THE FINANCIAL gulf between the best and the rest was glaring last week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Champions League semi-finals seemed to be enacted between the adverts. There were the adverts on the electronic hoardings round the Emirates and Stamford Bridge, encircling the turf in a manner that was almost threatening, and flash-changing so frequently that when the ball went wide they distracted attention from the action and all the diving and girning by Didier Drogba.
Then there were the adverts during the commercial breaks from the expert chat, which interrupted the analysis often and at length, restricting Graeme Souness to just the one utterance of the pundits' favourite: "If you've played the game like we have
, you'll understand this … "
But on Thursday the Edinburgh derby didn't have to compete with such oppressive hard-selling. There were enticements on the Tynecastle boards but they weren't for sexy mobile phones or designer beers or snob-value credit cards – they were for diggers. And in the Setanta broom-cupboard-on-stilts, John Hartson got to finish all his sentences, safe in the knowledge he wasn't about to be bombarded by too many sponsors' messages.
Setanta are the SPL's live broadcasters, for better or worse, and the deal has just been cut back. While the Champions League keeps getting richer – and before long you can imagine the Sky and ITV studios becoming as palatial at Tom Cruise's dressing-room or even Derry Irvine's flat – Setanta may be forced to ask Big Bad John to punditise from a hammock strung across floodlight pylons. And digger promotions will seem like high-end glamour if the station resorts to discounting ad space for funeral parlours.
These are tough times and oor fitba is not at its perkiest as "product". The clubs have had to accept a £20 million reduction to keep Setanta plugged in, though there's been an extension to the overseas part of the deal worth £10m.
Who's watching the SPL in far-off lands? Some 150 countries have access to today's Inverness CT-Hamilton Accies game. On Thursday, on the walk to my local, I was trying to imagine people doing the same thing across the time-zones, a procession leading to unswept pubs holding special licences for out-of-hours bevvying, and wondering if their emotions were identical to mine.
"A 2-0 defeat would be acceptable, 3-0 I could live with. Tony Mowbray's Hibs regularly had four put past them. Five? That wouldn't be nice. But let's be clear: Hearts mustn't get to seven."
This was the conversation I was still having with myself as I sat next to my brother. The turnout was modest. Nervous nods were exchanged with the Alan O'Brien Appreciation Society (membership: 1) and His Lordship, the Hibs-supporting High Court judge. My political spin-doctor chum had to call off on account of having to accompany his boss, the Labour beak, to Question Time in Dunfermline. That sounded grim but I was wishing I'd had the same excuse.
Hearts had been playing well; Hibs had been struggling and were missing half a team. Csaba Laszlo, the Jambos' manager, had been crowing about his team's superiority in the morning papers. He'd done a good job of hyping up the match and I prepared for the dreaded inevitable.
Guess what happened? Hibs didn't, as expected, lie back and think of Brazil. Bruno Aguiar and Michael Stewart didn't, deliver a midfield masterclass. The born-again Calum Elliot turned out to be no different from the old one. Ian Murray played like he was on fire (maybe before this one he'd scrawled "7-0" on his chest with a soldering iron). After all those Champions League thrills, Tynecastle could still produce one more amazing twist.
The Hibee Nation-in-exile, watching at 6am, must have been excited. Laszlo got excited at the wrong time – a whole day too early, in his meeja briefings – but we like colourful characters. Judges are rarely given to displays of emotion but in our pub even His Lordship was excited, though he took a dim view of the fan who ran on to the pitch after Derek Riordan's winner.
The bold Deek denied throwing a punch at the invader, quipping that it must have been delivered by Casper the Ghost. Or maybe the ghost of Scottish football, stirring again.
The full article contains 739 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
