be too certain.

This morning saw three more British golds, particularly a pair in the sprints at the Velodrome with Victoria Pendleton and Chris Hoy winning.

But I'm now beginning to get concerned about the logisitics of 2012. No, I'm not thinking about how we can possibly top the Chinese opening ceremony, it's more to do with the timing of the events.

As has been widely pointed out, US network NBC got the IOC to move the swimming finals into mornings local Beijing time, so that they'd be able to broadcast events live in the US primetime (8pm - 11pm eastern time).

But 8pm eastern time is 1am UK time, and 2am for most of Europe.

A short piece in today's Guardian speculates that NBC might put the IOC under similar pressure in the UK to reschedule events into a post midnight slot. The Olympics have been phenominally successful for NBC so far, and all the more important given that they spend $1 billion for the rights to the summer games. But they do things like not broadcasting the mens' 100m final live, but holding off several hours to show it in the much more lucrative post 8pm timeslot.

Could the 100m or swimming finals be scheduled for post midnight or 1am? I just can't see it. It would screw up the athletes' body-clocks for starters. And, as I say, it wouldn't just inconvenience British viewers, but also the rest of Europe and Africa, all of whom have had to do without live evening coverage of the games this time around.

I know that boxing takes place in the UK at incredibly unsociable hours, but the blue riband events of a UK sport in stadia full to capacity in the small hours? It doesn't bear thinking about.

I think atheltics finals are likely to be scheduled for around 9pm local time in 2012, with key events like the 100m and 200m taking place on Saturday or Sundays. That allows US broadcasters to carry them in late afternoon slots when sports viewing is traditionally strong. And if they want to delay coverage for a few hours then so be it. It seems likely that the 2016 games will be in a timezone more suited to the US anyway (and I'm guessing Chicago will get it one way or another), so they'll just have to make do. There'll be an incredible outcry if they do otherwise.

While NBC might be spending $1bn on the 2012 games for coverage the UK government is spending £9.3bn ($18bn) on putting on the games. So let's keep things into perspective.

Once upon a time, the Olympics were broadcast on both ITV and the BBC. For a lot of the time, they'd show the same events, and if you were interested in a minority sport, you could probably forget it unless a Brit had a chance of a medal.

Now coverage might be "limited" to the BBC, but because of digital television, just about anything you want to watch is available to see. On satellite and cable, the BBC is offering six different streams of video (in addition to whatever their main services are showing), and there are a choice of three streams on Freeview. So we can all hit that red button and watch pretty much what we like.

But while it's great, there are a few issues that need to be overcome that are brought about largely because the Olympics are taking place in Beijing and therefore many events will be taking place in the small hours of the morning and through into the daytime. Primetime coverage will largely be highlights of what took place earlier that day.

And this means that digital video recorders come into their own if you want to watch full coverage of an event that took place earlier that day. But if you have Sky+ then that's not going to help you. Because you enter the Open TV environment of interactive red-button technology, you're not able to record video. As a result, you can't set a Sky+ device to record in advance a sub-channel like those Olympic video channels.

Remote Record is another excellent Sky feature, but even there we have problems. It certainly isn't a workaround for recording an interactive channel, but if I look at Saturday the BBC simply shows a programme called Olympics 2008 from 1.55am to 6.00am, followed by Olympic Breakfast from 6.00am to 11.00am, further followed by Olympics 2008, and so on. That doesn't help me record individual sports, yet the BBC has already decided the broad running order if you look at the detail they display on their site. So it's either record five hours at a time of BBC1, or watch live.

While Freeview might have fewer streams (although the temporary closure of BBC Parliament does mean three streams rather than two), you can at least choose programmes to record in advance on a Freeview digital video recorder - something Sky+ is unable to cope with. And that's one area where a Freeview digital video recorder can trump Sky+.

Under a new deal announced today by the ECB... precisely nothing changes. Sky has retained live rights to... well... everything. And Five has a highlights package.

Sky undoubtedly does a superb job. They've got lots of resources and they've innovated with new technology high-definition coverage, and super-slomo cameras (Although I did laugh on Saturday when it seemed as though play might continue through to the Sunday and David "Bumble" Lloyd told us details about how people in the ground on the Saturday could buy reduced price tickets on the Sunday "for those of you listening on earpieces." With the best will in the world, nobody listening via earpiece in a cricket ground is hearing the Sky audio feed - they're listening to Test Match Special on Radio 4 LW and Five Live Sports Xtra (not that the BBC admit that it's on R4 LW). Listening to a feed available only via satellite is not technically possible without some clever wizardry perhaps involving a laptop and a slingbox).

But the sad fact is that a 45 minute highlight package is not going energise the next generation of young cricketers. When England won the Ashes in 2005 there was a ticker-tape parade with a massive celebration in Trafalgar Square. That simply wouldn't happen again because the majority of the population would see, at best, highlights.

There will be no live cricket on terrestrial free-to-air television until 2013 at the earliest.

Now the ECB has admonished the BBC for not bidding this time around. Undoubtedly it's disappointing, and it's simply not true that the BBC couldn't accommodate a Test Series. One-day cricket - in particular Twenty20 - could easily be scheduled.

That said, the BBC has countered the ECB's accusations by declaring that "We have always said that any bid for live test cricket is subject to value for money and ability to schedule. In our view neither of these criteria were met."

I suspect that it's less scheduling issues than a value for money test that has kept the BBC out of the fray. The fact of the matter is that if the ECB is simply trying to maximise its revenues, then the BBC is never going to be able to outbid Sky. Sports is Sky's raison d'etre and it's simply not good value to pay over the odds. But the ECB could surely have adopted some kind of strategy that essentially meant that subject to some kind of minimum, at least some tests would be available to terrestrial broadcasters.

No form of cricket is accorded Full Live Protected Coverage, so if Sky wants to outbid all and sundry then it's able to.

It's interesting that several other broadcasters including ITV, Channel 4 and Setanta were interested in one-day coverage but none bid. They all knew that they'd be trumped by Sky.

If the ECB was serious about wanting to broaden the coverage of cricket, they should have put at least some rights out to tender to terrestrial broadcasters only. And in the long run, while they're undoubtedly generating more cash than ever before, they're still the losers.

Cricket is in a mess in any case, with all sorts of tournaments setting up left right and centre. Players are likely to be torn between club and country with some incredible riches seemingly available in the various Twenty20 leagues that are popping up. I'd love to see some impartial attendance figures because while Twenty20 is undoubtedly selling out, I wonder if it's not getting harder and harder to fill grounds as cricket fans essentially die out.

This won't end with cricket by the way. Both FIFA and UEFA are keen to remove fixtures from their finals tournament from the Listed Events. Currently the whole tournaments have to be screened terrestrially, but they argue that we only need to see games involving the home nations and perhaps the final on terrestrial television. That'd allow them to sell those other games to satellite broadcasters. It's something we really need to look out for.

So today is the start of Wimbledon, and as ever, the BBC has enormously comprehensive coverage. On digital TV they have the exceptional service that allows you to pick and choose which game you watch, and this is all replicated online (for UK users). Five Live and Five Live Sports Xtra have commentaries available throughout the fortnight - the main service hosted by the estimable Simon Mayo.

Then there's the official site which is run by IBM. There too you can listen to commentaries from Radio Wimbledon. It has three services this year (as previously noted, since they're broadcast locally on FM too) which are free to listen to online. You're also offered an even more comprehensive video service than that offered by the BBC (not that any significant match won't be broadcast by the Beeb), which costs subscribers £12.90 for an "all access" pass. Only a diehard would pay up for this surely, although the catch-up service might be worthwhile for some (at this stage it's not clear how many BBC games will be later available via the iPlayer).

All well and good. But then I had my weekly email from ITV.com with the following subject line: "Listen to Wimbledon live on itv.com!"

What? The BBC has a long-term deal in place, so what's ITV up to?

The HTML email that ITV.com send out doesn't render properly in Gmail, so I had to go exploring on ITV's website, and sure enough, if you click through to the Sport section you get this:

"Listen now to live Radio Wimbledon coverage direct from the Championships

"Remember to turn your speakers on, turn them up - and enjoy!"

Essentially ITV.com is rebroadcasting the official Radio Wimbledon coverage. It doesn't launch neatly in a player like it does from the official Wimbledon site, but it's certainly there.

It's curious that ITV should enter into this arrangement. Tennis quite evidently isn't core to them - indeed it's impossible to actually think of a sport that's "more" BBC and "less" ITV than tennis, and Wimbledon in particular.

Of course there'll be a financial arrangement in place, and I'm sure that ITV.com will be happy with any additional pageviews. But you can't help think that the BBC might be a little miffed, and it's still an odd move.

[UPDATE] Media Guardain has the full story about this, seemingly last minute, deal struck between IMG on behalf of Wimbledon and ITV.com. I still find it slightly odd that non-exclusive audio that can also be found via the official Wimbledon website would generate such interest.

But the news release does explain one thing. It struck me that Wimbledon was putting an awful lot of effort into its radio offering by producing three radio streams seemingly for the website and some local RSLs. It seems that these are syndicated offerings made available to English language broadcasters throughout the world. Radio anorak that I am, I'd love to know where these services are being rebroadcast.

So I thought that I'd head down to see the Olympic Torch Relay - the multi-country tour of the Olympic torch as it wends it way towards Beijing for this summer's Olympic Games.

It was obvious from the outset that following recent increased violence inside Tibet, that this was also going to be used to make a political point with demonstrators making themselves (rightly) heard all along the route. I thought that the nascent photojournalist in me might be able to catch some of the sights and sounds of this.

I must admit that personally I'm not sure that the Olympic Games are the right vehicle for making political protests, at least in as far as I don't think we should be boycotting them. I'm somehow hopeful that some of the concessions that the Chinese government is going to have to make will extend beyond the games this summer.

That said, the Free Tibet campaign has every right to make itself heard. And I'm in no way condoning the Olympic organisation itself which seems to be beset by greed and corruption. Things are probably cleaner than they once were, but until it's a fully democratic organisation itself (giving the UK, for example, the right to pick its own representatives) then it has to remain questionable. I've always said that I think that sporting fiefdoms like the Olympics or FIFA, are the last "acceptable" faces of dictatorship.

But anyway, on to today's events. It was snowy day in London with a few centimetres of snow having fallen across the capital. The streets were clear though, and I decided to head to Chinatown to begin with. As I approached from Covent Garden, it became obvious that there were an awful lot of police on the streets. They were mostly good natured, but as I entered the heart of Chinatown, I had to pass a bag search. On the radio I had heard that a protester had tried to snatch the flame from a Blue Peter presenter who was running with it, and others had tried to put the flame out with a fire extinguisher.

I stood on the corner of Gerrard Street, where the largely Chinese crowd were entertained by dragon dancing and inflatable Fuwa - the five characters who are the official Beijing mascots.

The spectators were largely jovial, and many were carrying dual-language banners and signs wishing all the best for the games in the summer. As I say, this was in the heart of Chinatown, and if anywhere was going to give the games a good reception, it was here.

Finally the police activity notably increased and the torch arrived. Through most of London, there'd been a convoy of vehicles leading the way, including double-decker buses and police vehicles. But in the narrow confines of Chinatown, it was just a police escort and the runners themselves.

I don't know who was carrying the torch as they arrived [UPDATE: I believe that this was actually the Chinese ambassador, who had been scheduled to run with the torch elsewhere but changed at the last minute]. He was flanked by Chinese securitymen in tracksuits, who were themselves flanked by more police in luminous jackets. Finally, there was a further layer of police dressed in black outside them.

Add to that the crowds, and you've got an enormous mass of people surrounding the flame. Seeing the flame itself was not easy and I'm 6'2"!

The runner handed over to the next runner in the relay - seemingly another athlete of Chinese origin, and she ran the length of Gerrard Street. There was not a lot to do now the procession had passed, and I began to drift on with the crowds around me.

Then a middle-aged man started shouting, "China out" quite loudly and repeatedly. This raised the hackles of several Chinese men standing nearby, but he wasn't to be dissuaded. So they had a loud and very confrontational shouting match which very nearly came to blows. The language used wasn't especially suitable for the young children who were also out in the cold to see the torch relay.

Ironically, there were now no police around to wade into the crowd and calm down the passions - they'd all moved on to protect the torch as it continued its journey. Finally common sense prevailed and nobody came to any blows.

I moved on to Trafalgar Square, where the Free Tibet protesters were really out in force. I didn't see the torch pass through as the crowds were too deep but we got an explosion of blue paper alongside a trumpet voluntary. I saw plenty more Tibetan flags, and you might almost think that the police had decided to keep things moving faster than they might otherwise have done.

Next it was down to Embankment. The torch had headed off to Downing Street where it was going to remain for a while. I walked to Waterloo Bridge expecting the torch to arrive by river. If it did arrive that way, I completely missed it. There was plenty of evidence of police out in force on the water, and large crowds had gathered in front of the Royal Festival Hall, but they had other entertainment to keep their minds off the snow that had now begun to come down again.

I waited on the bridge where the convoy of supporting vehicles had gathered. A Chinese camera crew interviewed one of the relay's forthcoming runners - a fencer I believe. Then some people had their photos taken with another sportsman I didn't recognise. I'm not sure they knew who he was either.

Again there were many Free Tibet protesters on top of the bridge, and the whole relay was now becoming a 31 mile rolling "Free Tibet" protest.

When the torch finally arrived, it was hard to make it out with the sheer number of police and security men protecting it. It seems somehow pointless getting people to come out to see something and then surround it by dozens of running men (my mind kept drifting back to that Clint Eastwood film In The Line of Fire, where Clint played a secret service man who's job was to run alongside the Presidential cavalcade). In London, the relay runners were regularly replaced, but I'm not sure that the police had much let-up. Still, it'll have been good practice for anyone running the London Marathon next weekend.

Aside from the quite scary events in Chinatown when it felt as though it might kick off at any minute, the day was interesting - if cold. I suspect that much of the rest of the route is going to see similar protests. I notice that the torch is due to pass through San Francisco, a notably liberal city. That'll be worth looking out for.

(More photos here if you're interested.)

Media Guardian are reporting that Sky has won the majority of the Champions' League games for the three years beginning in 2009. It's thought that they offered more than £240m representing nearly a 50% increase over what they had previously paid.

For that sum, they get all the games bar one - a single Wednesday night game.

It's not surprising that Sky have launched a blockbuster bid, as with Setanta and ITV getting the FA Cup and England rights, and Setanta slowly becoming a force in televised sport in the UK (albeit, a force that's probably still losing money), Sky just had to win this package.

But where does that leave coverage of the Champions' League for the average viewer? What's really worrying is the single match package which is still up for grabs could also be won by Sky.

That'd be terrible for the competition, and terrible for the British viewing public. The Champions' League Final is not a Listed Event. It's actually conceivable that none of the tournament, including the European Cup Final itself, will not appear on terrestrial television.

Uefa president Michel Platini is said to be keen to keep at least one fixture on terrestrial TV, but will the lure of Sky's lucre be too much?

It's ironic that in the run up to this round of bidding that concerns were voiced by rivals of a potential BBC bid about how the Champions' League sponsors would be catered for on the BBC; they get the sponsorship bumpers on Sky and ITV. Well now the big risk to sponsors must surely be the lack of a big audience seeing their names and association at all. Sony, Heineken, Mastercard et al have paid tens of millions for their sponsorship packages. The value to them is much reduced if the majority of the UK population don't see their brands.

It'd be hard to argue that the competition will suffer in the short term if it disappeared completely from terrestrial television - undoubtedly the BBC or ITV would pick up a highlights package. But you only have to look at cricket to see how a sport can shift from gaining a ticker-tape parade in London when the Ashes were won, to a vague "are England playing?" when the game moved completely off terrestrial.

So who will win that final match? Well, I can't see them giving it to Sky. In some ways, it's more valuable to Sky not to have that game - it acts as something to remind you that they have all the other games. And that's something that's especially important in the knockout phases when terrestrial viewers will only see one half of a two-legged fixture.

ITV will want to retain the rights, but not at any cost. If the lone match that's available is to only be on a Wednesday, then arguably shifting Coronation Street is not something that ITV will really want to do. They used to, but it didn't please their legions of fans. On the other hand, the competition undoubtedly draws viewers to the channel who wouldn't otherwise come - young men in particular.

The BBC would love to win the matches. They must be furious that they've lost FA Cup and England rights - especially since they've done so much to reinvigorate the FA Cup in recent seasons. And they're now without any live top-flight football (the Championship isn't enough). Eastenders doesn't get in the way on Wednesday nights!

Five are the dark horse, but will RTL bid?

It's worth remembering that OnDigital once had the Champions' League rights and it wasn't enough to keep that platform running, so I'll assume that there won't be any mad fools at BT Vision or similar gunning for the games.

What is clear is that you can expect an awful lot more Man Utd on your TV. Given the choice of a Man Utd, Chelsea, Liverpool or Arsenal fixture, TV bosses will pick Man Utd every time. Supporters of the other teams might as well start saving for Sky now.

Yesterday the news broke that the Premier League is considering giving everyone an extra fixture which will be played in one of five cities internationally.

I'll leave others to debate the pros and cons of such a scheme - or "brand extension".

