Search: 'media'

Looking forward to a half-time video link-up with the England camp? Karl Sturgeon isn't

It’s easy to be cynical about modern football, so I’d like to begin with a positive statement – the World Cup is great. Even if you missed out on FIFA’s wheeze of selling match tickets in South African supermarkets and won’t be there yourself, the competition gives the summer shape. I doubt I’m the only person impatiently awaiting the World Cup wallcharts so that barbecues, beach trips and weddings can be slotted into the gaps between group deciders, or quarter-finals B and C.

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Despite the big-name status of Roy Keane, many Ipswich fans have been underwhelmed by their manager. Csaba Abrahall on a disappointing year at Portman Road

Notable mostly for a club-record number of draws, it has not been an exciting season for Ipswich Town. Even the threatened drama of a relegation battle never really materialised and lower mid-table mediocrity has been the ultimate outcome. For a club that has enjoyed an eventful professional career, this could well be the most tedious season ever.

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Mark Segal on the rise of Twitter as the place for fans to keep up with events at their club

In the early part of the last decade when I was running the football service on Teletext we struck a deal with a national sports agency to provide us with news tip-offs from the training grounds of Premier League clubs. We weren’t looking for the big stories which would be splashed across the next morning’s papers, more nuggets of information which we knew fans would be interested in receiving immediately such as injury updates, weekend team news and reaction to transfer speculation

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Cameron Carter examines the dramatic effects of a draw away to Blackburn and more reshuffling on the Match of the Day sofa

It is one thing for the tabloids to whip up a bit of national tension – the diagrams of tarsals and metatarsals were being searched out again as soon as Wayne Rooney hit the ground against Bayern Munich – but when the BBC start creating drama from the raw material of Nothing Much it edges beyond a joke. When Chelsea drew at Blackburn on March 21, journalists and football pundits took this as a cue for a Chelsea-disintegrate-under-pressure story. On Easter Saturday’s Match of the Day, as Chelsea scored their second against Man Utd, Jonathan Pearce piped: “It looked like their title hopes had disappeared two weeks ago at Blackburn… but now!…”

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Football's culture of greed will eventually have dire consequences, both for clubs and for those in charge of the game

Two men have presided over a period of financial crisis in their respective spheres, with large businesses being crippled by debt while many smaller ones hover in the verge of extinction. The first, Gordon Brown, became associated with crisis to the extent that he was deemed to be a liability, and has duly stepped down. The other, Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League, sails serenely on. In fact he’s positively bullish.

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