Crozier's TV pledge

The Football Association has pledged to fight the prospect of England's away matches being screened live only on pay-per-view television.

The Football Association has pledged to fight the prospect of England's away matches being screened live only on pay-per-view television.

It was announced this week that England's World Cup qualifier against Finland in October would be screened live only by the satellite broadcaster u>direct, which plans to charge viewers around £10 to watch the game.

However, the FA is relieved that the BBC has secured secondary rights to the game and will show a same-day highlights package soon after 10pm. Now the FA plans to come to the rescue of the armchair fans by asking other countries who are due to face England not to sell the rights to pay-per-view channels. Its chief executive, Adam Crozier, said: "The problem is that [we] only control the rights for home games, so Finland own the rights to the game in Finland. They took a decision to sell them to the pay-per-view company. The company who bought the exclusive rights, u>direct, have been pretty good because they have at least now sold the highlights to the BBC and they are also going to make it available live on ONdigital.

"What we need to do now is to make sure that, for England's other away matches, we talk to the countries and try to encourage them to make it as widely available as possible. The issue is, because we are a bigger country, we are a good pay-day for these countries who have the chance to earn a lot of television money that they might not otherwise do."

Crozier stressed that all of England's home matches would be available on terrestrial television. He said: "We have just done our TV deal for a year's time and we are very clear - for England and for the FA Cup - that we are against pay-per-view television. That is why we have gone to the BBC and all England's competitive home matches will be live on BBC."

Crozier was speaking at Watford's Vicarage Road stadium where he was helping to launch an important new campaign to highlight safety issues involved with using goalposts in grassroots football. The campaign follows the deaths of nine children in accidents involving goalposts since 1986.