DISQUS

Interesting read, Gaffer. Last month I went to matches at Spurs and Villa and my observations were pretty much the same as yours. At Spurs, the atmosphere seemed incredibly sterile, but the stadium was packed. There was more vibe at Villa, but still was on the calm side. You could tell that the Premiership matches had a lot of neutral supporters curious to watch a Premiership match (like me), so that probably had something to do with it.


On the flip side, I went to 2 Championship derbies: Ipswich Town-Norwich City and Derby County-Leicester City and both matches were incredible. Both matches had a very heavy police presence at the train station and at the ground -- while walking to the Derby match, I didn't feel like I was in any danger of being attacked, but I still felt compelled to cover up my Leicester shirt until I got to the away end. The Ipswich match was probably the most heated sporting event I had ever been to -- incredible stuff.

This is terrible news. The on-demand service made ITVN very user friendly. I hope ITVN modifies its service so that they make recording possible. In the meantime, I'm going to start writing to my cable company again to pick up Setanta.