But plenty of reports claim that "an estimated 1bn people watched the Premier League game between Arsenal and Manchester United in November 2007."

I don't know who was doing the estimating, but they're wrong.

The reason for the billion estimate was because the game was airing in primetime in the Far East. Everyone knows that countries like China are finding English football ever more popular. Except, that of course, while the population of the country is roughly 1.3bn, comparatively few of them can watch football. It's a premium commodity!

But as of the end of last year, WinTV which bought the rights to Premier League games for three seasons from the start of this one, only had 20,000 subscribers.

Curiously, depending where you read, reports suggest that previously between 30m and 300m were watching Premier League football regularly.

I tend to believe the former number rather than the latter, since the most popular single show on Chinese TV is the CCTV New Year's Gala which is estimated to achieve audiences of up to 700m (this year's Gala was on Wednesday).

Obviously there are many more places that show "EPL football" as it's known internationally. But in a recent report from Initiative Sports Futures, it placed the Superbowl as the biggest single event, with an average audience of 97m in January 2007, and a total audience (reach) of 142m. This shouldn't be confused with this year's Superbowl which achieved an average audience of 97.5m in the US alone, making it the second biggest broadcast ever in that country, only behind the final episode of *MASH* which achieved 106m. And that figure excludes people who watched in clubs and bars.

As Initiative's report says:

Initiative Sports Futures' league table of the most popular televised sporting events of the year is very different from that which would be produced if based on typically reported audiences.

Initiative Sports Futures believes that it is vital to draw these differences between actual and reported TV audiences to the attention of sponsors. Reported audiences often reflect the potential number of viewers, or include news clips within the total audience figures.

Here's the full list of sports:

My favourite over-used phrase comes from tennis. Whenever a Brit is knocked out of a tennis tournament, they aren't defeated - they crash out.

Andy Murray lost earlier this morning and Google News tells me that there are already 171 articles about Murray that include the phrases "crashes out."

Glad to see that sub-editors remain as original as ever.

I was genuinely surprised today, to learn that the rally once known as the RAC Rally, had been run this weekend. Now I'm not an especially big rallying fan, but since it became "WRC" branded, it seems that it's becoming harder for the passive fan to see.

Once upon a time it ran for the better part of a week, and the BBC would have lots of coverage on a nightly basis with round-ups of the day's action etc. Then there was a "big money" transfer to Channel 4 where rallying fans could catch action as long as they remember to get up early or stay up late.

More recently, the coverage has moved to ITV - and ITV4 in particular. I didn't spot any coverage at all over the weekend, so I've just rifled through this week's Radio Times to see where it had all gone, and all I could find was a solitary programme on ITV4 at 6.40pm on Sunday evening reprising the whole weekend's action. Earlier in the day I could have watched, not live coverage, but "WRC: Greatest Stages" and "WRC: Craziest Moments" which were no doubt thrilling, but not really the same. I'm sure I used to see some live "special stages" action on a Sunday afternoon. And didn't they used to be on Fridays too?

According the WRC website:

"...in recent years, the World Rally Championship has undergone a revolution. Thanks to technological improvements in TV and network coverage, the sport is raising its profile and is attracting the attention of a greater dedicated worldwide audience."

Well they've certainly done a good job in Britain. One hour and ten minute's coverage on ITV4. Hmm.

I know that rallying is not a perfect TV sport - it's technically complicated to film and edit, even with digital advances. But it seems to me that there was better coverage in the UK at least, in the 90s than there is today. And that's got to be hurting the sport.

Here's an interesting little tale about something happening over on the other side of the pond.

We all know how premium TV works in the UK. If you take either Sky or Virgin Media services, you have to pay extra for premium sports. If you don't, the best you might get is Eurosport, Motors TV and the odd racing channel. Now I quite Eurosport, if only for its excellent cycling coverage.

But the fact is that if you want any major sport that's not being covered by either the BBC or ITV, you're going to need to pay up for Sky, and now, Setanta.

In the US it doesn't quite work like that. The nearest US equivalent of Sky Sports is ESPN, owned by Disney like the network ABC. It has a sister station in ESPN2 and there are further ESPNs around the world. It shows Monday Night Football - the NFL variety - as well as a variety of other sports including baseball and college football. It's probably true to say that it doesn't get quite the exclusive deals that someone like Sky might get - rights tend to be more divided between different markets and networks in the US. So there may be a local television station that shows baseball as well as ESPN. But it's undoubtedly the premier sports TV brand in the country.

Beyond that there are other stations like TNT that show a lot of basketball while the Fox network shows a good quantity of baseball. But a sports fan is likely to have ESPN. But here's thing - if you get cable, you almost certainly get ESPN as part of your basic cable package. A broad analogy might be getting Sky or Virgin Media in the UK and you'd expect to find UK Gold.

ESPN (like UK Gold) gets a small amount of every subscriber's basic subscription. This is something that channel owners negotiate with cable operators. ESPN has the whip hand in the sense that subscribers expect to get the channel, so a cable operator will need to come to an agreement with ESPN. There are a few channels that are in this powerful position - perhaps including Discovery. Beyond that, like the UK, you either have to rely purely on advertising revenue, or you can try to sell yourself as a premium brand like HBO or Showtime.

Anyway, so much for the history lesson. The NFL in the US recently created its own channel - the NFL Network. NFL games are already sold to ESPN as mentioned. They also sell games to CBS and Fox who between them broadcast Sunday afternoon games - usually a total of three in any market, although what games you actually see might vary according to local interests and whether or not a ground has sold out. Finally, there's NBC which shows a game on Sunday night. Between these four channels, the NFL earns a lot of cash. But it still wanted a bit more.

The NFL Network broadcasts repeats and profile shows for the most part. But for four Thursdays a year, it broadcasts a live and exclusive game on its nascent channel.

Cable channel operators looked at the network and decided that they didn't want to bundle it with their basic channels. If they do they, they'd have to pay - say $1 - for each of their subscribers, which effectively means increasing their subscription packages. So they instead put it into premium bundles - either on its own or with other premium sports networks such as the Fox Soccer Channel and the Outdoor channel. Subscribers can choose if they want it.

That seems fair, but the NFL Network is not happy. They don't get nearly as much cash if they're not included in the basic package, since many subscribers will choose not to pay that premium. This has now reached the point that the network has been sent a 'cease and desist' letter by US cable operator Comcast demanding that it stops inciting Comcast subscribers to switch providers.

The network is also trying to get legislators involved, getting them to try to force cable operators to take their network in their basic packages.

From this outsider's point of view, this whole thing is ridiculous. The NFL Network should surely stand or fall on the basis of whether viewers want to pay for the service or not. The reason Sky or Setanta can command premium prices in the UK is because you can't see live Premier League football anyway else. But that's because the free alternative is simply highlights. The average US viewer can watch three games back to back on a Sunday across the various networks on free-to-air television. They then can see a further game on Mondays if they have a basic cable package. The NFL Network is offering a paltry eight further games, and frankly the four most viewers can already see is probably enough. Only the real die-hards are likely to subscribe further.

Like anything else, it's surely a question of pricing a product right on the basis of the market it's operating in.

Soccer Scene in Carnaby Street has two main windows which are regularly handed over to major football kit suppliers. So you'll regularly see one window given over to Nike's kit deal with Man Utd or Liverpool's new Adidas away kit.

This morning, there was a new window display for Puma featuring a red shirt I didn't recognise. Then I read the wording accompanying it: "Show your support with the new Poland away shirt."

What?

A last minute display of the Israeli support might have been amusing. But Poland?

Obviously, I know the answer. The UK is undoubtedly now the second largest market for Polish shirts in the world. And I bet they cost a fair bit more in Carnaby Street than they do in ulica Marszalkowska in Warsaw, so Puma are probably earning a nice pound or two. With up to 700,000 Poles in London, it's not really a minority group. And there was Pro-Celebrity game between England and Poland at Selhurst Park over the weekend. I'm just surprised the sign wasn't actually in Polish.

Not this again.

Today's Telegraph has a banner at the top of the front page proclaiming that one billion people will be watching today's Arsenal v Man Utd game.

What on earth are they on about. One person in six is watching a UK club match? I think not. As I've said time and again, these figures are ridiculously over-inflated and have to be treated with a pinch of salt.

Just think about the UK for a moment. Out of a population of sixty million, a maximum of three million will watch on Sky, and about the same again on Match of the Day. And that's it. One in ten. Perhaps a few more. And that's in a country that has the most to care about.

"It is not an exaggeration to say it could be watched by one billion people," said a Premier League spokesman.

Yes it is, even if it is going out in Asia on a Saturday evening.

So what are we meant to think about the proceedings at The Tour de France this year? To re-cap, we first had T-Mobile rider Patrik Sinkewitz testing positive for elevated levels of testosterone from a test during the beginning of June.

He was immediately kicked out of the Tour, but in Germany things went a little further. The two state broadcasters who cover the Tour also pulled out leaving Germans with no coverage of the event. I'm not sure if I entirely agreed with their position, although it sends a very stark message to German sponsors - particularly T-Mobile who are behind the team with probably the most funding in cycling.

Then more news came out about Tour leader Michael Rasmussen. The maillot jeune had been dropped by Danish Cycling from events including the World Championships and next year's Olympics.

At the moment the situation remains complicated but it seems that he's missed a series of random drug tests. Like many athletes, he has to inform the authorities where he'll be at given times so that they can come to him to test him. There's a three strikes rule, and he'd missed two Danish cycling appointments as well as two UCI appointments. Normally three together would have been enough, but two pairs of two was suspicious in many eyes.

However the rules did not mean that he could be withdrawn, and despite the Tour organisers' obvious distaste, they wanted to abide by the rules and weren't going to kick him out. They made him do a press conference however which he clearly didn't enjoy.

But the biggest shocks were to come. On Saturday it was the first time-trial of the tour since the prologue in London. Alexandre Vinokourov stormed to victory minutes ahead of the rest of the field. This was all the more amazing since he'd been having a very hit and miss Tour. He started as favourite, but a crash on stage 5 left him with multiple stitches in both legs, and it was then touch and go whether or not he'd be able to continue at all - never mind continue to be a contender.

On the big stage in the Pyranees on Sunday he seemed to have used it all up on the previous day, but then on Monday he was resurgent and stormed to another stage victory. Although overall victory remained unlikely, the Tour's hard man was showing what he was made of and fans cheered him on.

That made it all the more terrible when on the rest day on Tuesday, news came out that he'd failed a doping test after the time-trial and a blood test had indicated that he had someone else's blood in his body. His team, Astana, immediately pulled out of the Tour, and everyone was left reeling.

Then on Wednesday, another rider was found to be positive - Cofidis rider Cristian Moreni tested positive for testosterone.

He owned up immediately and his French team, including British rider Bradley Wiggins, pulled out. This was a particular shame because Wiggins is certainly clean, and obviously still had high hopes for the time-trial this coming Saturday before entering Paris.

But that was small beer compared to what happened next. Wednesday's stage saw Michael Rasmussen win another stage, blowing everyone away on the famed Col d'Aubisque.

But behind the scenes, Rasmussen's claims about his whereabouts during some of those missing were seemingly falling apart. He had claimed to be in Mexico yet had apparently been spotted in Italy at the time. Finally Rasmussen's team, and undoubtedly their main sponsor, Rabobank, decided enough was enough, and even though Rasmussen was leading the race, wearing the famed yellow jersey, he was pulled from the Tour.

So is the Tour dead? Should it have been stopped this year? Is professional cycling over?

I'd answer no to all those questions. It's certainly going through its darkest moment since the infamous 1998 Tour when doping first really hit the big time. But I genuinely believe that these cheats are actually far fewer than they once were, and cycling is washing its laundry very publicly in getting rid of these people now.

It's likely that more big sponsors will pull out in the short term, but cycling will come out the better for it in the long term. It'd be unfair to those clean riders to cancel this year's race now. Everyone's hoping that nobody else is found guilty, but better we find the cheats than we pretend that they're not there.

I wonder if every other sport can really claim to be as clean as it might be?

Finally this weekend, the Tour de France arrived in London.

I love cycling, and I love the Tour, which has become an important part of my summer of sport for many years now starting when Channel 4 used to cover it. Channel 4 long gave up on showing much over the summer except reality trash. So we're still in that unlikely state of affairs where ITV carries the mantle with the continued exceptional commentary of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin.

An aside, there was a good piece about Sunset + Vine's coverage of the Tour in this week's broadcast magazine, written by Brian Venner who has been working on the race for twenty years now. They have fifteen people in France and another fifteen in the UK. And between them, reporters Matt Rendell and Ned Boulting speak nine languages, which is better than Katie Derham who struggled when Vinokourov answered her English language question in French at the presentation on Friday.

But for me, the commentaries were something to catch later, as I was going to hit the course. Aside from managing to forget to bring my large memory card for my camera (I stopped by John Lewis to right this wrong), I was soon on the course.

It struck me that most people would place themselves near the major sights of the city. And wandering down from Green Park to Buckingham Palace, revealed that to be very much the case. I didn't want to watch the race from behind six other people, so I headed out towards Hyde Park, and in particular, The Serpentine. Although I was planning on taking plenty of photos, it was the cyclists I was looking to see, not necessarily the sights of London.

Just an aside to say that the people running the concession stands were some of the most stupid people I've ever met in a position that requires them to collect money. There was no issue with communication - they were from Birmingham rather than Boulogne - but they were clueless, and I had to look elsewhere for a t-shirt.

But otherwise, the organisation was exceptional, with barriers everywhere, a people's village in Hyde Park, and plenty of big screens scattered around the course. I'd specifically avoided arriving by bike because I wasn't sure where I could leave it and I was planning to move around a bit.

In the end I needn't have worried, with massive bike parks in Green Park and Hyde Park - if only they were there all the time.

(Yet another aside - I didn't mention that I got a free bike from Orange on Wednesday did I? Orange is an official sponsor, and on Tuesday night I read that on Wednesday morning, Orange would give 500 mountain bikes away at Covent Garden. I decided that if I got up early I'd see what the queue was like. Arriving at around 7.30am I found a decently long queue and saw the bikes all being laid out. I reckoned that there were a maximum of 300 people in front of me, so I got in the queue. In the event, there were actually about 495 people in front of me. Nonetheless, Chris Hoy handed me a bike. Since Orange is French owned, I was hopeful that the bikes might be some good. They weren't really. Suspension on a cheap bike is just something to make the handlebars move when you break heavily. And the bike was tiny. I felt like I was riding a BMX as I took it into work. Still, I've got a spare bike for any small people who visit.)

I found a really good spot where the road widened, affording good views as riders came around the corner. As a consequence, I ended up with pictures of all the riders. You can see the set here.

On Sunday, I traveled down to Kent to my brother's home village, where we waited in the sun for the caravan to again appear, and swiftly followed by the bike riders.

We got a bigger haul of tour freebies this time around including copious Skoda hats, some Haribo sweets, and a Kent t-shirt.

There was a breakaway group through first, which included David Millar amongst its number. I tried to explain as much to all and sundry who were suffering a lack of information. BBC Radio Kent was "covering" the race, but nobody at the studio seemed to have tuned into ITV4's coverage, so we were left fairly much in the dark about what was going on. Instead, we were left with lots of interviews with people who had turned out to watch, regardless of whether or not they actually knew what they were seeing.

When the peleton finally arrived, it swept through in a few seconds, and that was it. I was burnt more than every, although I did at least have a hat to keep the sun off my head this time.

After watching more of the action on TV, I headed off home and Five Live gave live coverage of Robbie McEwan's incredible victory.

More photos from Stage 1 can be found here.

A good weekend. Let's hope we don't have to wait another thirteen years before the the Tour returns again.

Before I head off into town, I thought I'd share this, which I made to watch riders as they go past. It's a list of start times, rider numbers and names. I could find names and start times, and names and numbers, but not all three together. So a quick bit of Excel has left me with this. A handy print-out guide for roadside viewing.

Hope it helps at least someone. More on today's stage later.

Wow - finally football clubs are doing the decent thing, and withdrawing alcohol sponsors' logos from their kids size football strips. Other sports including cricket clubs are doing the same thing.

Well - I say "football clubs" and "cricket clubs" when I actually mean the Portman Group is doing it (they're the people who are sort of responsible for the Drinkaware website you see linked to on many alcohol ads - it's complicated). The Portman Group is run by the major alcohol manufacturers and exists to keep its members in check. A cynic might say that when they see the writing's on the wall for something, they make the first move; taking the initiative.

Anyway, the agreement suggests that from January next year, all sponsorship contracts will exclude kids shirts. Except that as The Times reports, Liverpool has just resigned with Carlsberg for three years, so the contract won't fall under the new rules until it expires. That's in the spirit of the agreement isn't it?

And then there's the small matter of gambling companies...

To Arsenal to see the final game of the season. A draw meant that Man Utd deprived Chelsea of the Premiership title.

But isn't it just typical of Mourinho that when the steadicam operator was circling him as he want onto the pitch he swears at the cameraman. The BBC's highlights carefully cutaway in time. But it was obvious what he was saying - and it was less Portuguese than Anglo-Saxon in origin.

