A best loved and iconic brand. Or nauseating commentary and self-opinionated twaddle. MOTD continues « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Tony Attwood

If there was no Match of the Day there’d be no need for blogs like this.

Well, maybe not quite, but even so, when Untold appeared for the first time on 14 January 2008 with “Arsenal witness the end of football”, the way in which commentators were ignoring what seemed to me to be some key issues in the game was one of my key reasons for going to the trouble of setting all this up.

Looking back at that piece it really did set out the stall of Untold, commenting on the invention by Birmingham of rotational time wasting, to run alongside rotational fouling (of which Blackburn were cited as the main culprits).

Time has moved on.  I think no more than half a dozen people found that article (it’s still on line if you are interested in archive material, but it looks rather dull compared to the sort of material we get now) and now we are read by supporters of many different clubs – and have half a dozen regular writers contributing.

But Match of the Day seems stuck in a time warp.  Yet  the BBC have paid £179.7million to keep their rights for Match of the Day until 2016.

Gary Lineker said: “It is wonderful news that we have Match of the Day for another three years. It is a flagship programme and it shows how much the BBC values sport and the importance of football.”

BBC director of sport Barbara Slater said: “We’ve seen audiences for MOTD grow in recent years and the programme remains one of the BBC’s best loved and most iconic brands.”

Well, yes, it is valuable because if you are in the UK and choose Freeview or Freesat this is going to be a prime way to get the games – although you get more coverage through Arsenal’s on line channel.

But it is good that league football is on air. But, it is the horrible chit-chat those goes on around the matches that annoys me so much.  The obvious bias, the inadequacy of investigation into poor refereeing, the complete inability to question the difficulties facing football, and the insistence that the whole thing exists in a bubble unrelated to the rest of the world.

Issues that many fans talk about simply are not issues on Match of the Day, unless they affect Tottenham and Liverpool, or for some other reason the producers unilaterally decide to let them in.

The only good thing about the show is that the presenters don’t actually realise how foolish they are making themselves look by ignoring key issues, and the constant inability of their experts to make any predictions or analyses that turn out to be right.  In fact they seem to revel in their inability to make any insightful comment.

All we can do I guess is to keep on going and raising issues that Match of the Day will never cover – like rotational fouling, rotational time wasting, how curious decisions by refs don’t “all balance out in the end”, how clubs like Chelsea and Man C are challenging Uefa over FFP, how their editing totally affects the reality of what is happening on the pitch (see Anne’s last articles about injuries that happen out of camera shot)…

It is not just a silly programme, it is a downright misleading one.

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Untold Ref Review Swansea 1 Man C 0

Match fixing

The police move in a surprise dawn raid

How to Fix the Premier League in 10 Simple Steps

As I say, when we started a handful of people were kind enough to take a look at Untold.  Now we get over half a million visits a month.  MOTD is still more popular than Untold, but at least we are catching up.