It’s Sunday evening. An odd day to be sure. For one thing, there was a football match on television. No I’m not talking about Sky… Well, there was one on Sky too… This was BBC 1! Granted it was a pretty mundane 1-0 Championship tussle, but football nonetheless. Also, the Community Shield took place and once again feature Manchester United. I’m not much of a fan, but I’m always up for a good comeback and a 3-2 win when down 2-0 at half time has to be good viewing. So, since I don’t have Sky I’d like to see the highlights. Unreasonable? Apparently so.
Firstly, I know Google is a search engine, and so not obliged to be able to react at rapid rate of response, but it is less than useless at helping me here. Well, It can find any number of shall we say, unofficial websites sporting video footage. The problem here is that people who work for whomever actually owns the rights to this footage also can use Google as effectively as me and have managed to sweep around getting these videos pulled from whichever host service they are using. So most of the links are in fact galleries of copyright infringement notices.
I wouldn’t mind them removing the unofficial highlights if I could find ANY official highlights… Sky would be a reasonable place to look? They carried the game live so maybe they have some highlights to show me? Well. No. They have an interview with Mancini. Great. Football managers excuses are pathetic at the best of times, let alone when he’s forced to make stuff up in a language which doesn’t come naturally to him. So. Nothing here… Maybe the FA? They organised the game, they have a website, surely they have video footage of it taking place? No. Unless you count the 2010 game, but I’ve seen that already.
It’s not like the game just finished. It’s after 9. The game finished several hours ago and the final goal has been shown on Channel 5′s poor excuse for “news”. Yes I watched Channel 5. Men in Black 2 was on. No, I know that doesn’t make it any better… So they can show a clip on TV shows, the “infringers” can put a copy online, in multiple locations, in the time. Why aren’t there any official highlights accessible?
This right here is the problem. There would be no dodgy sites with unofficial highlights if the idiots got their act together and actually delivered what people want, the highlights! It’s clearly not hard, so it must be something to do with money. It’s always about money. But surely they must spend a fair bit trying to track down and squash people videos showing their content. We don’t want to search for highlights. We don’t want to watch videos where the only commentary we understand is “Roooney” and “GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL”. We just want to watch overpaid pretty boys dance about with a ball.
I actually suspect there probably is an official place to watch these highlights. I mean, they can’t be as incompetent as I think they are, right? Maybe it’s my fault however hard I look on the internet I can’t find them. I can’t say I have that much trouble finding anything else I’m looking for… As proof. Here is a duck on a tricycle.