I truly believe that England does indeed have the best domestic football in the world. We laugh at countries like the US and their Major League Soccer "franchises." Premiership football is now sold at a big premium throughout the world - why else is the FA going to court against YouTube if not to protect those rights?

But we really do need to become more professional in our attitudes towards the media. That means players too. No swearing. No mouthing of swearing. No failures to give broadcasters interviews. These are basics. At Arsenal today, the latest Nike advert promoting the forthcoming new Arsenal away kit uses the genius of pre-war Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman. Would he have stood for some of the things that still pass in the English game?

Yesterday Australia won the cricket world cup final - or as the organisers would have us call it, the ICC CWC 2007. It just trips off the tongue doesn't it?

It was a complete farce of a final, coming after a long and dull tournament that had its own tragedy. The Aussies got to celebrate winning the final twice by virtue of some inept umpiring that forced the Sri Lankans back onto the pitch in complete darkness to face three pointless overs that nobody could see. Even the TV cameras, which normally do a great job of hiding the gloom, were struggling with even basic things such as keeping in focus. The Sky commentators, normally to be relied upon to take a pro-tournament view, didn't hold back in letting us know that they knew, like we did, that it was a complete farce.

Anyway, Australia duly won the rain interrupted final, while most of the rest of the world carried on in complete obliviousness.

You could argue that after England's dismal Ashes losing tour to Australia earlier in the winter, and then complete failure in this tournament, what with pedalo incidents the only things to keep us entertained, it's the public that's at fault, but I really don't think that's the case.

Everybody, and I really mean everybody, knows that the tournament was way too long. The format allows for dead rubbers and completely one-sided fixtures. Yes Ireland and Bangladesh did very well in the early stages, but that's really not enough. The Football World Cup lasts a month and it's worth reminding ourselves that when the Olympics finally hit these shores in 2012, they'll be finished in just over a fortnight.

We hear that it's TV's fault that the tournament lasts so long; TV needs lots of fixtures, and doesn't want more than one match at a time. I don't buy this for a second. It's making for exceptionally dull TV in the current format.

And then there's the fact that the locals seemingly can't afford to watch cricket in their own country. There's simply nothing worse in a major sporting than seeing row upon row of empty seats - the only spectators seeming to be white in a country where the locals are mainly black.

But then as I've always argued, sports authorities are the most venal and corrupt in the world. It's the one area of power left where presidencies are elected in dubious manners and backhanders are the way things work. If you want to be a tyrannical despot in the 21st century, don't muck around trying to gain control of a small country - get involved in the organisational body of a major international sport. If you happen to have a major tournament to bestow upon different nations every few years, then you can be expected to be treated like royalty. And once you've got to the top, use the funds of your organisation to "buy" votes from smaller countries to keep you in place.

Back to cricket specifically though. How should the Cricket World Cup be improved? Well fewer games for a start. Make sure locals can afford to watch matches - if your stadia aren't full for every game, then you've got the pricing wrong. Sell the TV rights to free to air stations. I've no problem with Sky bidding for World Cup rights, but I do have a problem with the ICC selling them. If the nation can't watch a tournament, then they don't care about it. Of course the same is true for the stupid fools in charge of the ECC who also took Sky cash against the sport's greater interest. Even the crassly commercial F1 realises that without widespread coverage, the "sport" has no real future.

And don't make excuses. This was a terrible event with a humiliating final. Learn from the many mistakes, and do better next time.

Some Observer journalists make these points far more eloquently than I can in today's paper.

So thick and fast after the Boat Race came ITV's coverage of the Malaysian Grand Prix this morning. Now I make no secret of my disinterest in the engineering competition sport. There's little to no overtaking, and new rules are introduced and dropped on a whim. This season there seems to be something about different types of tyres that have to be used. I'd look it up, but you know what? I just don't care.

But if it's on, and I'm in, and there's nothing else to watch, well...

Anyway, as I tuned in this morning after 9.00am, there was a potential McLaren one-two finish on the cards with new British driver (and F1's first black competitor) looking to finish second after his third place podium finish at the first race of the season. This he duly did in a tense finish holding off Raikkonen for the last few laps. Truth be told, it was only because my clock radio came on with coverage that my interest was piqued.

After F1 races there's always a farcical "news conference" where a nameless Brit asks questions in English to each of the drivers in turn. Since he's F1 approved, there's never anything too controversial. The drivers have all dutifully put on their sponsored baseball caps and wear their sponsored watches - an attendant is on hand to make sure. Then they say nothing too extraordinary or contentious to the waiting millions.

It is nonsense, but you might hope we could at least hear what young Lewis Hamilton had to say. Not on ITV though.

It was getting closer to 10am so we left the "press conference" (surely a true press conference allows various members of the press to ask the questions? Otherwise isn't it a "press statement"?) to get a brief interview with Hamilton's father with the uber-bland Steve Rider. All very well, except we left mid-conversation with Lewis Hamilton himself!

It was quite abysmal timing.

They only had to hang on another three minutes to get the full interview. Fortunately Five Live was covering it much more fully, and were prepared to delay the 10am news by a couple of minutes to let us hear what he had to say. He told us, for example, that he'd run out of onboard water about halfway through the race in the extreme conditions, leaving a very uncomfortable race to the finish.

I suppose the only thing to be said for ITV ending their coverage on time was the fact that it was to make way for 55 minutes of cartoons - it's rare, after all, for them to carry any children's programming these days. Of course even that's not the full story. As the race started around 7am, it ate into valuable GMTV airtime, and that's airtime that has to be made up by ITV plc - a separate company. So this was GMTV make-weight airtime.

(By the way, it must be said that overall, the race direction was pretty atrocious with processions of cars at the front of the race being shown in favour of anything interesting occuring towards the back of the field).

An article in this week's Broadcast (behind a paywall I'm afraid) explained the broadcast complexities with covering something like the annual Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race. It takes 38 cameras, two helicopters and and goodness knows how many other people to cover it.

Last year there was an issue with open microphones when ITV cut to the audio of one of the coxes who chose that moment to swear as they urged their crew on. This year they seem to have put some kind of delay on it, as the sound cut and times when they cut to them, yet even my feeble lip-reading got a good idea what she was saying.

However, who was the person who at the precise moment the race started, managed to cutaway to a disinterested looking person sitting in a portakabin studio somewhere? Very poor.

For the rest it was good coverage, and until Cambridge took a firm lead, it was a very open race.

I really don't know why I care who wins the Boat Race not having been to either University. But somehow I do - a bit. Cambridge won.

An update on Wembley again. One thing that I forgot to talk about was the hand-dryers in the bathrooms. As everybody picked up upon by The Londonist noted, the dryers are rocket powered. Normally they're half-hearted affairs that blow out mildly warm air, failing to dry your hands, yet running up the premises' electricity bill in a double whammy of failure. Not the Wembley ones. As you walk down the concourses, it sounds like some remedial repair work is still going on in the toilet. Then you realise that it's someone drying their hands.

These things are so powerful that I doubt that small children will actually be able to keep their hands under the machine. You know those videos you see of astronauts or fighter pilots being spun around at highspeed to simulate Mach 5 or whatever? You know how their faces distort under the pressure? Well that's what happens to your hands while they're under one of these bad boys.

Back in 2000/2001 I went to the old Wembley Stadium for a lunch there. The stadium had closed and Sports.com (who at the time were trying to create a proper sports portal rather than today's gambling-fixated effort) had invited a group of us to meet the 1966 England team. I wasn't due to go, but someone dropped out at the last minute, and I leapt at the chance. I had a picture taken with the surviving team members, and then we sat at the top table opposite the players - I was across from Jack Charlton. It was a wonderful day.

My first experience of Wembley came on FA Cup final day in 1978. It was Arsenal v Ipswich, and as an Arsenal fan, dad drove me and my brother up the road to Wembley. We didn't have tickets, and parked nearby in Brent. We walked up Wembley way around lunchtime, soaking up the atmosphere, dad filming us on his cine camera, and we bought programmes, before setting off back home to watch the match on TV. Arsenal lost that game, but we'd repeat the process for the next couple of years as Arsenal played first Man Utd (a classic game) and then West Ham (another defeat).

My first actual game at Wembley was an England match - England v Romania - it must have been the 1981 World Cup Qualifier. We were at one of the corners, standing. There may have been benches in our section but they were next to useless with no tiering to speak of and everyone else standing anyway. The corners of the old Wembley were set back a long way - there was a dog track around the edge of the pitch don't forget - and I was "lucky" enough to be right next to someone with a fog-horn. The match was a dull 0-0.

Over the years I've seen many other fixtures at Wembley including league and non-league cup finals, largely irrelevant England games against poor opposition, and an unsuccessful spell of Arsenal playing Champions' League games there.

So I was keen to see what the new Wembley would look like.

I'd seen the arch from afar quite a lot. It's been up a while now, and I've also been to Wembley Arena a couple of times since much of the work was completed. Yesterday's event was called a Community Day, and was largely for the residents of Brent. I'm not a resident, but know someone who works there... Around 60,000 people had been invited along, and had been told to arrive at the stadium between 11.00 and 12.00 when events would begin. It'd all be over by 3.00.

We were supposed to enter via gate K, but there was a massive queue there. Gate J had far shorter queues. Couldn't we just walk in there and walk around? I gave it a go and we got in with minimal difficulty.

It's got to be said that the interior of any new stadium is much the same as the other. Concession stands - invariably much busier near the entrances than if you walk a little further around - and toilets. We started looking for our block and then noticed that they were all one hundred and something. We wanted five hundred and something. The first digit in the block number referred to the floor.

No problem, we'd walk up. Most stadia allow you to move around inside. It's not uncommon, for example, for you to have friends in other areas. You can still meet up before the game, or for the brave, at half-time. But seemingly not here. There were no signs leading to stairs, although there were mysterious grey doors that were unmarked. Eventually a steward showed us through a set of such doors and we reached the escalators and stairs up. Needless to say, the second escalator was broken already.

Up at the top you get good views across north-west London from most parts of the stadium, and when we reached our seats the views of the pitch were great.

Inside, and you could tell that this was a trial event. None of the staff had ever sold anything from the catering areas before, indeed the chap who served me had never really used a till before, worked a Coke machine, or have an especially strong grasp of the UK currency (incidentally, those new £20 notes are very different aren't they?). But we struggled through manfully.

I doubt that there were 60,000 people in attendance, and the celebrity games that were planned weren't utterly enthralling, which meant that by the time that Soccer AM had won the mini tournament, most seats were empty. A rumoured fire alarm test didn't take place - probably because there were too few people at this point to run one.

Those who were still there largely wanted to explore - just what the stewards didn't want doing.

On the way out, one of the senior managers was giving press interviews. Some of the members of the crowd started to berate him over some issues they'd experienced: Coke machines failing (everyone had been offered a free soft drink), lack of food, tea and coffee running out.

None of them were major issues, and you'd expect them to be righted for full events. The only sympathy I had was for people who claimed that the stadium isn't signposted very well, and I'd say that's right. You can find your seats and block number easily enough, but finding your way out is a little hit and miss. And I do think you should be able to find your way between levels.

As a stadium, it's taken a long time to finish, but it's a fine building in the end. I reckon that the acoustics are going to make it sound great when a proper game's being played there, and I can't wait to see a real game.

See a full set of photos at Flickr.

And here's a brief, very low quality video that I also made.

OK. Not quite. But I have signed up for the British Cyclosportive which follows the route of Stage 1 of the Tour De France from London to Canterbury. We ride the route a week before the main event.

It's 187 km (120 miles) and your're expected to ride at a minimum average speed of 20 km/h (12.5 mph) so I've got a bit of getting fit to do before July 1st.

Up bright and early to head off to Cardiff to see Arsenal v Chelsea in the Carling Cup Final at the Millennium Stadium. The traffic was awful, and it took far longer to get there than it did a few years back when we drove up for the FA Cup Final (also against Chelsea). Leaving a short time later can get you into Cardiff a lot later than you might hope.

Anyway, unlike many poor souls including those stuck on trains, we did at least make it to the game on time, where we discovered our tickets were in the second row level with the edge of the penalty area behind one of the goals. Apologies for some of these photos - I didn't take my good camera on the basis that they might not have let me in with it (I'm getting quite fussy about the quality of my photos now).

Arsenal's kids were completely dominant in the first half with Walcott scoring his first club goal.

You can read match reports elsewhere, but there was a bit of a scare with John Terry who was stretchered off to hospital but proved to be OK. Shortly after that Drogba scored and leveled the game. He then took the lead, and with lots of injury time to play, it all kicked off.

Here's my record of the incident. You can see Mourinho lead his people onto the pitch:

And here's the melée a few seconds later:

Anyway, it all upset Alan Green terribly. We made a bid for a quick escape, and it was a painful journey out of Wales until the motorway cleared up and we could head home.

He live blogs 24 each week, and boy is he a prolific blogger by the way...

But there's a great quote from him about the Superbowl which is being held in Miami this Sunday:

"[The Superbowl is] the biggest sporting event in the world, unless you include other parts of the world."

(via Mediaguardian)

If it weren't for the fact that I'm going to be at the match, I'd be tuning in to BBC Radio Five Live Sports Extra this Sunday to hear an alternate version of the commentary.

As this piece explains, back in 1927 from the first radio commentaries, each week's Radio Times would publish a chart of a football pitch which was divided into eight squares. The commentator would describe the action, while a second voice called out the grid numbers so listeners at home could appreciate where the ball was. The phrase "back to square one" is famously said to come from this system, although a ball played back could equally have ended up in square two.

This week's Radio Times has reproduced a version of the said chart, but it and the accompanying article are also available online.

(I may record the coverage anyway, radio anorak that I am.)

We went to watch this epic third round FA Cup tie yesterday afternoon. I'd not been to Selhurst Park before. It's obviously a ground (and a club) that's seen better days. When we got to the visiting fans ticket booth there was a largish queue and not a lot happening. It seemed that there was a shortage of tickets. Not a shortage of actual space - there were only just over 10,000 people in a ground with a capacity of over 26,000. No, they hadn't actually printed enough tickets to sell to people. In other words, they'd underestimated the number of Swindonians who'd actually bother to show up.

Sadly, the game was disappointing, with Palace quickly going a goal up. Swindon had a few opportunities, but by now the heavens had really opened and the game was becoming literally bogged down, although the pitch did hold up well.

Palace got a second and it looked unlikely that Swindon could mount a comeback. But with less then ten minutes to go, they got one, and there was a bit of a scramble to try and find an equaliser.

It wasn't to come, but the performance hadn't been bad and fans around me, who'd been in good voice throughout, were relatively upbeat.

We went on to a pub to watch the Liverpool v Arsenal game, featuring two great goals from Tomas Rosicky and a fabulous individual effort from Thierry Henry.

I see that I'm not alone in thinking that perhaps putting gambling sponsors on football shirts mightn't be the smartest idea.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Aston Villa, Blackburn, Middlesborough and Spurs all feature gambling advertisers on their shirts. I'm not the only person to notice that gambling appeals enormously to kids, and make the observation that having the sponsors' names on the child sizes is really not a smart idea.

Now, it seems, the Gambling Commission is investigating the issue, and the shirt sponsorships could be deemed illegal. One possibility might be the removal of logos on kids shirts (although I'd like to think that any self-respecting club would do that anyway), but let's face it, kids watch the players who are their heroes, in the full strip.

The shortlist for this year's Sports Personality of the Year is in, with the winner to be decided by a phone and text vote on Sunday night, live during the programme.

First things first: David Walliams isn't on the list. It was thought that he might make it for his charity swim across the English Channel. Whilst this was a fine achievement and raised lots of money for charity, it was not "sports" in the same way that me finishing the London Marathon (not for some years) or the Great North Run (never) should be considered sport. If I'd won a competition (and winning one of those races would count), then I might be in with a shot. But like sailing, walking or cycling around the world, it's just an achievement to be proud of.

But back to the shortlist. Here are the entrants and my thoughts:

Jenson Button (Formula One) - won his first Grand Prix this year, which is awfully nice for him, but I think we should wait until he's won the Drivers' Championship before getting it
Joe Calzaghe (Boxing) - he might be in with a shout with two belts, were it not for the fact that nobody really watches championship boxing anymore because it's not on mainstream TV
Darren Clarke (Golf) - yes he was part of a winning Ryder Cup team, but other team members did better on the European Order of Merit. No, if Clarke won, it'd be a sympathy vote since he lost his wife to cancer - a tragedy certainly, but not something that should really come into his winning sports personality of the year. He's odds on favourite which actually really annoys me.
Nicole Cooke - (Cycling) - my choice of winner. Nicole has had a spectacular year winning the World Cup with a race to spare, and also La Grand Boucle (the women's Tour de France), as well as many others. I seriously doubt that she will win because so few people know who she is or what she's achieved.
Ricky Hatton - (Boxing) - lots of stepping up and down divisions to take and lose belts. I'd imagine that he'll split the boxing vote, so I can't see him winning, and in any case, others are more deserving.
Andy Murray - (Tennis) - a great future bet for British tennis, but remind me again what he won this year? A single ATP tour event. Not to be sniffed at, but if he can win Wimbledon then the award is his.
Monty Panesar - (Cricket) - a fine cricketer; matchwinning even. It's a shame that he hasn't been selected for either of the first Ashes tests. If he manages to demolish the Australian attack, then he can go up for consideration, but as things stand he's a promising newcomer for whom the future is beckoning.
Zara Phillips - (Equestrianism) - well we all know her mum won the competition in 1971, but is that enough? She's undoubtedly outstanding at her sport, and deserves consideration. But like motor racing, you get the feeling that the rider or driver is only part of the "package" (I hate that word in F1). Second favourite to Clarke.
Phil Taylor - (Darts) - an outstanding darts player (thrower?), but the problem for me comes from the fact that he plays in a split sport. The PDC has some very strong players, but there are all the rest that are in the BDO. Until there's a unified competition, it's hard to be certain of his achievement. This year's PDC final was incredibly one-sided anyway, with Taylor winning 7-0.
Beth Tweddle - (Gymnastics) - our finest gymnast for years, and has won golds in both the World and European championships this year. I guess she could win in other events, aside from the uneven bars, but her achievement is not to be knocked and she should be a strong contender.

