Football: Delayed kick-off for When Sunday Comes

SO was it a principled stand, or simply a negotiating tactic? When the chairmen of the Premiership's 20 clubs met on Friday morning they were widely expected simply to nod through BSkyB's proposals for a pay-per-view scheme on selected matches next season.

Rupert Murdoch's timing had looked typically ruthless - the domestic football season was over, all eyes were on England's warm-up games for the World Cup, and it was a whole day before the Football Supporters' Association met Sports Minister Tony Banks at their annual meeting in Wolverhampton.

No worries. But for the second time in a week - his Concorde flight to New York had to return to Heathrow when part of the wing broke off - Murdoch found that BSkyB's corporate slogan "No Turning Back" had been re-written.

Now I don't suppose that the Premiership's executive will release the minutes of the meeting, but it may well be that there was simply a revolt against the indecent haste of the deal and Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards' over-confident prediction of its acceptance. Perhaps the chairmen found that the decision which would have changed the entire pattern of our football-watching for the foreseeable future was too momentous to take in one session. Perhaps they suddenly saw the full picture of what had been planned and turned away from the brink.

Under the proposed deal four Premiership games would have been moved from Saturdays to Sundays from mid-September, with three of them designated as PPV events at an anticipated pounds 10 per game to begin with, but certain to be more once people were wired up. The other game, like the one on Monday nights, would have been "free" - free if you'd paid your monthly subscription to Sky, that is.

The Saturday programme for the Premiership would have been reduced to a maximum of five matches. The fragmentation of our football supporting experience in order to maximise profits for clubs and broadcaster would have been nearly completed. When Saturday Comes would have needed a change of title.

Now it would be naive in the extreme to believe that the chairmen were swayed by the thought of the players of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and Newcastle, the teams with the highest levels of support and the most potential for PPV income, having to spend Saturday nights in their team hotels rather than with their families. And it is pure fantasy to believe that they will have considered the plight of those fans invited to experience the delights of Sunday travel - engineering works on the railways and cones on the motorways.

But it is just possible that some of the older members of the group had a brief pause for thought and reflected on football's post-war popularity when the games were timed to meet the needs of the working man. The kick- offs were at lunch-time then, after the Saturday morning shift at the factory or pit.

After the installation of floodlights the starts were moved back to 3pm, allowing that most pleasurable of sequences to become established - the end of the working week, a pie and a few pints in the pub and then a few hours on the terraces.

At half time the little painted boards would be laid along the alphabetised perimeter walls giving you the scores of all the other games. By twenty to five you knew exactly where your team stood, you could gloat or commiserate, you could check your pools coupon on the way home, read the local football Echo by six o clock and still have time to take the whippet for a walk. Football, in the modern jargon, was a holistic experience.

No one doubts that the imminent digital technology will make pay-per- view inevitable but for the time being those marketing geeks who had already worked out that games going into extra time or penalty shoot-outs should require punters to swipe more electronic money into their set-top units, have been thwarted.

The breathing space created by the chairmen's decision must now be urgently used by administrators, fans and government to ensure that the right kind of technological progress is made, not just some wild leap into the unknown, because Murdoch will be back, and quickly, and we do not want his version of the Sunday League.

Still on football, but only just, I can't help feeling that Glenn Hoddle's decision to allow his squad three days of home leave before they depart for France is misguided in the light of what the Scottish press have already achieved with goalkeeper Andy Goram.

Quite apart from the climate change involved in a return to England, it offers the non-sporting members, in every sense, of the tabloid press to offer a bounty for the first freelance hack or wannabee photographer to catch some of the World Cup players relaxing in inappropriate style, with Paul Gascoigne the primary target.

The "rotters", as they are known, will have an all-points bulletin out on every kebab house, bar and disco in the country in the hope that our hero has one last binge before the World Cup.

The management at Rangers, Gazza's old club, found out pretty early what was on the agenda when team coach Walter Smith was woken by a midnight call from a tabloid news desk asking for his comments on the news that Mrs Gascoigne was pregnant, which made life a little fraught the next day for the same paper's innocent football reporter.

"Who's the **** who phoned me last night?" Smith demanded in best hair- dryer fashion, rendering all subsequent enquiries about footballing matters redundant.

How much better it would have been to have flown the wives and families of the squad out to La Manga, where Five Bellies could have found a more appropriate role as a lilo in the swimming pool and Gazza could have played the clown at a children's party.

THE picture for Saturday's Derby at Epsom is a little clearer now that Sheik Mohammed's Godolphin team have decided that Cape Verdi can take her chance among the colts.

But the preliminaries for the race had begun to resemble a high-rolling poker game with such players as Robert Sangster, John Magnier, Michael Tabor and the Dubai brothers all keeping their "hands" unseen until one dared to make a call.

Apart from virtually killing off the ante-post betting market - which has also been unsettled by Aidan O'Brien's delay in committing himself with Second Empire and Saratoga Springs - the prevarication had begun to devalue the race itself, wearying punters rather than exciting their appetites. The seven-day entry rule, which allows owners to make last- minute decisions on late-developing horses, may be well-intentioned in its desire to assemble the best possible field for the race, but it has been abused this year and should be abandoned in favour of a reasonable span such as a fortnight so that the bookies know what they are laying and we know what we're backing.

Finally, I imagine that cricket's world authorities are scratching their heads over the next Test series between India and Pakistan, not jut in terms of the tension between the two countries but also for a likely sponsor for the series.

Two candidates spring to mind -- Sandline International and, perhaps more optimistically, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.