Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
TV games are a joke in the UK
WHAT a great day of football Boxing Day is and there was plenty going on this time around.
Whoever picked the live games for us all to sit through needs to take a long hard look at themselves, though.
Watford v Crystal Palace and then Hull v Man City were disappointing on paper, never mind in the flesh.
Newcastle taking on Sheffield Wednesday afterwards wasn’t too bad to be fair but the Premier League is the pinnacle.
The broadcasting rules in the UK are a joke — when every other country in the world can watch any game they like, we get stuck with whatever Sky or BT wants to show.
I know they’re trying to protect attendances by not showing 3pm kick-offs on a Saturday but in Germany every single Bundesliga game is on TV and the stadiums are still full.
In Scotland — where BT Sport do a cracking job with our game, by the way — I reckon we need a proper shake-up to try and emulate the German model.
Maybe the money’s not there to do it now but if it isn’t, when will it ever be?
2016 has been a pretty painful year for a Queen of the South fan. Yes, we had a good spell in there but mostly it’s been a surprise and unfair sacking of a decent manager, failure to back his successor properly and now we can’t buy a win and face a relegation battle. I’m hoping 2017 is better.