So I'd say that the winner should come from Nicole Cooke, Beth Tweddle and Zara Phillips. But the latest Ladbrokes betting is as follows:

Darren Clarke 1/5
Zara Phillips 10/3
Joe Calzaghe 16/1
Nicole Cook 25/1
Monty Panesar 30/1
Andrew Murray 33/1
Beth Tweddle 33/1
Phil Taylor 50/1
Jenson Button 66/1
Ricky Hatton 100/1

Long odds for anyone other than Darren Clarke and Zara Phillips. Perhaps the BBC should use a system that works something like Strictly Come Dancing, and only let the public part of the vote count towards half the marks. Then have a BBC Sport editorial team make up the other half of the points. That'd ensure that minor sports would get a fair shout, and sympathy votes would count less. Obviously, I'm making the judgment that a BBC Sport editorial team would be less prone to human interest stories, but there's a place for them in the Unsung Hero award.

A disappointing 0-0 draw. But I did take my camera...

Five Live had a report today about how gambling, and to a lesser extent porn, are becoming quite serious addictions amongst some young footballers. You can listen to the report here. It's ironic, then, that so many shirt sponsors in the British leagues are now tacky internet gambling companies. Step forward Aston Villa, Blackburn, Middlesborough and Spurs. And of course, pretty much every club has their own "gambling partner".

It's not unusual for sponsors to supply products to the players in their teams, so do the players at Villa et al get free lines of credit at their internet casinos?

And of course then there's the alcohol adverts that appear on shirts. Do they take the advertising logos off the kidswear? No. No. No. Although I do read that because of religious sensibilities, you can buy an "alcohol free" Celtic shirt.

I was thinking about this when for the first time today, I realised that Barcelona were now sporting a shirt sponsor. Except that they've selected Unicef who of course aren't paying for the privilege. I may still see if I can buy an unsponsored Barcelona shirt.

Following on from my moan the other day about the ridiculousness of football managers "banning" the BBC from their press conferences or making any comments to them, it was pleasing to hear Chief Sports Writer of The Mirror, Oliver Holt, saying the same thing on Sportsweek this morning. He said it was a bit of a hobby horse of his, as it is of mine. As he pointed out, last night's Match of the Day featured neither Sam Allardyce nor Alex Ferguson (yes I know Man Utd only played today). If the BBC investigate, say, where Abramovich's millions come from and Chelsea take issue, might they be banned as well?

It is indeed for the Premier League to insist on its managers talking to all their partners as part of the deal.

And here's something really scary. After Bolton's Monday game, Sky Sports presenter Jeff Stelling asked Sam Allardyce if he'd ever taken a bung. Allardyce said that he was "out of order" and an hour later, reports say that Bolton officials were harranguing Sky's producer.

The scary part is that the interview was not replayed or shown on either Sky News or Sky Sports News. The impression given suggests that Sky appreciates that to make their multi-million investment in football work, they have to have access to players and officials. If they fall out with them, then the value of their investment is reduced.

So if you've made a large investment in a product, you don't want to rock any boats and ask tough questions, even if it begins to make people question your editorial integrity. Sky News has just appointed a Viewers' Editor (link broken at time of entry), so maybe that's a question for them?

So following last week's Panorama into football bungs, Sam Alladyce, the "embattled" Bolton manager has imposed a ban on the BBC at all his press conferences. He now joins Sir Alex Ferguson in refusing to talk to the BBC (Fergie is unhappy at the way his son was treated in a previous BBC documentary).

Now if Alladyce feels that he has a legal complaint against the BBC, then he's every right to have his day in court if that's what's needed. But the BBC pays his club a share of the £xm a year that is paid to the Premiership for radio and television rights. As such, however unhappy he might be, he should be contracted to make post match comments much as American sportsmen and women, or tennis players are obliged to.

These petty vendettas aimed against broadcasting organisations who have the temerity to conduct investigative journalism is frankly sickening and puts football in a terrible light.

He and Ferguson should be fined each and everytime they refuse to appear on a BBC camera or conduct a post match radio interview of at least two minutes, with suspension if they continue behaving that way. It's the very least that the licence fee payer deserves.

On a separate subject entirely, what the hell is The Guardian doing employing Russell Brand to write a "sports" column every week? They're having a laugh aren't they - except that it's not a very funny laugh. I did enjoy last week's Independent on Sunday review of Brand's radio show though (can't find it online - sorry).

It seems that the ticket agency in Piccadilly Circus tube station doesn't now offer tickets to matches. It's actually illegal in the UK to resell tickets to football matches due to crowd control issues, but giving out "information" isn't. They even put the word in inverted commas.

Wow. Isn't Ashley Cole a bitter man? I think we're getting a very biased and one-sided view in the first extract of his book - a book, incidentally, I certainly won't be reading. It's called My Defence. He bemoans the fact that fans were still singing Henry's name and not his at the end of the season in Highbury. Then, having laid into plenty of Arsenal folk, he bemoans the fact that Arsenal have refused him permission to use their official photos. It's not really surprising is it?

I was listening to the Simon Mayo book programme over the weekend, and it reminded me that I really must pick up a copy of Gary Imlach's book about his father now that it's out in paperback.

So I took some photos of the Tour of Britain last week, including the one above which I thought would make a nice picture of the cyclists crossing Tower Bridge.

Then I picked up this week's Cycling Weekly to see the picture below (by Mark Lees of Empics) in nearly the same position. And who's that you can see leaning over the railings on the left...?

Today saw the Tour of Britain arrive in London and I set out unneccessarily early to see the Tour cross Tower Bridge. It was a good opportunity to give my camera a decent work out. Some of the photos are OK, but others aren't. Have a look below, and also my Flickr stream (Why does the Flickr Uploader not pay attention to actual dates in the EXIF data in the JPEGs? All the photos are out of sequence in a seemingly random manner).

A couple of nice landmark photos there...

Martin Pedersen, of CSC - General Classification Winner

Andy Schleck, of CSC - King of the Mountains Winner

Mark Cavendish of T-Mobile receives his green points jersey.

The winners spray the crowd with their champagne.

Overall, this was a good fun day out. I was not on my own by travelling around the course on bike. Less than a year now until the Tour de France reaches these parts on a very similar course. The only thing I would say is that I think that the police might have closed some of the roads a little earlier than they did. There were still cars crossing Tower Bridge less than five minutes before the pelleton came through.

In other news, Nicole Cooke was today crowned as the World Cup Champion, in the same year that she has already La Grande Boucle - the female version of the Tour de France. If there's any more deserving winner of Sports Personality of the Year, I don't know who it is. Certainly not David Walliams anyway.

You just know we're entering silly season when you read stories like this. Ken Livingstone apparently believes that getting cyclists to fit licence plates so that they could be fined for infractions like jumping red lights or cycling on the pavement would be a good idea.

I suspect that as this comment came during a phone-in on LBC, it was off the cuff rather than a fully formed idea. It's particularly laughable that he's come up with this at a time when Transport For London is running a heavyweight campaign promoting the virtues of cycling.

As many of the correspondents on this page on The Times' website point out, there are far more dangerous pursuits that we should be spending money on stopping. How many motorists jump redlights - where they're much likelier to cause serious damage? And how many people illegally hold mobile phones in their hands whilst driving? Who do you think is going to cause the most damage in a collision - a person on a piece of lightweight steel or aluminium, or someone in a metal object that weighs well over one tonne?

With cycling lanes that are full of debris pushed towards the gutter from the main road, with cars parked illegally or otherwise in the way, with stretches that last for just a few metres and with just about nobody respecting those extra lines at traffic lights that cyclists are allowed to line-up behind, I'll quite happily ride my bike on the pavement or get away from the lights quickly if I think it's going to keep me safer.

And Ken, you've done a lot of good things as mayor including introducing the congestion charge (how I laughed when I saw engineers working on the lift to the underground carpark at M&C Saatchi this morning, realising that the power cut yesterday must have left their vehicles stranded in their basement), but ideas such as this will kill off all the good work that's already been done regarding cycling. I suggest that Ken takes to his bike for a little while and sees the kind of stuff that cyclists have to put up with.

So what to make of the drug charges that newly crowned Tour de France winner Floyd Landis is chasing?

I was amazed to read that it was Landis who'd been charged. At some point yesterday I heard a vague radio report that one of the riders in this year's Tour had been found positive for drugs. It was only reading the paper on the way home that I found out who it was.

The drugs charges arise from samples taken from him on Stage 17 into Morzine. This was an amazing stage when, after being dropped the previous day and losing more than ten minutes the previous day and dropping back down to 11th overall, he came back and rode away for 130km gaining enough time to put him back into contention. Whilst he didn't end up in yellow, he was close enough to his rivals that by the penultimate stage's time-trial, he was able to decisively win the tour. It was an incredible comeback after a poor day in the mountains the day before.

The drug in question is testosterone which is an unusual drug to choose in these days of hi-tech blood-doping. But it can be either injected or enter the bloodstream via a patch (much like nicotein patches do).

Landis has flat-out denied that he's guilty, but by Monday we should know the result of the B sample which double checks the results of the first blood test.

What do we believe until then?

Yesterday's stage in the Tour de France was spectacular with Floyd Landis cracking badly on the final climb, rueing the day that he decided to let Oscar Pereiro get half an hour on the field and get into yellow.

I'm completely with Martin Kelner on the various merits of Sport Relief. Kelner mentions Chris Evans high-fiving some tsunami survivors, while I was unfortunate enough to be there at the end when all the participants starting hugging one another congratulating themselves on a job well done.

The most truthful comment came from a showstopping Peter Kay sketch where he first of all performed Chumbawumba's Tubthumping, before in the guise of Max (or Paddy - I don't know) mentioned that he wouldn't be watching live. He'd be Sky+ing the show so he could fast forward through all those "let's remember what this evening's really about" films with X-Factor presenters watching babies being born in Malawi or whatever. Isn't it too patronising that we have to have light-entertainers explain to us what's going on in the world on the basis that they've spent three days in the area talking to NGOs who are living their lives out there and could really give us an insight.

Maybe Davina McCall could present an episode of Horizon so that we could truly understand how the quantum physics works. Because she could spend a day or so with a few experts and then give us her down to earth expertise. Or perhaps Jonathan Ross could front an episode of Panorama after he has a brief sojourn to the middle east, letting us know about the background to the current Hezbullah/Israeli conflict. I mean, he'd bring it home so much more than some dull journalist who has a deep understanding of the situation wouldn't he?

Then there's the wanton advertising that you get. There was actually a short film about quite how marvellous Sainsburys is, a massive BT logo on the video wall at one point and various other plugs. "I do a lot for charity mate, but I don't like to talk about it" is a line that somehow comes to mind.

I've no problem with charity fundraising, although I suspect that the cost of putting on Sport Relief mightn't fall that far short of the £12.2m actually raised so far...

Not everything is going completely wrong in sport this summer, well not quite all anyway. England maybe out of the World Cup, but Andy Murray's still in Wimbledon, and the 2006 edition of Le Tour has started.

OK, not everything's beautiful in the world of cycling with a massive fallout from an ongoing to Spanish blood doping investigation. So no Basso, Ulrich or Vinokourov amongst others. It all leaves this year's race very open.

Britain is represented by the humbled David Millar, who's returning to professional cycling following a two year drugs ban. He knows that he has rebuild trust with the public. Making his Tour debut is British Olympian Bradley Wiggins. Despite both being tipped as possible winners to the prologue time-trial, they finished a second apart in 16th and 17th place. Norwegian Thor Hushovd of Credit Agricole won the stage.

As usual ITV and Eurosport have coverage and despite ITV's recent claims that they're going to save £30m on their sports coverage (largely virtue of the fact that there's no World Cup next year), they still seem to be doing fine with live coverage on ITV, amid repeats of Rumpole of the Bailey and Jeeves & Wooster. As usual, it's a clever way of sharing the commentary talents of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin with US network OLN. Effectively we dip and out of the coverage with extended periods of commentary from Sherwin when Liggett is doing something specifically for OLN. The coverage is fronted excellently by Gary Imlach with Chris Boardman, and I've noticed Graham Bell doing some stuff - perhaps until Ned Boulting gets back from the World Cup.

Nightly highlights are on ITV4, although it seems that "gaming" TV has pushed out the weekly terrestrial ITV1 wrap up shows. But ITV is doing a podcast this year which is a nice addition.

I know we're still in the midst of the trials and tribulations that are watching England progress through a major football tournament, but things just get busier.

As well as Wimbledon starting today, next weekend sees the return of my sporting highlight of the summer - the Tour de France.

When ITV4 started last autumn, I knew that ITV planned to move most of its sports coverage to the channel and worried me a little because since it doesn't start until 6.00pm in the evening (it shares a channel space with CITV), that would mean the end of live weekend coverage.

But looking at some of the upcoming listings, it looks as though live coverage is still with us on ITV3 with coverage of the prologue on Saturday and Stage 1 on Sunday. With any luck this'll continue into the following weekends, particularly that of the 15th and 16th July when the Tour's in the mountains.

It looks as though weekday coverage is ITV4 between 7pm and 8pm which is fine.

I know I should be talking about England 1 Ecuador 0, but I got fed up of listening to the loons on 606 to bother with that (and I include Alan Green amongst their number).

But I've just witnessed a match that saw more cards than..., than..., Clinton's!

So who exactly are Portugal going to have available next Saturday? I assume Valentin Ivanov, tonight's official, will be heading to the airport this Wednesday alongside Graham Poll and their "Thanks, But No Thanks" greetings cards.

And fair play to Gabby or whichever ITV sport producer spotted that the official Fifa stats say that the match only had 25 fouls. That's a great foul to card average.

Last night the BBC chose to show Brazil v Japan rather than the simultaneous Australia v Croatia. This was pretty disappointing because even though Japan took an unlikely early lead, it was obvious that Japan needed to rely on the other result and then score a hatful against Brazil to get through.

I was watching Australia v Crotia in a pub and it was a much livelier affair. Croatia needed a win and Australia just a draw. So when Croatia took an early lead the many Australians in the pub were a little disappointed. On a nearby table was a group of Croatian girls, so we decided to side with them (actually it was one Croatian and her Swedish mates). So when Australia equalised for a second time, a big Australian bloke decided to almost pick a fight with me for not supporting Australia. Something to do with us both being in the Commonwealth or something.

I didn't bother getting into why the English are always likely to prefer the other side to Australia - if only to wind up a sports mad nation. In fact, I was pretty neutral in reality, and was only cheering Croatia because the Croat girl was really pretty.

So there it is then. My allegiance can be bought by whoever has the prettiest fans.

I see that the ratings for BBC 3 are some of the best they've had with that game.

A very unfortunate ad from the Northern Rock building society at the foot of the front page of The Guardian's sports section today.

Five months is how long Owen looks like he's going to be out for.

[UPDATE] Northern Rock are pulling the ads.

I really hate those England games that ITV shows. They're just painful to watch. Not because of all the ad breaks. Not because Steve Rider's just dull. And not because those sponsorship breakers are just unfunny.

No. The real problem is that ITV gives its big games to that dynamic commentary duo of Clive Tyldesley and Gareth Southgate. Tyldesley gives us a few choice bon mots before the game's even started. Then before the first ten minutes of the game are up, he's bemoaning England's lack of goals in the competition so far. Six minutes later and he's back on the same hobby horse, telling us how many goals Brazil began their last World Cup winning campaign with.

At least we had Joe Coles superb goal to take our minds off Tyldesley and Southgate.

The second half and I've given up on ITV's commentary altogether. The TV goes onto mute, and I'm listening to Five Live. There is the slight issue that Alan Green and co. are managing to describe play before I see it. I'll live with it. I'd rather have it on mute at the moment than endure Tyldesley.

We're through at any length.

You know those really annoying Budweiser football analysts that ITV have in their sponsorship credits? They're the ones who are only marginally more annoying than the EDF ones. Well I decided, using the power of the internet, to try out ESPN2 coverage of tonight's Spain v Tunisia fixture.

First of all, the picture I got was pretty good - superior indeed to the BBC's live stream. The graphics were typically American with the score box filling the top of the screen; official FIFA sponsors' logos rotating around at one end. Meanwhile the bottom of the screen had continual score updates from baseball or whatever. The football action took place in what was left.

