The Magic Of The FA Cup / Tareq Quiroz / 09 January 2009 / Leave a comment

Tareq Quiroz has a good old rant at everything from the January transfer window to too much televised football to early kick-offs...

I had forgotten just how much I dislike the pressures that come with a transfer window. It is an uncomfortable time for any fan as you hope that your team will pull off the coup of the century whilst many others are just desperate that their favourite player doesn't depart for pastures new. Far too much time in the day is spent flicking from sports news site to sports news site back to the official club website. Then onto the forum to vent your frustration at how your manager hasn't put in any bids yet. Sound familiar? Don't worry; this is normal seasonal behaviour.

As far as I am concerned, I find the transfer window an unwelcome distraction from the real business of winning football matches. I am going to keep my transfer window rant bottled up for now as I am sure that with three weeks of it still to run, my frustration will boil over later in the month! Non-league teams don't really come onto our radar re transfer talk but they are always in the public eye in January due to the FA Cup.

With the fourth round just around the corner any non-league team left in will be grateful of the extra money this will bring in. Kettering Town are one such team who have been rewarded with a tie against Premier League Fulham. A match they are not expected to win but if you think they will progress further than any other non-league team, there is a market on site named To Progress Furthest - Non-League, where you can currently back Kettering at [1.83]. It's not the most liquid market in the world so you may well get a bigger price than that on Kettering if you ask for one - that's the beauty of Betfair! It is also a match they had every right to think might be one of the five televised matches. This is not the case as once again the big named teams get the limelight.

As a season ticket holder at Villa and regular match-goer it is frustrating to see how many games are covered by TV. My disappointment is twofold. Firstly, it gives more weight to the growing number of armchair supporters. Not that I mind them as not everyone can attend games and I do feel these people need the facility to watch their team play a certain number of times. My argument is that it is too much. Villa play West Brom on Saturday lunchtime and believe it or not that game will be the sixth consecutive game televised live for Villa. Any Villa fan so wishing would not have to attend a game between the 13th December and the 17th January. They could have watched them all from their own living room.

How can anyone justify that sort of heavy coverage? I do not feel it is warranted and it certainly doesn't help with attendance figures. I find, somewhat surprisingly, that it is usually the home team that suffers with absent fans as the away team nearly always has a hardcore group who will attend every fixture possible. A fact made clear to me when I was at Priestfield for the Gillingham v Villa tie. It is a good job that didn't go to a replay as I am sure that would have been a seventh consecutive televised game! It didn't and now Villa have a good draw and decent chance of progressing in the FA Cup. A competition where they are fifth favourites at current odds of [13.0].

The other reason I dislike the amount of games on TV is the annoying changes in kick-off times. Super Sunday is often anything but, as most weekends it is just an average game with limited appeal to the neutral. I might sound like a grumpy old man but I don't like my Saturday game changed to a Sunday just for TV. Some weeks you have more Premier League games on a Sunday than you do on a Saturday. I know these things are influenced by European commitments but let's try and keep them to a minimum.

If Sundays weren't bad enough I really have a problem with early kick-offs. Who wants to attend a game starting at 12:45? It is supposed to be a fun day out where the build-up is as important as the game in terms of getting your money's worth. You can't get anything achieved before that crazy lunchtime kick-off, least of all suitable refreshment! As a result there is so often no atmosphere at these games. This is then often reflected in the game itself as the players can't raise themselves and you get a rather dour encounter.

I can only see the situation getting worse as money talks and it won't be long before you can view every match your team plays. Good neutral games don't come around too often and I am no different in so much as I will be glued to the TV on Sunday to watch Man Utd v Chelsea. An encounter that will have a big say in the title race and one in which United will start favourites at [2.28] in the Match Odds market. As great as this will be to watch, I can't help but think that the fans attending would just love for this game to be on at 3pm on a Saturday, just for once. Whatever happened to the traditional Saturday feeling where you knew your league position at 5pm? Ah, the good old days.