The Big Match Clive clive on itv

And so on a gloriously sunny Sunday football as 16 million people know it drew to a somewhat anti climactic close.
Birmingham up, Norwich down, Bury miss out by a goal, the Crewe revival wasn’t quite as spectacular as it first appeared - and then it was all over bar the play offs.

The Football League is, officials like to remind us on a daily basis, the fourth most watched league in Europe and as it finished for all but a handful of its clubs on the first weekend of May its greatest shame went with it - thankfully for good. Seventy clubs, plus two from the Conference, will all be back in August but thankfully, mercifully, ITV’s attempts to showcase it will not.

The Championship - television programme rather than division - is no more and whoever you support I cannot imagine you being anything other than delighted to see the back of it.
Football League fans have turned to ITV for their fix of highlights since August 2004, a time when ITV’s ill fated attempt to snatch Match of the Day from the BBC and turn it into a Saturday tea-time entertainment programme to wedge in between some talent show or other fronted by Simon Cowell and Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Wankathon had fallen flat on its face.

The Championship, with the same U2 themed introduction and Matt Smith in the presenter’s position, was left behind like the warm dregs at the bottom of ITV’s one for the road.
Now I’m coming at this from a position of bias. I hate ITV. Trash television for the lowest common denominators in our society. A channel responsible for Ant and Dec, Michael Barrymore, Cilla Black, Simon Cowell, Hear Say, Coronation Street - I’d close the bloody thing down, remove the button from all remote controls and strap the ‘talent’ down for a six month long session of watching their own programmes.

A channel that when trusted with exclusive live rights to the top flight of English football chose to use those rights to show Man Utd and Liverpool. Every now and again.

A channel that, in the aftermath of Liverpool’s first Champions League semi final victory against Chelsea and with the Kop in full voice, cut to a commercial break. Then, despite a raft of complaints, did exactly the same as Stephen Gerrard paraded around the pitch in Istanbul with the trophy after coming from three down to beat AC Milan on penalties.

A channel that went one better than even all of that by missing Everton’s winning goal in a Merseyside derby earlier this season because they were too busy trying to sell us mints.

A channel that launched a digital platform with a business plan designed by a deranged single cell amoeba that, when it predictably died on its arse trying to sell QPR v Bristol City on a Thursday night to the masses, almost took half the football league with it. Clubs like Grimsby and Cambridge continue to suffer the consequences.

So I’m not a fan of ITV - but surely it cannot be hard to produce a simple one hour highlights programme with so much material? Apparently it can.

The Championship’s first problem was its scheduling. Sometimes it was half an hour long, sometimes an hour, and often various obscure times in between. Sometimes it was on at 8am, sometimes it was on at 11.30am, sometimes 10am, sometimes 10.43am.
And it was never very clear why this was. Occasionally, before viewers grew weary of their shambolic coverage of that as well and celebrated its move back to the BBC, F1 would obstruct the schedules and The Championship would be bumped to an early morning or late evening slot. However most of the changes to the start time and length of the programme seemed to be dictated by The Power Rangers movie or some other such brain rot on a stick aimed at kids left to entertain themselves on a Sunday morning while parents slept off their hangovers.

Now I don’t remember much about my time as an eight year old but I’m pretty sure I didn’t give a flying toss whether Thunderbirds started at five or six. I’m pretty sure I could have done without the chuffing five thousandth showing of the Power Rangers Movie on a Sunday morning.

This schedule dodging and variety of length saw programme editors do that thing that makes the blood of football fans everywhere boil - they edited the highlights. They figured because Barnsley didn’t have much to play for they would only show one of their four goals from Norwich, or because nobody really watches Plymouth they would only show ten seconds of their match. One week when the programme was only allocated half an hour they failed to show any goals from Leagues One or Two at all and then, in its final full show, they repeated the trick of only showing one goal from some matches to try and squeeze it all in. It shows a criminal lack of knowledge of the audience to do this so often, right up to the final show.

I could point out that if they cut out the interviews, the pieces to camera from Matt Smith in his chunky knitwear and the fucking St Hellier Pear Cider adverts every two minutes then we would have time to see all the goals which is, after all, what the programme is there for but I won’t bother - if they don’t understand that five years on I doubt they’ll realise now.

Then there was the selection of the main match venue. Sheff Utd, Wolves, Reading, Birmingham, Cardiff and occasionally Charlton and Crystal Palace. How many times have Norwich been the main game at Carrow Road? Or Preston at Deepdale? Or Plymouth at Home Park? Or Blackpool at Bloomfield Road? The answer is not many because, as those that wake up early to Five Live on a Saturday morning before going to matches will know, Matt Smith is working for the BBC until 9am and he can only make it so far by 3pm. Shoddy.

Then there’s the dubbed on commentary. When Mike Newell launched his tirade against women in football following the decisions of assistant referee Amy Raynor in a home match with QPR ITV upgraded the match from its planned five second slot at the end of the reel to an extended highlights package and dubbed on commentary after the event - so suddenly we had a match commentary based almost totally around the bloody linesman: “Ooh look at that, a terrible mistake there by Amy Raynor the assistant, Luton will be furious if QPR score from this, and what do you know, they have, Dexter Blackstock there.” Disgraceful, and grossly unfair to the official who did very little wrong on the day and was caught in the crossfire of a bitter and beaten bigot.

There’s more, I could go on. Why did they have to interview Aidy Boothroyd every week? Why did one of the games have to be filmed from ground level on a mobile phone while Gabriel Clarke did a voice over in Haiku? Does anybody actually drink St Hellier Pear Cider anyway?
A dreadful programme, totally out of touch with its audience and remorselessly beaten backwards and forwards by schedulers with skewed priorities. BBC, it’s over to you.