Actually, the commentary was quite good - being done by a couple of guys hailing from Britain and Ireland by the sound of their accents, Adrian Healey and Tommy Smyth. They were obviously commentating off a monitor, but they seemed pretty knowledgable, and enthusiastic. When the match ended, there was much excitement over who might be the viewer voted (via text message) T-Mobile Man of the Match (it was Spain's Torres - not a hard choice since he'd contributed two goals), and there was a summary of the day's previous play. Unfortunately, one of the studio hosts insisted that we carefully watch Tranquillo Barnetta's goal which he described as a perfectly struck shot. Unfortunate, because the slow-motion replay revealed that it would have been slightly off target were it not for a deflection off a Togo defender. Still, not nearly as bad as I thought it might be, and I've heard worse from BBC and ITV commentators so far this world cup.

I turned off just as ESPN2's coverage of a 2005 Domino Championship begun. Really. I'm not lying. Seriously. Have a look here if you don't believe me!

What a shame.

And so to Highbury for the very last time. Today's fixture against Wigan was the last of the season. There was also the small matter of the fact that we needed to beat Wigan while hoping that West Ham could hold Spurs to a draw or better. That way, we'd finish fourth and get a guaranteed Champions' League place. As it stood, we needed to win against Barcelona next week to ensure that Ashburton Grove saw Champions' League football.

Although we'd been wearing redcurrent all season, today every seat had either a red or a white t-shirt on it. Highbury was turned red and white as a consequence.

As is the way with these things, it was a tense afternoon. We took a 1-0 lead very quickly while West Ham took the lead against Spurs. Then both games equalised and Wigan took the lead through a sloppy free kick. Spurs saved a West Ham penalty from Teddy Sheringham no less, and we equalised.

Into the second half and my radio was at full volume following events at Upton Park. Henry scored another and then another - getting his hat-trick in the process. Bergkamp came on, and at the same time, West Ham went 2-1 up. Now, with around ten minutes left, we were 4-2 up and coasting, while Spurs needed two goals.

Everyone around me wanted to know what was happening, as false information sweeps around all the time - for some reason in the first half, large numbers of the crowd thought that West Ham had gone 2-0 up.

The scores ended the same, and a day of drama ended wonderfully.

The celebrations went on for quite some time, including players from yesteryear parading around the ground, a performance (of sorts) from Roger Daltrey and assorted presentations. They ended with fireworks of a kind, although since it was still light they were the smokey kind.

A great day out. We head to Paris in 10 days to face the spectacle of the European Cup against Barcelona. The perfect send-off.

I could probably spend about an hour writing a vituperative piece on all the inequalities of the Worlld Cup's ticket distribution system. The Observer's been waging a campaign against the current scheme that sees just 8% of tickets going to the fans from each country in any given match. Sponsors, meanwhile, share 16% of the tickets, with a further 11% going to hospitality seats.

As usual, the same old canards are coming out about how this time will be different and you'll have names and so on printed on the ticket preventing resale. As if that's going to stop anything. We all know that come fifteen minutes before the start of a fixture with twenty thousand fans still to get in, no turnstile is going to be checking anything apart from whether you have a genuine ticket in your hand.

But that's not what I really wanted to write about here. The various sponsors like to point out that many of their tickets actually do find their way into the hands of fans through competitions. My own employer is running a series of such competitions (there are cars to be won too!).

Budweiser's been running a promotion for a while that involves you sending in photos of yourself showing how much you love football. And Coke has just started a campaign that, er, involves you sending in photos of yourself showing how much you love football.

But I was amazed to see the new McDonalds (warning, annoying sound kicks in at this site) competition. Throughout every hour of May, they're giving away a pair of tickets to various, unspecified matches. Great. But right up front is the fact that the tickets do not include accommodation or travel! Now I've no doubt organising hundreds of trips in this way would be a logistical nightmare as well as very costly. But giving someone a pair of tickets to a game in Munich and telling them at this late stage that they've got to make their own way, and sort out their own accommodation is actually pretty poor.

Make no mistake, if someone were to offer me a pair of tickets, I'd work something out. But one thing I do know is that direct flights in and out of Germany around any especially attractive fixture are likely to be really hard to get at anything approaching a reasonable price.

Wouldn't it be better if McDonalds offered fewer tickets but put packages together for their contestants. The surplus tickets could be passed on to host nations to up their percentages and offer real fans more opportunities to go.

Oh, who am I kidding? You've got to be incredibly wealthy to support any premiership football team these days. And to support England you have to have money coming out of your ears. All those away games in far flung ports come at substantial cost.

I was very excited to learn about the route of Le Tour when it arrives in 2007 for Le Grand Départ.

The prologue takes place on Saturday 6 July 2007, and is a 7.9km time trial starting in Whitehall just down from Trafalgar Square, running through Parliament Square (think pictures of cyclists with Big Ben in the background), towards Buckingham Palace via Victoria, up Constitution Hill and taking in a loop around Hyde Park before doubling back on itself and finishing in The Mall.

The next day, the first stage proper, it starts again in The Mall, before heading over Westminster Bridge, running down the South Bank, crossing the river again, passing through the City, then going over Tower Bridge before heading out into Kent. The finish is in Canterbury, but the route takes it possibly right past the front of my brother's house, and certainly through his village (the full details of the exact roads aren't yet available). Kent's pretty flat, but there are a couple of "hills" of fourth and fifth categories.

I can't wait.

There's a flythrough of the stage here. The question is, do I volunteer? Or do I just experience it all and take photos etc?

News just in (sorry, I can't bring myself to say "Breaking News"... damn): London has been confirmed as hosting the start of Le Tour next year. Ken Livingstone has been working hard for a while to get the start of the Tour, which hasn't been in Britain since it came through Kent in 1994. There'd been some suggestion that Le Tour's organisers might be a bit miffed at London after it was awarded the 2012 Olympics last year.

But the tour's definitely coming here. Without seeing any more information than the banner at the bottom of a Sky News screen, I don't know for certain, but would anticipate the prologue timetrial taking place around the streets of London, while the first stage would be from London to Canterbury, through the Kent countryside.

I'll start making sure I'm available at the beginning of July next year.

[UPDATE: More info here and here]

Not the greatest of surprises that Freddie Flintoff won it. But I'm with Steve Cram on the merits of the runner-up, Ellen MacArthur, getting an award in this arena.

I was in Stanfords earlier today where they have a fine selection of books on adventurers. And that's the category that MacArthur belongs in - adventure. Undoubtedly, sailing around the world in the fastest time is a great achievement, but is it sport? When a runner breaks a record, they're either competing against competitors or the clock. But the environment is fixed and it's sporting prowess that's being measured. Would we have given Scott of the Antarctic a special (posthumous) prize if there'd been a BBC Sports Personality of the Year contest in 1912?

(And as an aside, why did the version of Jerusalem that the awards played out with sound like presenter Sue Barker was actually singing it herself?)

Yesterday I went to two fabulous places. Sadly, due to my having to sign an NDA, I can only talk about one of them. But if you run into me, feel free to ask! Roll on 2006 is all I can say, when, at some point, I'll be able to reveal all...

The place I can talk about is Arsenal. I was supposed to be seeing the new stadium at Ashburton Grove. Unfortunately, due to a mix-up over times (not my fault, honestly), I managed to arrive after the coach had left for the tour. But I was fortunate to be able to tag on to the end of another Arsenal tour which took me into the directors' box and the home changing rooms, where all the shirts were hanging up.

Then, I also got to see the tunnel the players come out of - not a view I'd ever previously had at Arsenal. I also got to go into the boardroom. All in all it was great fun.

Fortunately, I'm now booked onto another tour which should see me finally get to visit the new stadium!

Here's a slideshow of some of my pictures from Highbury.

Of course there was another sporting event at the weekend - days three and four of the Ashes. But with a poor batting performance alongside poor weather, I didn't want to dwell on it too much.

The problem is that there are a maximum of 20 more days for me to dwell on it while it remains free to air. When this series finishes, so will terrestrial coverage of live cricket.

In today's Media Guardian, former director of programmes at ITV, argues (free reg. reqd) that the BBC wasn't really trying when the last TV deal was struck with all the live rights to Test cricket going to Sky, with Five showing 45 minutes of highlights nightly.

I'm not sure I really buy this argument. I think C4 made a pretty attractive bid, but the reality is that Sky can always outbid a terrestrial supplier - certainly a commercial one. The BBC could raise the bid again, but then runs the risk of overpaying. The truth is that the cricket authorities - namely the ECB - are the ones at fault, and a generation of kids is never going to be able to see Freddie Flintoff or Kevin Pietersen do their thing.

And Liddement also talks about the end of live "Test" cricket. Actually, this summer see's the end of terrestrial coverage of all live cricket. Twenty/20 is exclusive to Sky, as are over variants of the one day game. And no terrestrial broadcaster is ever going to show the county game (although BBC local radio does a sterling job of covering it).

So another fabulous tour ended, and Lance Armstrong retires from professional cycling with his 7th consecutive win in what is quite probably the toughest sporting event on the planet.

It wasn't his greatest win ever - he only won his first individual stage in Saturday's time trial, and Basso stuck to him like glue in the mountains - but a win's a win, and Armstrong bows out on top.

Armstrong's may not be the greatest cyclist of all time, because he hasn't really done a great deal outside the Tour, but don't let that stop us marvelling at this incredible achievement.

And full marks, once again, to ITV2 and their coverage of the tour produced by Brian Venner at VTV with the usual complications of having Gary Imlach and Chris Boardman present UK coverage, while we share Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin with international broadcasters in the US and Australia.

I can't tell you how pleased I am that London's been awarded the Olympics in 2012.

I'm as big a naysayer as you could find, and I've long railed against the corruption that's endemic in the IOC.

But I'm thrilled!

I was basically transfixed the whole morning as the IOC went through its voting process which saw the five candidate cities whittled down to just London and Paris after three rounds of voting. Finally it was Paris and London, and we were to be kept waiting for an hour to find out who'd won. Someone in the office described this as the "Henman moment" - that time when you truly think that something great might happen, before all is dashed in front of you.

But then, finally the announcement came, and we let out a great cheer in the office.

Thrilling.

I've been on board since the start, despite the cost and the worry about what we do with the facilities afterwards.

The whole enterprise will be a tremendous boost the country and will fill us all with pride. You can't buy the kind of spirit the country will be full of when the games come around.

And full marks to Seb Coe who's done a sterling effort. He may be a Tory, but he deserves all the plaudits that he's got coming to him for a sensational job in turning around the British bid. He's already got Olympic medals and he's a Lord. What else can we bestow on him? Houses on the edge of Hyde Park? Pensions in pepuity?

One final quick word about the panel discussion about the Olympic win on Newsnight. Well done to Tony Banks and Sharon Davies for putting up such a stout defence to rent-a-quote Cristina Odone's criticims. It's really no good putting up arguments about the number of hospitals we could be build with the £5 billion that the Olympics will cost because that money simply wouldn't have been made available beforehand. Yes it's going to cost everyone £270 over the next 12 years to pay for it, and if asked, many would say no. But then they'd also say no to paying for the refurbishment of the Royal Opera House, or maybe keeping museums that they don't visit open. What she really fails to understand is that passion and renewed spirit and optimism this will bring to the country. In the past, you only got that kind of thing when you won a war against the French (bad example) or something. Sport is the one thing that unites (most of) the country, even if you don't actually like sport. And this isn't a question of forking out the cash for a two week period. This is about kids in schools now being focused on performing in front of the nation in seven years' time. And more being inspired with what they will see others achieve in 2012 and going onwards from there.

On an entirely separate note, you remember how in school, there was always someone who "spoilt it for the rest" of us? I bet that's Bob Geldof and the aid agencies and charities currently gathered in Scotland are thinking when you see those hooligans pointlessly chucking bricks and smashing car windows. What are they trying to achieve? Their behaviour does dilute the message and undermine what others are trying to do.

Rather than depressing myself terribly with all this ID Card stuff, I thought I'd brighten up and remind anyone still reading that The Tour De France starts on Saturday.

It's Lance Armstrong's last tour and he wants to finish with a seventh win in a row. As usual ITV (well ITV2), are covering it as are Eurosport.

It looks like if you live in France you can subscribe to a live feed of the race on your PC. Last year I was able to listen to live commentary via the Outdoor Life Network, but it's not clear whether or not that'll be available this year.

Well the most ridiculous F1 "race" ever is under way. Between them, the organisers and FIA have managed to con 120,000 paying spectators and millions of TV viewers out of a proper race.

Instead just six cars are "racing" around with some of the teams competing seemingly more interested in picking up points rather than serving the spectators, viewers and sponsors.

Obviously none of these people have seen how US sports crowds take this kind of thing, with cases in the past of spectators throwing drinks onto the circuit in disgust.

I've thought for years that F1 was a sham, and this just goes to show that it is. The US has plenty of other motorsports as do other parts of the world. They don't need F1. F1 could be on its last legs.

Can it really be true that rugby union want to do away with automatic promotion and relegation? I really do wonder about the rugby authorities.

So we end up with a league that becomes meaningless dead rubbers by the end of the season, with the dull games that would bring about. Of course there's also the possibility that a major club would be relegated in the last season that relegation occurs, and gets shut out as a consequence.

Add this to the fact that club rugby on terrestrial television is limited to a handful of Powergen Cup games and post-midnight highlights on Sunday evenings, and you're looking at a sport that really doesn't think about its own future.

Well the ECB have done it. They've gone completely to Sky for live coverage. All live cricket is now exclusively available to satellite and cable subscribers.

The sop to the rest of us is that channel Five are going to show highlights between 7.15pm and 8.00pm. Of course large parts of the country don't get Five either. My parents will not be able to watch any cricket for a start - no analogue Five and no DTT.

Do they really see much of a future for cricket in this country?

If I was at nPower right now, I'd be looking very carefully at where I spent my next sponsorship cash.

Read more from Mediaguardian here.

Back to the radio then...

Today's the day when the ECC decide whether or not they're going to deprive the masses and do for themselves what rugby (union and league) already does by removing themselves entirely from terrestrial television.

Do they take the extra £20 available and go exclusively to Sky? How much less should nPower, Vodafone and other sponsors pay if the sport were to be marginalised in this way? This is different to football, which, aside from a brief spell just before the foundation of the Premiership, has never had a history of live coverage. No terrestrial channel is going to put cricket highlights on at any time except the dead of night - the ratings just won't be good enough.

Rugby Union is a case in point. Just over a year ago, England won the world cup. The winning team had a procession through London, Clive Woodward was knighted and all was happy. And then we realised that the Six Nations was the only other coverage the Sky-less were ever going to get. Now the coverage for that is good, and all the matches are live on the BBC. But the Heineken Cup is no longer shared with multi-channel, and club rugby has no outlet. You get broader coverage of snooker on BBC television.

Anyway, we'll have to wait and see.

It seems that Yealding have decided that they should try to hold their FA Cup tie against Newcastle at their home ground after all. A couple of years ago there was the farcical situation where Farnborough decided that they'd prefer to play their tie against Arssenal at Highbury instead of at home. Of course they lost since they were playing on a surface which was closer to a billiard table than any of them had every come across before. Arsenal fans outnumbered their "home" fans. And a general mockery was made.

The FA can now throw out any club that switches the venue for anything other than safety grounds. And they can't go to the opposition's stadium - only a neutral ground.

This morning a Yealding player was talking about how he wanted to play at St James' Park. Well guess what, if you get a draw at home, you can play there. But it's not a divine right. Even neutral venues should only be considered in extreme cases. If you're able to hold a 3000 crowd, then that's good enough for me.

Could Sky be getting the lot? Financially sound in the short term, it spells disaster in the long term for the game.

Mediaguardian are reporting that Fergie has extended his boycott of the BBC for life. Frankly, he deserves a dressing down from the FA for this petulant and childish behaviour.

The BBC pays £105m for their three year deal, and at the very least they should be entitled to have an interview with a nominated player and the manager from each team at every match. I don't care if Duncan Ferguson or Alex Ferguson don't want to talk to journalists - if they're getting the cash they have to give something back.

Millions only ever see highlights of the football and if Alex Ferguson wants to behave like a spoilt two year old, then Man Utd ought to forfeit their cash from the BBC.

Frankly, it should be in every player and manager's contract that they have to adhere to minimum media interviews. Tennis players, for example, are fined if they refuse to face the press.

American sport has many many things wrong with it, but you know full-well that their sports authorities would not stand for this kind of behaviour for one instant.

From now on, every week on Match of the Day, the BBC ought to say that Alex Ferguson is behaving childishly in refusing to give interviews. There really is no excuse. He's upset that the BBC revealed that his son personally benefited from deals involving Man Utd players, in a documentary earlier this year. Well that's investigative journalism, and we all know that agents are the biggest problem the game is facing in the UK. If he can't defend his son's actions, that's tough, but behaving like a spoilt child is too much. The FA needs to take action now.

Last night the Red Sox finally won the World Series for the first time since 1918 - I won't even get into the whole Babe Ruth curse thing. I'm not sure what that'll make Newcastle United fans feel like. They haven't won a domestic trophy since their 1955 FA Cup win. The Red Sox hadn't won for 86 years...

