Guardian Angels
Simon Hattenstone has written which is one of those drab and outdated attacks on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport. No, Simon, we won't bother with a letter of complaint. But the argument he puts is a classic one of someone who Just Doesn't Get It.
Let's deal quickly with the argument about TV rights. It's more than the FA Cup and Wimbledon: there's England home internationals, the Six Nations, the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games, Open Golf, the Grand National, the Derby, Royal Ascot, the Rugby League Challenge Cup, World Snooker and a lot more. I greatly respect Sky Sports, but in the same way as we had a relatively thin TV weekend in August I suspect they had a quiet day when we were doing the Men's Singles Final at Wimbledon and the World Cup Final from Germany. And
We should also quickly note that our "cold portions of the Premiership" attract rather more viewers than Sky's live coverage. The number of people watching Sky Sports' Premier League match last Sunday afternoon was 1.7m, whereas 2.7m tuned in for MOTD2 that night. From those figures and your comments to Paul Armstrong's blog, there's no doubt Match Of The Day is still a vital programme for millions of viewers. When people have a choice of live football coverage, they overwhelmingly choose the ´óÏó´«Ã½ - by a 10:1 margin for the FA Cup Final compared with Sky and by a 5:1 margin for the World Cup Final up against ITV.
But Simon's real sin is not spotting that the media world is changing, and ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport is now rather wider than just television...
Last weekend, for instance, your licence fee did bring you US PGA golf from Medinah on Radio Five Live. It also brought you Manchester United v Fulham and Chelsea v Manchester City live on the radio, your chance to comment on the games on 606 and a sports news service showing some of the key action every 30 minutes on ´óÏó´«Ã½ News 24. The ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Test Match Special was on Radio 4 covering the England v Pakistan row as well as the cricket itself, and it was nice to see . There's also Five Live Sports Extra bringing additional commentary, live and uninterrupted - another new service offering more ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport.
If we'd "lay down and died" we wouldn't have been pioneering broadband, either. The World Cup service attracted 5.9 million requests for video; and this year we introduced the Wimbledon broadband service with a choice of different courts. Match Of The Day will be online from the start of next season. That's in addition to our well-established interactive TV service on the red button, which again attracts millions of users.
And that brings me to this website. Again, it's part of what you get from the licence fee and another innovation from the past decade. On Monday this week it had 2.6m individual users, which is more than 5 times the daily circulation of Mr Hattenstone's newspaper. Last Saturday there were more than 2 million page impressions for our WAP service to mobiles. All of this represents expansion - and recognising that people want more choice, more opportunities to enjoy sport and sports news at the time of their choosing and more interaction.
This forms the basis of our plan for the future. TV is still vitally important to us - hence Match Of The Day guaranteed for the next four years, and our commitment to the big events like Olympics and the World Cups through to 2014. But so is radio, so is the web, so are our plans for an ambitious multimedia sport portal, so is this blog - where we remain unique among sports broadcasters in opening up the debate and encouraging you to bop us on the chin from time to time.
So I'm sorry that we don't do the kind of jokes about haemorrhoids that Simon enjoys. We won't be nicking the format for Soccer AM - we have our own top quality sports news show in development for next year. But we're most emphatically not giving up, and the aim remains to be the most modern and most multimedia sports service in the UK - with a global reputation too.