Two good media stories from this. First off, Five Live used Five Live Sports Xtra through the night to give full commentary. I don't know how many people were listening, but I was, even though it was on channel Five at the same time.

Secondly, the Major League Baseball website has a very reasonable video policy. They stream very brief highlights of the major plays etc, and charge a reasonable $3.99 for full match downloads, suitable for portable devices.

So on Sunday, courtesy of a sponsorship deal at work, I got to go along to Superset Tennis at Wembley Arena. I must admit that I hate travelling to and from Wembley, but on Sunday, aside from my local train service being a bus for the day (and thus making it quicker to catch a proper bus that doesn't attempt to follow a railway line's route, and then getting a tube), I actually got to Wembley very quickly.

The idea of Superset tennis is that a short tournament is played out over one day with individual fixtures being a single set each. So in the afternoon you have four sets of tennis - the quarterfinals effectively. Then in the evening, two semi-finals and a final. They play for a quarter of a million - winner takes all (apart from the unmentioned appearance fees of course).

The website says that it features "8 of the world's best players". Well, up to a point Lord Copper. Actually we did get a decent selection of players, with Greg Rusedski, young Andrew Murray who won the US junior boys, and pros like Mario Ancic (who won the tournament) and Tommy Robrede. On top of these we got crowd pleasers like Goran Ivanesevic, Boris Becker and a very impressive John McEnroe. I took loads of photos from our courtside seats so I'm looking forward to gettting a decent "Mac" shot blown up. Tim Henman would have been playing but was injured after last week's Davis Cup defeat.

Other differences were Boxing/Wrestling style intros, on-court coaches (with Greg having Paul McKenna - who seemingly has helped Greg in the past, although I'm not sure what help he could be during a tennis match. McEnroe had the far more obviously helpful Peter Fleming on his bench), and the liberal use of Hawkeye to check whether balls were in or out. Players were allowed to call on Hawkeye for disputed line calls. It worked pretty well, but I'm not altogether convinced about the how accurate it really is. An example: the sets start with a "Serve to serve" competition, whereby each competitor serves to balls as close as possible to the "T" in the opposite court - closest serve wins. Well it was never quite explained to us whether "out" balls counted if they were close, but one serve hit the net and bounced well long into the back of the court. Yet when Hawkeye was presented to determine the winner, the ball was shown landing in the the service court, following its original trajectory. Very wrong in otherwords. Probably not surprising given the way Hawkeye's used in cricket where you're trying to determine where the ball would have gone if a leg hadn't got in the way, but it just goes to show that technology does not yet rule.

So there was lots of music between points, and some matches went on to scores like 11-9 since you can't really employ tie-breaks too soon in a one set match. We had to endure some dreadful all-girl "urban" act who mimed away on court. But overall it was a pretty good day with some great tennis.

Rich from work was umpire for a large part of it which was fun to see, particularly when they made him put on a baseball cap back to front for the final, and there was no fine netting at either end of the court which meant that if you were in those seats, you had tennis balls coming at you at well over a hundred miles an hour. Greg must have been gutted to lose the final to Ancic!

Well the England cricket rights are up for grabs at the moment (free reg reqd). Over the last three years, Channel 4 have had all the home Tests, save one, and Sky have had the one dayers as well as a single Test.

Ofcom have recently put out a draft of the latest Listed Events (PDF), and it's worth noting that the England Test Matches fall into Group B, which means that if, say Sky, get the live rights exclusively, another broadcaster should be able to offer highlights and live radio rights have been acquired by a national broadcaster. The wording is confusing, and I'm not sure whether that means that if, say, Sky get the TV rights, but neither the BBC nor Talksport take the radio rights, that then Sky wouldn't be allowed to continue. A moot point that's unlikely to occur.

But returning to the case in point, I'm not sure how keen C4 really are to continue with their cricket coverage. You sometimes get the feeling that it invades their Hollyoaks/T4 hour (repeats of Friends have to continue at all costs, and they've just paid a fortune for The Simpsons). Then there's the issue of highlights (remembering that most people are working for most of the time the Test matches are on) - sometime around midnight seems to be the norm. And on Saturday, at the time when most people are able to watch, they interrupt it with racing (albeit, you can watch full, unencrypted coverage of FilmFour if you have digital satellite or cable).

Sky, I've no doubt would love it, but it surely has to be the BBC that gets the cricket back. Wimbledon aside, most of the summer they can fit it in, uninterrupted, and when play goes beyond 6pm, it's less of an issue.

But the fact remains, that should the ECB want, they could just go for satellite, with some kind of highlights programme relegated to late night on a terrestrial channel. It would be late night coverage, because neither the Beeb nor C4 would especially want to give much primetime to a sport that they can't cover properly - that's why there was so little coverage of the last Cricket World Cup terrestrially. The rights were available, but no-one wanted them.

Sports administrators can be very stupid about these things, just looking for the quick buck. But if I was a sports sponsor, I'd be looking for reduced costs if the ECB go the Sky route. Less exposure equals less cash.

My dad was moaning to me only yesterday about how terrible it was that the Ryder Cup was not shown live on free-to-air television. You had to stay up late for the highlights - which were certainly comprehensive. But the event didn't finish until around 10.00pm our time, so it was much later than that, that terrestrial viewers got to see the European team celebrations. The Ryder Cup is also a category B event, and that's why, I think, that the competition has never really achieved mass appeal. It's a big event, but one that can't be shared properly by the populace.

Incidentally, other Group B events include non-finals play at Wimbledon (the BBC have this, but they could in theory be limited to the finals alone), all the games aside from the final in the Rugby World Cup (ITV currently show all the games), Six Nations matches involving home nations (the BBC have all the Six Nations), The Commonwealth Games (BBC - doubt anyone else would bother), The World Athletics Championships (BBC), the Cricket World Cup final, semis and matches involving England (Sky has this tournament, and terrestrial viewers are left with highlights of the above - if at all), the Open Golf Championship (BBC).

I reckon if the Open Golf Championship left the BBC, that might just about kill Golf as a mass viewership sport in this country. There are a handful of other tournaments on TV in the UK - including the Volvo PGA, the Scottish Open, the World Matchplay, and the Masters. But would the BBC give loads of airtime to a sport that they couldn't really do justice to? I doubt it. As it happens, I think that the deal the BBC have stretches a few years forward - the European Tour deal certainly runs to 2008.

In some respects, keeping an element of these sports on terrestrial TV must also help the likes of Sky Sports. If you don't build a following free-to-air, you reducing the number of people who're likely to want to subscribe for additional coverage. Look at boxing as a case in point. Amir Khan aside, the general populace has lost interest in this sport.

I rushed back from Brighton to catch the end of the Tour of Britain cycle race. Last weekend saw the southeast having fantastic weather, and people turned out in big numbers. It's been five years since the last tour of Britain - the Prutour as it was then. So it was good to see professional cycling, including some big teams like US Postal Service and Credit Agricole, on the streets of London.

So it seems that Wayne Rooney's off to Man Utd - but that story highlights a real problem that I have with the way the Premiership is organised.

Yesterday Man Utd drew with Everton 0-0, but Fergie refused "all post match interviews."

Fergie already has a problem with the BBC, and is not giving interviews to them. The reason behind this is the investigation made by the BBC into the dealings of Ferguson's son Jason with the club.

It's appalling that Ferguson is allowed to get away with this. There ought to be a rule that the manager and at least one player is put forward for media coverage questioning at the end of every game. Professional tennis players have to go through it, noone would stand for it in the States if post game interviews weren't given, and in international competition it's the norm.

The BBC are paying Man Utd many millions for the rights to show highlights of Premiership matches, and if Ferguson is unwilling to participate he should be fined. That also goes for footballers who refuse all media requests. It's part of the contract that if we're paying them via match tickets, Sky subscriptions or TV licences, we get something back in return.

While Bobby Robson's been ousted from Newcastle, it's Man Utd who I think really need a change in manager.

The IOC are already starting my favourite game at major sporting contests - the unfeasibly large audiences. Of course events like the Olympics attract astronomical audiences with global appeal. But much of the world still doesn't have electricity regularly available and they won't be tuning in for the Men's 100m Final at Athens. They're saying that the global audience will be 3.9 billion.

Lets do some sums.

The IOC are reporting that 300 channels worldwide will carry 35,000 hours of dedicated coverage. Since our very own BBC is carrying 1,200 hours on up to five channels, that begins to put that figure in perspective. And NBC in the US is carrying many hours over plenty of their channels too.

But I suspect that most countries will be televising some coverage during the fortnight.

But these gargantuan claims are based on some very dubious methodology, particularly in an instance where the games have yet to start. In a post Sydney 2000 report, the IOC talk about 3.7 billion viewers - or "nearly every person in the world who had access to a television". These figures are taken from a survey that the IOC commissioned from Sports Marketing Surveys which says that it's used "conservative figures" and excludes out of home viewing and news coverage.

Let's first do some maths in those countries where there's no problem seeing the Olympics on TV - the UK and the US.

In the US NBC reported that the Sydney games reached a cumulative 185 million Americans. The UN give the US population in 2000 as being roughly 285 million meaning that 65% of Americans watched some of the Games' coverage. And remember that this is in the region with the greatest number of TV sets per head of population and in a market where the Olympics are one of the most highly sought after rights packages. NBC have agreed to pay $2b for the rights to the 2010 Winter Games and 2012 Summer Olympics. And the Sydney games saw some of the poorest figures in recent times according to that same CNN report.

Interestingly, we see some quite different figures when comparing what the IOC report and NBC themselves reported in the form of their parent company, General Electric's annual report. As I said above, General Electric gave a figure of 185m, while the IOC state that "more than 228 million" Americans watched some part of the games. Quite a discrepency.

Back in the UK, where a similarly high number of TV sets per head of population exist, the BBC reported to a Parliamentary select committee that 77% of the population saw at least 15 minutes of BBC Olympic coverage.

Let's examine these numbers in the context of the world's population - currently given by the UN as being 6,301,463,000 (6.3 billion).

If 4 billion of this 6.3 billion "available audience" were to watch, then 63% of the world would be watching some part of the games - nearly the same percentage worldwide as watched the Sydney games in the US. But not everywhere in the world has access to television.

This is the part of my research that's been hardest to find out about. The most recent set of figures that I can find only run until 1997 and are from UNESCO. Over the most recent 7 years, no doubt many more people have gained access to television with satellite services burgeoning, but to what extent? And is the rest of the world quite so mad about the Olympics as Western countries are?

I'll be honest and admit that I don't know these answers. But in 1997 the World overall had 44% fewer TV sets per head of population than the American average (and "American" in this instance includes both North and South America). In particular, Asia, which makes up 61% of the world's population, had 190 sets per thousand population compared with 429 in "America" and 548 in "Developed Countries" - that's a respective shortfall of 56% and 65%.

These figures will have improved by now, but by how much? The two most populous countries on the planet, China and India, also have some of the poorest people living within their borders. Both countries will undoubtedly enter large teams and have good followings back home - but 63% of the population, when the continent as whole probably has less than 250 televisions per thousand (and this will be massively weighted towards more prosperous cities)? I think not.

Of course I can't prove any of this definitively. And statistics like this always get bandied around at major sporting events, since large sponsors have invested many millions of dollars promote their brand around the world. There probably isn't a better environment for them to do that either. No dispute there. But let's not make rash claims.

Returning to that IOC press release, much of the reasoning behind this increase is down to developed world TV stations massively increasing the number of hours they carry, largely as a result of digital offerings and multi-channel availability. But this is not the same as increasing the overall reach of the games. A sports fan, such as myself, may well watch a greater quantity of coverage. But someone who hates sport (they exist - I've met them), still won't be watching. Three out of five of the main TV channels in the UK will have no coverage. Three out of the four biggest US networks will have no coverage. It'll be easy to dodge if you want to.

The bottom line is that it's imperative to the IOC that every Olympic Games is better than the previous one. That means bigger, more athletes, more records and most importantly, more audiences. I applaud them for striving to ensure that the games do not disappear onto subscription sports channels, as much prime sport has in Europe. However, the numbers are not always going to increase. Are they?

A couple of Olympic blogs that are making fascinating reading: Stuart Hughes and Scott Goldblatt.

This week's Broadcast magazine has a double-page spread on something very close to my heart - those fancy camera techniques that are used in sport.

Since Broadcast's website is totally subscription only, here are their top ten:

1. Virtual Spectator - Basically all the graphics tricks used in coverage of the WRC. It all involves GPS, computer graphics and minicams.
2. Crash Recording - For use in yachting. The cameras are recording to memory all the time. Then if something exciting happens, a crewmember hits a button and everything that has just happened is committed to a more permament storage.
3. Super Slow-Mo - As used superbly by C4 in the cricket. Sky have their own version too. 2000 frames a second.
4. Hawkeye - First cricket, now tennis. Where next for the ball-tracking technology?
5. Skycam - A camera mounted high on a pair of wires. You do get some very involving views. The French Open employ one as well as the Beeb for the FA Cup Final.
6. Epsis - The tricks now widely employed in football and many other sports for projecting graphics onto the pitch while the players walk all over them.
7. Streaming - Er. This is more a delivery mechanism isn't it? Move along please.
8. High Definition - Another delivery mechanism. Sky are looking to be first in the UK with this. But we'll all need new TVs.
9. Post Cam - The BBC used it during the Six Nations. Strap a remote controlled camera around the foot of a rugby post just above the padding. You get close-up views without getting in the way. Limited potential in other sports though.
10. I-Ball - Still in development, but basically seems to involve putting 12 cameras inside a ball (say a football), transmitting the images back and combining them to produce a single image "ball's eye" view, with computers doing the hard work since balls spin a lot etc.

Looking forward to this Panorama, whenever it gets broadcast. No real surprises that votes can effectively be bought - the whole regime stinks in my opinion.

This being an Olympic year, Andrew Jennings normally has another book out on this subject. It doesn't seem to be the case this time around sadly.

It's always seemed to me that while becoming a dictator of a country is quite hard work, and will result in possible alienation from other countries, exclusion from the UN, possible invasion by America if you happen to have oil in "them there hills", and quite possibly arms dealers queuing up at the airport to sell you stuff. Overall though, being a dictatorship is generally seen as a bad thing by right thinking countries. Apart from anything else, you have to have eyes in the back of your head in case some discontented general in your army decides he'd make a far better leader.

But sport is a different case. There you can make your own rules, bend then to your heart's content, get treated like royalty and generally do as you wish. You quite probably bribe representatives, that you picked, from third world nations to vote for you. You start your own marketing companies to sell off the TV rights to your events, getting a nice slice of the action along the way. You start introducing new competitions to increase revenues, without too much care about whether sports fans want or need another competition.

Yes comrades, sport is the last bastion of the great dictatorships!

[UPDATE]

There was someone from the London 2012 Olympic bid on Radio Five this evening being interviewed at the Crystal Palace athletics meeting this evening who was having a bit of a moan about this forthcoming documentary. Both he and the interviewer admitted that they hadn't seen the documentary (I suspect that it's not yet finished), but the stance he was taking was that this is likely to reduce the likelihood of London winning the bid. But as far as I can make out from what I've read and heard about this programme, the scandal is that agents are there to accept bribes for votes from IOC members. The fact that this sting was set up in London is neither here nor there. It could equally have been Paris or one of the other bid cities. The idea that we'll have "all forgotten" about it come next summer when the decision is made is completely the wrong attitude. If the IOC has members who are willing to accept bribes then they need to be drummed out of the organisation.

The corollary of this is that the BBC, as a major news organistation in Britain, should not investigate possible scandals amongst Olympic members in the run-up to a bid. This is exactly the right time to be doing it. If people are accepting cash for votes to get London chosen, then they're equally as likely to be willing to accept that cash for choosing other cities. The process should be completely fair and open, and any IOC members who are acting illegally should be discovered now and not later. Don't forget that after the Salt Lake City scandal, the chosen venue wasn't changed as a result. If Paris were to win the vote next summer, and subsequently it emerges that in a tight vote, several members had chosen Paris in return for cash then would they really change the host city? No. It'd be too late. As soon as the winning city is chosen, work begins, including major construction. There'd be major law suits launched and the entire thing would spiral out of control.

What would happen is that some people would end up in court, and be thrown out of the IOC. There'd be recriminations. But Paris would still get the games.

So let's continue to investigate corruption in sport. It's a multi-billion business, and there's far less serious news coverage than there should be. I'd guess that the reason is that there are interests to be protected.

Panorama is on Wednesday 4 August at 9.00pm on BBC1 (and probably stored on the web subsequently). I'll be watching.

It may be unlucky for some, but Stage 13 in the Pyranees yesterday kept me watching. The stage covered many mountains, finishing at the Plateau de Beille. Lance Armstrong, chasing his sixth consecutive tour win was once again left with a sole real rival in Ivan Basso. Everyone else was losing time or even getting off their bikes.

But the greatest performance of the day was by the French rider Thomas Voeckler who's been hanging on to his yellow jersey for dear life for nine days now. And despite most people thinking he was certain to lose it in the Pyranees - he's still got it with an amazine effort to keep his losses down. He now has 22 seconds on Armstrong. The French crowd loved it and gave him an enormous roar as he crossed the line. The drama of the tour is wonderful, and credit where it's due - ITV2's coverage is utterly superb, with a great team all round.

Well that was a built of a shambles wasn't it?

I work right next to Regent Street where several Formula One cars were effectively parading up and down doing around 80mph last night. Since all the tube stations were closed, I was involved like it or not.

As a matter of interest, despite my overall disdain for Formula One (How many races in a season can Michael Schumacher win?), I like seeing cars driving fast as much as the next man, and since it was happening just a street away, it seemed a shame not to go see. Well obviously I shouldn't have left it until the last minute, since the crowds were absolutely enormous, with estimates of 500,000 from the police. I went along Kingley Street which runs parallel to Regent Street, and then tried to cut through. When I pushed my way through, the crowds I still found myself at least 10 people away from the edge of the road, from where there was a gap before bollards and the "race track" itself. Needless to say, there's no tiering on the Regent Street pavement, and F1 cars are very low. So there was absolutely no chance of seeing anything at all - just hearing them. I pushed my way out (no mean feat) and started a meandering walk back to Kings Cross (it was a nice evening, and I thought I'd avoid tubes). On my way, in Great Marlborough Street I was blocked from going further by a massive crowd who'd gathered to watch the event on a large screen TV! Why? Can't think of anything worse than going to an event only to watch it on TV. Concerts in Hyde Park or the old Wembley anyone?

More seriously, the crowds were far too packed in at the side of Regent Street in my view. If you're expecting 500,000 people in town, you need to make provisions for them - portable toilets etc. There were plenty of police on show, and I walked past the Middlesex Hospital which had emergency A&E facilities in their courtyard. But it still needed better marshalling. And most spectators will have seen absolutely nothing.

Am I biased? Certainly. I'd never go out of my way to watch an F1 race. I consider it less a sport (despite how I've categorised this entry) than an engineering competition. There is simply too little competitiveness between the drivers and too much reliance on the cars. We end up with a situation where the best car by far is driven by the best driver by far with the best reliability by far. And he hardly gets beaten. All the tactics seem to take place in the pit-stops rather than any dualling on the road.

When I got home last night I saw the tactically challenging Tour de France on TV along the pave stage. There's a sport where the riders' machines count for very little. There's no technological advantage to really be gained by choosing one manufacturer over another. It's all down to ability, tactics and teamwork.

UPDATE: THe local news in London on Wednesday covered the "procession" again and asked the question - was it too dangerous? Yes it was, despite what various Westminster City councillors might say. I saw the Rugby World Cup team procession, and the Stop the War March, and both were absolutely fine. On Tuesday evening, the crowds were dangerously packed in, and frankly they shouldn't have let so many people into the area. It's very lucky indeed that no members of the crowd were crushed. I shudder to think what would have happened if one of the cars had spun slightly out of control (however good the drivers are).

Once again the Tour De France is upon us, and amazinhgly, ITV2 are still giving it reasonable amounts of airtime (undoubtedly helped by the fact that it has a sponsor in Michelob Ultra). Live coverage seems to be limited to occassional transmissions at the weekend when Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin manage the very clever trick of broadcasting on both ITV and America's OLN at the same time including channel specific pieces. (I finally worked out what was going on by listening to the online audio from OLN while watching the ITV2 coverage at the weekend and realising that at times both commentators are talking - one on one channel and the other on the other - before coming back together. Usually this happens around commercial breaks that are far more frequent in the US).

So with daily highlights at 7.00pm, we're back to good old Eurosport for the live coverage. But it's a shame that there hasn't been any David Duffield? I know he's getting on a bit, and Mike Smith (no not *that* one) isn't bad, but I miss his ramblings. Actually Eurosport do a damn good job considering the tight budgets that they tend to work to - usually seeing the commentators based in studios in Paris rather than actually at the events. As for Duffield, a posting on the Eurosport message board says that he had been due to guest on the channel's studio coverage. But they lost their main sponsor days before the event started and obviously had to scale back what they were planning to do. It now seems that he'll be contributing from Stage 6 onwards - quite how is not clear, although I can appreciate that there won't have been hotel rooms booked etc, and another person is a significant additional cost.

But the real disappointment of the Tour this year has been the sorry story of David Millar. We don't have much of a British presence in the Tour, and this year we have precisely no riders at all. Millar, of course, is a time trial specialist, and won his first ever stage of the Tour in 2000 when he won the Prologue time trial. What's happened is that he's admitted taking the performance enhancing drug EPO, although he says, not recently. But in a sport that's been plagued by drug scandals, that's plenty enough guilt and he's been banned from the Tour, kicked out the Olympics and likely to be dropped by his team which has a zero tolerance policy. Quite how the whole thing pans out is difficult to say, but it's going to take a gargantuan leap for him to come back from this low.

Returning to the Tour, Armstrong is of course chasing his sixth win in a row - an all time record. He's looking good, and had a great time trial prologue on Saturday. But last year was the best race for ages, with Armstrong at times looking defeatable. The real action comes in the third week this year with the mountains unusually back-weighted towards the end of the race.

Guess who had a pair of tickets to Wimbledon yesterday? We stayed until around 4ish before deciding that there was unlikely to be any play and headed off home. Once we'd made that decision, you begin to hope that all play really will be cancelled, because you'd hate to think that as you're getting on the tube at Southfields, the covers are coming off.

I was surprised to see later on, via the rather excellent interactive BBC TV coverage, that people were still sitting hopefully on Centre Court until around 7.00pm when the announcement was finally made.

You get the feeling that they knew this was going to happen somewhat earlier than they admitted it, but there's catering companies who are banking on making money etc. In fact with no tennis on, they probably had a field day yesterday!

Still, we did get quite early word of play today via a friend who's an umpire... Not that I was likely to want to queue today after yesterday's fun. In any case, I don't think I own enough Union Flags or crosses of St George to be allowed in on Centre Court today. I've got no problem with opening up the middle Sunday to all and sundry - but calling it the "People's Sunday" is somewhat unfair. This morning there were the expected interviews with people in the queue going on about how this was a chance to let the real fans in to see play.

Uhhh... I'd say that the "real fans" are those who actually made the effort to enter the public ballot (I've done it in the past - it works - you get tickets), or play the game. We all know that tennis clubs can be snobbish affairs, but people who play the sport are quite entitled to get ticket advantages. The same happens in rugby and football. In actual fact, it's pretty hard for people to get tickets to any of our major sporting events, unless you pay close attention to the rules, and get your applications in early, and maybe join the relevant organisations. When the England football team are playing Wales in the World Cup qualifiers and tickets are hard to come by, nobody's going to say that it's not fair that real fans aren't allowed in.

Certainly, there's plenty of hospitality, but check out the number of hospitality seats the new Wembley is attempting to flog - a terrible deal incidentally. It's part of sport and it's not nice, but when was professional sport ever that wonderful?

Still Henman won today, and I suspect that the moment his game was over, some people will have been leaving the ground to get back in the queue for tickets tomorrow. It'd be unfair to characterise them all as middle-aged women wearing large felt top hats garlanded with flags and wearing free Daily Mail waterproofs (free with your copy in the queue)! But characterise them all I will. OK - that's harsh. There are also a lot of Aussies and Americans, but they're outnumbered. The only other time you come across this same cross section of the country's population is if you've ever had the (mis)fortune to ride the tube home around the same time that a Cliff Richard concert has finished at Earl's Court. You see? It's no coincidence that Cliff famously cheered up the Centre Court crowd on a previous wet Wimbledon.

And speaking of Cliff, I really hope that all the newspapers and media outlets that gave space to that ridiculous stunt (free reg. req'd.) involving Tony Blackburn were fully aware what they were doing. Unique, the company who own Classic Gold "Digital" (mostly available on AM) was founded by one Noel Edmonds. And wouldn't you know it? This week also saw their annual results. Tony Blackburn just about admitted as much at the NTL Commercial Radio awards on Friday where he was presenting an award.

So this article from Media Week has the findings of some research that says that fans don't mind company-sponsored stadia.

What a load of nonsense. This research was conducted for Arsenal, and is obviously paving the way for some blue-chip company to pay many millions for the right to call the new Arsenal stadium something like "O2 Highbury" or "Nike Highbury".

Personally, I think that this is pretty vulgar. Highbury has always been one of the finer stadia in the country, indeed the East and West stands are listed. I'd like to see the full research methodology to see exactly how this was question was asked. As the Media Week article states, none of the fans will use the name.

Well if the plaudits for Wayne Rooney weren't enough the other day, the papers are going to go mad tomorrow. Rooney helped England to a 4-2 win over Croatia, taking us through to a massive quarter-final match against the host nation tomorrow.

Come on England!

The best thing has got to be the press ads they're running that use old logos from The Avengers (Beckham, Owen and Gerrard) and The Saint (featuring Michael Owen). [Sorry, can't find online versions of them]

I mean - really! So the old Fourth Division now becomes the Coca Cola League Two. What a load of nonsense. So you've got a new sponsor and a new logo - leave it at that. I think I may have to go back to calling everything Divisions 1 to 4.

So Porto beat Monaco in a pretty average Champions' League final last night, in what was Mourinho's last match before he joins Chelsea.

But much more entertaining for the home viewer was the "matrix-stylee" bullet time effects. Known as "Eye-vision", it was first used, I believe, for the 2001 Superbowl (The Matrix was released in 1999, and the effect existed before then used on BBC wildlife documentaries and in some experimental films). Since CBS covered this year's Superbowl, which I didn't see, they used it again.

UEFA or their German TV partners who would have been providing the coverage last night, must have got very excited about this, and invested in the cameras you have to be-deck the stadium with. The problem is that aside from looking flash, it really adds nothing to the coverage. Most of the decent camera positions are already covered, and because they have to use so many cameras, the quality of them is pretty poor. From crysal clear (although not widescreen) coverage, we jump to something that looks like it's using CCTV cameras.

The BBC were using their gyroscopic camera at the FA Cup which runs on wires and can travel around the pitch - good for those kickoff shots, but otherwise you've really got to hope that the camera's in the right place to follow a mazey run leading to a fabulous goal before you can be sure it's giving good value. ESPN call this SkyCam I believe. At the rugby, the Beeb also have post-cam, which certainly makes you feel close to the action, even if the coverage is limited (it can revolve around the post above the crash pads). And then there's that camera that runs along tracks for things like the 100m, which was also employed at the Rugby European Cup Final on Sunday - a gyroscope keeps the camera very smooth depsite it running along rails.

Some of these devices are good while others add nothing but look cool.

Isn't 3.11pm a little early for tea? That's the time that tea's coming in the first test between England and New Zealand.

Champions!

In 2000 I wrote an Excel spreadsheet which I called the Euro 2000 Wallchart. I called it this because come every major tournament, everyone I knew would get their poster, or newspaper pullout and chart England's (and other teams) performance throughout the competition.

There was nothing spectacularly original with this idea - I saw one done for World Cup 98. I made it better and look smarter. But there were a couple of flaws which I had fix along the way.

I made a conscious decision to do two things with the spreadsheet: I didn't want it to contain macros, because they can be nasty and untrustworthy if you don't know who's sending it; and I wrote it in such a way that the curious could delve into it to see what I did. I'm not an Excel whizz. Another reason I didn't put any macros in was because I'm rubbish at macros!

I never distributed beyond close friends, but these things end up flying around the world, and to this day I receive a steady trickle of email about it, asking for adaptations for their leagues etc.

I didn't get around to producing a World Cup 2002 version, for reasons that I'll come onto in a minute. But others did modify mine, leaving alone the properties page (which is the only page that gives an email address).

This year we're on Euro 2004, and at least three different sets of people have adapted the sheet that I wrote for the new competition. But they've locked it up to some extent so that you either can't enter details into the sheet beyond a certain point, or can't see the formulas used. I'm beginning to get emails about this.

I'd love to help, but as I didn't make the changes, I'm at a bit of a loss. I have used a password cracking macro (from here) to get into these sheets. Use the following depending on what version of the program you're using.

1. If there are two small Euro logos at the top of the page, one over the dates and times of the first round matches, and one over Grupo A/Group A, then try using AAAAAAABABAw in Tools > Protection > Unlock Workbook.

2. If the map of Portugal is to the right of Group A and the spreadsheet is titled Euro 2004 Wallchart, then try using this password: AAAAAABBAAB7.

3. Another version is modified by "yakyak" and is unprotected by password. It has a larger Euro logo spanning the top of the sheet across from the first round games to group section.

In either case, you then should go to Tools > Options, select View, and check the Row and Column Headers, Horizontal Scroll bar, and Vertical Scroll bar, as well as Sheet Tabs.

If you then look at the columns, there'll be a gap between at least two of the columns alphabetically. Highlight the columns either side of this gap (ie. Cols T:BV) by clicking on the letters themselves, right hand click, and choose Unhide. This should reveal the inner workings of the spreadsheet. There are three sets of three sorts, each changing the teams' points, goal difference and goals for.

The reason for not putting together a new version of the spreadsheet was simple: I couldn't get one working properly on the group round. If a group goes to a three or even four way tie, the mathematics and permutations of what's involved get awfully complicated, with matches played between the tied teams going into their own mini-league. I have seen someone do this, but didn't want to rip off their code.

In fact the workings that I employed are those used in traditional leagues, like England's Premier League. It sorts teams first by points, then by goal difference, and then by goals scored.

But UEFA doesn't use this system. UEFA's rules are outlined here, but in summary if two or more teams finish level on points, they're divided by looking at the results between those teams:

1. Points between the teams involved. (e.g. if two teams are on the same points, but one beat the other in the group round, that team goes higher)

2. Goal difference between the teams involved.

3. Goals scored between the teams involved.

4. Goals scored between the teams involved.

5. Goal difference in all games.

6. Goals scored in all games.

7. Coefficient points from World Cup and Euro competitions.

8. Fairplay so far (ie. Yellow cards etc)

9. Drawing of lots.

Oh and if the final group game between two teams ends in a draw and they have the same number of points, goals scored and goal difference, they ignore most of the above criteria and go to a penalty shoot out.

You try coding that lot into an Excel sheet!

I may still put together something for this year, but there'll have to be some degree of originality involved before I do it. And, er, quite a lot of work!

Read on in the extended entry to learn more about the sort techniques involved to produce your own league table.

UPDATE: I will publish more about this at a later stage, but I'd recommend using the official UEFA spreadsheet which can be found here since it does follow all the competition's rules regarding splitting teams. Once I've fully understood how it works, I'll publish a full explanation.

According to this press release detailing BBC1's summer season, the BBC will be streaming the Olympics via broadband as well as on television. They've obviously pulled quite a coup off to do this, but I fear that as a Demon customer, I'll be missing out, since it's bound to be a very limited service for those people living in the UK and that are part of the Beeb's broadband initiative. Demon has yet to appear on this list.

Weeks after the death of Marco Pantani, former Cofidis rider Philippe Gaumont has been talking in Le Monde about how easy it is for riders to get away with drug cheating.

This really is a big issue in sport at the moment, and it's worrying how relaxed many of our authorities still are about it. Rusedski was found not guilty last week of having Nandrolene in his body. Rio Ferdinand is on the sidelines at the moment serving an eight month ban while still hoping (I believe) to appeal his ban for failing to take a drugs test.

It's all a mess. Depending on what sport you're taking part in, you can get away with more or less. And sports men and women are willing to take enormous risks with their bodies to seek short term reward. Is it really healthy that so many young cyclists have died recently?

And what about American professional sports? Could it be possible that some Baseball pros take steroids? Or NFL players?

It's all a horrible mess, with "nutritional supplements" possibly having side effects as well. But as long as we keep testing, keep investing in new tests and try to stay ahead of the cheats, then we're doing what we can. But I'm not sure every sports body is doing quite as much as they should.

This is pretty shocking news for any lovers of cycling.

Nuff said.

Congratulations to David Millar for becoming Men's Time Trial World Champion tonight, winning in Canada.

Since it only happened ten minutes ago, I can't find any online reports yet (not that it'd be a problem with football). Wait a moment - here's one.

He absolutely crucified the rest of the field taking three minutes out of one competitor and a minute and a half from another. Consequently he won by well over a minute.

It's been a shocking few weeks in football.

There's been the rape case which is ongoing, a second alleged sexual offense involving another player, Man Utd about to change hands, and goodness knows what else.

The smallest suggestion that England players were not going to Portugal is simply the most outrageous thing I've heard all year.

I don't care what the rights and wrongs of the Rio Ferdinand case are, but it's simply not relevant. He's most certainly in the wrong.

I've got to say that I've absolutely no time for Gordon Taylor of the PFA. I'm listening to him right now on Radio Five Live, and his uncritical backing is just too much to bear.

The bottom line is that the players have held the England team to ransom. If they don't want to play, then they shouldn't be in that St Albans hotel right now. Team spirit is fine, but those players think that they're running the game.

The lot of them ought to be ashamed.

So BSkyB now has all the football rights that are going!

They've now got delayed rights to all the premiership matches on a Saturday, being able to replay one match in full at 8.30pm and the rest either as 45 minute highlight packages or in full. I'd guess that Sky will put one on at 8.30 and let viewers decide which match to watch in full at 10.00pm using their digital technology, much like they're doing with the Champions League.

As well as diluting the rights that the BBC have bought for Match of the Day, this is bound to upset the EU who are said to already be investigating the Sky deal.

Mediaguardian reports that Mario Monti is not happy with BSkyB's premiership football deal. It's not really surprising, particularly given their almost certain imminent win of the last remaining rights to show replays of all the games on a delayed basis. This could shake the system up quite considerably.

Well as expected the FA have got the match report from yesterday's little friendly, and are "urgently" considering it and video tapes. As usual, the FA's website goes into overdrive; they just love a juicy story like this. "Stay logged on to TheFA.com for all the latest news on this story" they report!

The problem with this is that yes it was at a high profile match, and therefore you're unfairly penalised. I don't know exactly how many cameras Sky had at that game, but let's say it was a conservative 20. But compare that with, say Fulham v Man City on Saturday. It wouldn't have been a main ITV Premiership match, so there'd be a maximum of three cameras there to catch the goals but not much more. If there'd be a fracas on the pitch, they'd have caught some of it, but on a live Sky game, cameras are everywhere, and thus far likelier to catch the "untoward."

Well it didn't exactly go stormingly well tonight did it?

Well Mediaguardian has caught on to Sky's usual domineering fun and games with this year's UEFA Champions' League.

The format of the competition means that half the teams play on a Tuesday and half on a Wednesday. The following week, the all the play on the other night. So last night Man Utd, Chelsea and Rangers all played, and tonight it'll be the turn of Arsenal (I'll be there!) and Celtic.

This is where it gets confusing so pay attention.

ITV get to choose two games on a Tuesday, one on ITV1, and the other on ITV2, although it should be noted that STV and Grampian showed the Rangers game last night in Scotland, while it wasn't shown in England. Sky show the other 6 games on a Tuesday, showing one of them on Sky Sports 2 and the others on their interactive channels.

Then on a Wednesday, Sky show all 8 games - one on Sky Sports 2, and the other 7 interactively. The problem comes when you subscribe to Sky via cable. You can only watch the game on Sky Sports 2 which is ordinarily the main game. Tonight it's Arsenal v Inter Milan, but if you're a Celtic fan with cable then you miss out altogether. There aren't any highlights aside from on Sky Sports Xtra - a channel unavailable on cable.

In a fortnight on the next Champions' League matchday, the Arsenal game is on a Tuesday night and will be on ITV1 (at 17.15 since it's in a cold dark Moscow), and Celtic will be on ITV2. But come Wednesday, Sky Sports 2 will have one match (probably Man Utd's), but you're stuffed if you want to watch Chelsea or Rangers without Sky Digital.

Sky's argument is that it's not their fault that the other operators don't have the capacity for the extra games, but it's not like there isn't space for them on the Sky Channels. Sky Sports 1 will be showing Gillette Soccer Special, which will also be on Sky Sports News - a free channel (so everyone can watch that), and Sky Sports 3 has no live sport at all. Of course Sky like to move their programming around between the varying Sky Sports channels to ensure that football fans need to subscribe to both Sky Sports 1 and 2 for top flight action (now that the BBC has most International and FA Cup football that was the staple of Sky Sports 2 in football terms), but clearly this is abuse of power with the supply and distribution sides of the Sky platform sewing things up, and shutting other multi-channel suppliers out.

Sky really does need to be broken up if they're going to abuse their position in this way. And until someone stops them, they'll continue to do it. Why shouldn't they? They're in a competitive position.

Of course I blame UEFA in this matter too. They've short-sold British football fans. There are no highlights of Wednesday fixtures either, so you simply can't see the Arsenal goals from tonight, unless the news carries them.

Maybe some of the big UEFA sponsors might want to consider the loss of coverage they're getting as a result. I hope they've had their fees reduced commensurately!

Just been watching the Champions' League Draw on Sky Sports. You've never seen so many containers of balls in your life. I won't begin to try to explain how they made something so simple so complicated. I still don't quite understand red and blue groups - something to do with A-D being red and E-H being blue... I think.

OK so Arsenal are in Group B and will play Inter (who were forced into our pot), Dynamo Kiev and Lokomotiv Moscow.

Quite an east European lineup!

But the question is which groups play on Arsenal's night, since that'll effect how likely it is that Arsenal's games get shown.

Man Utd have got Rangers, Panathinaikos and Stuttgart.

Chelsea have Lazio, Sparta Prague and Bekitas

Celtic have Bayern Munich, Lyon and Anderlecht

There's something wrotten in the state of Premiership websites. It seems that a number of them have been taken over by a company called Premium TV. Indeed their website claims that they run over 80% of Premiership and Football League websites, and that's where the problem lies.

I'm sure that they're able to use the same basic backend system for many of these sites, and obviously it works out as good value for the clubs involved, since websites are probably a considerable cost, particularly for smaller clubs around the country. What I really object to is the fact that you can't browse around these sites without registering. Am I supposed to register every time I want to visit one?

Supporting Arsenal, I visit them more than most, and have no problem with some of the better content being behind a registered area as long as it's free. Sure, if you want to, you can attempt to charge me for audio coverage or video footage, but why should I register just to read the latest news or look over the first team squad. I don't want emails from your club or other junk mail, so I won't register, and I'll have to resort to one of the many fan sites. You've lost visitors to your official site.

Premiership clubs involved are Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton, Leicester, Middlesborough, Newcastle Utd, Portsmouth and Wolves. I think the true nadir of this was revealed when I visited the Watford official site at the weekend to read about the sad death of young Man Utd footballer Jimmy Davis, but couldn't because I had to register. Pretty poor, and not a way to attract new business. At least a good chunk of Premiership clubs, all of whom are attempting to sell various video goals packages, do at least let you wander around their sites.

The BBC has won back the Premiership highlights from the season after this for three years. Well they can't do a worse job than ITV have done.

In fact ITV are going to be a bit short of football come the 2004/5 season since their Champions League is being reduced with the advent of Sky's deal from this season.

But the bigger story must be Sky itself. The European Commission have been watching British football rights very carefully, and despite the league breaking up live rights into four packages after initially offering three, Sky has won the lot.

They apparently based the major part of their bid on the exclusivity of rights - you can only watch live football on Sky. But this does suggest that they've shut out all other operators.

I can't see the EC being happy.

But Peter Salmon, the Beeb's director of sport, says that the BBC didn't bid for any of the live packages. If the BBC didn't, there's every chance ITV didn't - or if they did, they didn't put a high bid in. In which case, the league can't really be blamed for not awarding the football to Sky.

I would have thought that a safer route all round would have been having either the BBC or ITV jointly bid for one of the bronze packages of rights. That way, at least some live matches would end up on terrestrial TV, and the EC would be happy. The terrestrial broadcaster wouldn't be overwhelmed by having to show dozens of not especially good games (and let's face it, Arsenal v Man Utd was never going to end up in a "bronze" package).

I'll be reading the media press with interest to see what they find out about the other bids. Did C4 or C5 try bidding. Did ITV bid for live games?

There are still some packages to be awarded. There are the rights to full games after 10.00pm on the day - and I assume that these will end up with Sky in some kind of season ticket package, as well as on PPV. Theoretically an internet provider could have bid for these, but it seems unlikely. I also believe that there are other packages of highlight rights available, and someone like C5 might want to do a football analysis show.

The one set of people I think are going to do really well out of all this are commentators. There must be more jobs out there now, with full commentaries being done for every match, and for several broadcasters.

Armstrong did it. Well, after Saturday, it was no surprise. The green jersey was won and lost on the line, and overall the centenial Tour was the best in years and years.

I still can't get over the fact that I was able to watch the end of it on ITV live on a Sunday afternoon!

Well this year's Tour has been superb, and it was all set up for this afternoon's time trial with Jan Ullrich chasing a lead of Armstrong of just over 1 minute on Lance Armstrong. Ullrich crashed within the last few KM although he was never likely to take much out of Armstrong. At that point, Armstrong slowed up, and David Millar got to win the stage - despite having come off his bike himself!

I must admit to being truly fascinated by the ongoing televised Premiership football wranglings.

Here's where we stand at the moment. The premier league started off by breaking the rights into three groups: The Gold Package of 38 first choice games on Sundays at 4.00pm, The Silver package of 38 games on Mondays at 8.00pm, and a Bronze package of 62 games to be largely played on Saturdays at 1.00pm and 5.15pm (to avoid clashing with 3.00pm kick offs). There are also a number of highlights and "as live" packages up for grabs, including the rights ITV currently own for The Premiership (the "Match of the Day" rights). The invitation to tender is here (Registration required).

The reason for the breakup of rights is that the European Commission was convinced that it's not in the public interest that all the games are wrapped up in one package, and was minded to think that each club should be able to sell its own games.

In my view, it's certainly not a good idea that Man Utd gets to sell all their games for some extortionate rate, while no-one particularly bothers about picking up Portsmouth's games. That just leads to "the rich getting richer".

When the news broke, there was plenty of hyperbole about live football returning to terrestrial television for the first time in years. The story made the 10 O'Clock news.

Then a bit of common sense entered procedings as people realised that Sky were absolutely certain to outbid allcomers to win the Sunday, and most likely Monday rights. That left an enormous glut of Saturday (and sometimes Sunday) games available to either a Pay-Per-View bidder, or theoretically, a free-to-air supplier like the BBC. But even if, say, the BBC was willing to pay for all these games, could they actually schedule them? Two full matches a week, with the latter games finishing around 8.00pm in the evening, using up all that primetime, as well as the earlier games. And at least the BBC has two terrestrial channels they could spread the load over. ITV would surely be out of the running since again the 5.15pm games run into primetime, and they've already been very burnt showing highlights at 7.00pm in place of fare like Blind Date (RIP).

So at that stage, everyone began to realise that Sky and/or partners, would buy up the Bronze package and offer it as Pay Per View. Sky would have all the games, and the monopoly situation would continue, even though anyone could have bid.

The latest news is that rumblings from Europe mean that this was not a happy compromise, since the monopoly continued. The Bronze package has been broken into two smaller deals. It now seems likely that at least one of these packages - if not both - will fall into the hands of a terrestrial station.

There does remain the question of Pay-Per-View. No-one is ever really free to supply figures for these games, but I have my doubts over how well they do. I suspect that most of the money generated is through subscription packages which don't earn the headline eight pounds per game. The games are sold abroad, so there is income to be generated there, but the revenue cannot be enormous in the UK market, since the pick of the games are always on either Sundays or Mondays anyway.

We wait for the results of the new bids.

This year's Tour is excellent. Armstrong is in his expected yellow, but it turns out that Jan Ullrich is second by just 15 seconds and only a week to go. And Alexandre Vinokourov from Kazakhstan is just 3 seconds further behind.

Another big day in the Pyranees tomorrow, and there's another Time Trial, where Ullrich really gained ground, in a couple more days.

What a superb day for the Tour today! I know it was a gloriously sunny day, but I spent all afternoon indoors watching Le Tour on TV. Now obviously the whole world has slipped into some kind of parallel dimension at the moment because ITV were showing live coverage of the race today with commentary by Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin. (No it doesn't make any sense to me, that the channel which last week dropped an expensive Hugh Laurie drama, and Brian Conley vehicle because they weren't performing, is taking time out to show live cycling, but you won't see me complaining. I just don't quite expect to see it next year - that's all).

Anyway, a fabulous finish which saw Armstrong in yellow - but is he beatable? That's the question now - and the answer at the moment must be yes...

It's started once more, and bowl me over with a feather, but dear old ITV are doing coverage. OK there was some late night action last year, and most of the coverage is on ITV2, but we do get Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin every night at the utterly reasonable 7.00pm. And on Sunday's ITV1 is taking some coverage.

I'm going to miss out today of course because I'll be on a train, but I'll try to catch the other weeks' coverage.

Poor old David Miller through - losing out on the yellow jersey by just 0.14 seconds after his chain came off near the end of the stage. He would have comfortably won otherwise.

I've managed to avoid talking too much about Arsenal recently.

It's half-time just now, with Arsenal still drawing Middlesbrough 0-0 at the Riverside, while Man Utd are 2-1 up against Blackburn.

The match on Wednesday night between the two was a tempestuous affair, and it was disappointing that we were unable to win it.

Still the match did afford me the chance to get little Harry, and Arsenal jumpsuit!

It's taken them long enough, and everyone's scared about it, but they've done it. They've asked for it to be moved. I'm amazed that the Aussies haven't already come to the same conclusion.

And with New Zealand not wanting to play in Kenya, there's some serious reorganisation on the cards.

Yesterday the players finally came out and told the ECB that they didn't want to play their opening match in Zimbabwe. They spoke under the aegis of The Professional Cricketers Association. It really is dreadful that it came to this.

An excellent couple of articles in today's Guardian explain why the ECB, and the ICC are so reluctant to cancel the game. It's not political - it's cash. Basically the ICC managed to sell the rights to the competition for a considerable amount of money to a company owned by Murdoch. His company, GCC (no website to be found), in turn have not been able to reap the rewards they were expecting to, so any changes in what they've been promised could open up a loophole for renegotiation. And that's what the ICC are scared of.

Of course if players are not actually safe in the country, and injuries or death follow as a consequence of the match taking place, then no financial burden should prevent the game being called off.

All going well, the match will be moved this Thursday following another ICC meeting. Failing that, the World Cup and the ICC risk ridicule if England players refuse to play in Zimbabwe. I don't think that the British public will have any problem with them pulling out.

As an aside, Radio 4 is broadcasting an edition of The Archive Hour in a couple of weeks entitled Rebel Hell, which is all about England's tour to South Africa in 1982 and the turmoil it caused.

Wow. Barcelona are unbeaten in the Champions League this season, with a record 10 matches unbeaten, yet their poor league form means that they've sacked their manager Louis van Gaal.

Some jobs are simply impossible.

The Culture, Media and Sports Committee has just reported back on a proposed London Olympic bid. The amount of deliberation that's being made over what is likely to be a relatively small outlay at least initially, seems to be immense.

Anyhow their response seems to be that we shouldn't go ahead "at any cost". Well I really doubt that Gordon Brown would have quite gone down that route.

The costs of the Olympics can very nearly be covered by sponsorship and other revenues. Then there are grants from the EU payable for renovating a deprived area - and we are talking about one of the most deprived areas in the UK.

The cabinet meeting is next week, but if the fourth largest economy in the world can't put on the Olympics then it's a pretty desperate state of affairs. Madrid and Paris will bid, as well as Moscow and New York. The US has had way too many Olympics recently, and Moscow's last hosting was in living memory. Spain had Barcelona, so I rekon if we were against Paris, we'd have a fifty-fifty chance. Otherwise, I don't know when we'd next host a major sporting event.

As for the issue of what to do with an 80,000 seater stadium. I'm sure that a combination of a football stadium for Spurs or a replacement for the decrepit Crystal Palace stadium could do it justice. Very careful planning and it could host many events with removable surfaces and the like. Maybe a roof?

Finally Arsenal get around to allowing you to purchase tickets online! Of course you have to pay �5 each for the privelidge for the rest of the year. Sellers market anyone? Other industries manage to save money by selling online, and not having telephone operators. Nothing like paying to beta-test their system. Still, if it saves me an hour's redialling for Man Utd or Valencia tickets it'll be worth it.

We were all over them yesterday!

Somehow or other I've managed not to talk about Arsenal here! Let me right that wrong immediately. Quite simply the football is fantastic at the moment. Everyone knows they've broken loads of records - but here's a link that helpfully lists them all for you!

Must admit that I jumped out of my seat on Saturday, when David Millar crossed the line ahead of the other 4 riders in his break. Nice one.

Of course Armstrong is amazing in the mountains at the moment, but Virenque did well yesterday to take the stage. Roll on the Alps this week!

One of my favourite summer events is up and running again this year. I'm still annoyed at Channel 4's jettisoning the event a couple of years ago, saying that that they could no longer cover it and cricket (this is the station that was putting out one-day cricket highlights at about one o'clock in the morning by the way). The only terrestrial coverage of the event last year was on ITV in the early hours of Tuesday morning each week, and sadly it's the same situation again this year. Fortunately for those among us with multi-channel TV, Eurosport has always done a sterling job (even if their highlights programmes tend to be the last hour of the race snipped off). This year ITV2 is also doing live coverage and 11.00pm highlights programmes. I haven't yet caught one of their highlights shows, but hopefully they'll be similar to the old Channel 4 ones (it's the same presentation team) since they did a better job of editing the day's highlights down, showing major incidents from earlier in the day and so on. Roll on the mountain stages!

Well they deserved to. They played the most impressive football of the tournament, and beat the stronger teams. Germany had way too easy a ride through to the final.

I do have a couple of problems with the World Cup at the moment (sorry Fifa World Cup):

1) The winners do not automatically qualify next time around to defend their trophy. (Whereas the defeated finalists Germany will definitely be there as hosts). This is done to open up the competition to more teams, but if you don't have the chance to beat the holders, then there's something wrong. And the fact that the winners don't play as much competitive football is something of a handicap for them.

2) In this year's tournament, Turkey played Brazil twice before the final. That can't be right. If you play a team once - you should only get to meet them again if you get to the final. The draw can be organised that way, and it should.