Popular Post A Diamond For Me Posted August 1 Popular Post Share Posted August 1 (edited) Had a look at the Scottish football page on the BBC website just out of curiosity and it's incredible how bare-bones an operation it's become. The lack of curiosity is striking - not a word on the Accies players and coaches walking out of training over missed pay, nothing on the vortex of chaotic bullshit that is Inverness. I remember when the original Airdrieonians were going down the tubes, there were always articles on the latest consortium getting put together, or Archibald's fall-outs with KPMG, and his claim that we were going to sign Hristo Stoitchkov - and we were a diddy first division team. That was a quarter of a century ago now, and for all the technical improvements it's really striking how much the BBC's online coverage of Scottish football has regressed since then. They don't even appear to have a "my club" page for anything outside the top tier anymore - but then there'd be nothing to put on such a page anymore. Here's the page for the Championship: "Ups, downs and the race for Europe"? Willie Collum talking about referees' mental health is surely a worthy topic, but is a Championship topic? It's good to know who Celtic and Rangers have in their opening fixtures, I suppose, but does anyone know how it went for Raith in that second leg? What's the story with Lesser Hampden this year? Where are Queen's Park playing? Are Accies in serious trouble, are they going to be docked points? Nope, nobody interested in that? National broadcaster, national sport. Edited August 2 by A Diamond For Me 24 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spring Onion Posted August 1 Share Posted August 1 13 hours ago, Darren said: Keith Jackson was named reporter of the year at the Scottish Press Awards not too long ago. Not just sports reporter, but the best reporter in the country. This has to be a joke, rigged or everyone else boycotted the event. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DA Baracus Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 9 hours ago, A Diamond For Me said: Had a look at the Scottish football page on the BBC website just out of curiosity and it's incredible how bare-bones an operation it's become. The lack of curiosity is striking - not a word on the Accies players and coaches walking out of training over missed pay, nothing on the vortex of chaotic bullshit that is Inverness. I remember when the original Airdrieonians were going down the tubes, there were always articles on the latest consortium getting put together, or Archibald's fall-outs with KPMG, and his claim that we were going to sign Hristo Stoitchkov - and we were a diddy first division team. That was a quarter of a century ago now, and for all the technical improvements since then it's really striking how much the BBC's online coverage of Scottish football has regressed since then. They don't even appear to have a "my club" page for anything outside the top tier anymore - but then there'd be nothing to put on such a page anymore. Here's the page for the Championship: "Ups, downs and the race for Europe"? Willie Collum talking about referees' mental health is surely a worthy topic, but is a Champship topic? It's good to know who Celtic and Rangers have in their opening fixtures, I suppose, but does anyone know how it went for Raith in that second leg? What's the story with Lesser Hampden this year? Where are Queen's Park playing? Are Accies in serious trouble, are they going to be docked points? Nope, nobody interested in that? National broadcaster, national sport. They're just too cowardly to do what they really want, which is to ditch coverage completely except for Celtic, Sevco and the national team. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ampersand Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 10 hours ago, A Diamond For Me said: The lack of curiosity is striking - not a word on the Accies players and coaches walking out of training over missed pay, nothing on the vortex of chaotic bullshit that is Inverness. This is the saddest and most culturally damaging thing about it, for me. There always has been and always will be Cheek puff pieces and somewhat inane preview articles, but there's a growing absence of any interrogative and committed reporting beyond that - ya know, journalism. I expect there are still journalists who want to do that work, they just don't get afforded the space to do it on prominent platforms. It's the same story with local news reporting, even in our bigger cities - I think there are journalists who can and do want to write proper local news, but they have to churn out click-friendly stuff too, or have good reporting swamped by ads and top-10 lists. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A Diamond For Me Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 (edited) 1 hour ago, Ampersand said: This is the saddest and most culturally damaging thing about it, for me. There always has been and always will be Cheek puff pieces and somewhat inane preview articles, but there's a growing absence of any interrogative and committed reporting beyond that - ya know, journalism. I expect there are still journalists who want to do that work, they just don't get afforded the space to do it on prominent platforms. It's the same story with local news reporting, even in our bigger cities - I think there are journalists who can and do want to write proper local news, but they have to churn out click-friendly stuff too, or have good reporting swamped by ads and top-10 lists. It's a disaster. But even though you get people who might be able to produce something more worthwhile than spending their time with "Wow! These ten pictures show how much Union Street has changed!", "12 words that prove you're from Edinburgh!" (invariably a list of 12 extremely common Scots words used all over the country) or barely disguised property adverts, they have people who are ostensibly paid to write and talk about football, and they're just... not good at it. There's never any substantial discussion of tactics, or how new signings will fit into a manager's system, it's all really insightful things like "Rangers need real players of real quality if they're to compete with Celtic for the title" and "I don't know if they've enough character in that dressing room". Yogi Hughes and his "guid hoanest laddies" are a running joke on here, but that's genuinely what 99% of the punditry in this country is like. If that's what you're getting from the people whose job it is to know the playing side of the game inside out, what chance is there of substantial investigation of off-field matters? "Hey, Willie Miller, let's get your thoughts on the utter balls-up Queen's Park have made of developing Lesser Hampden They agreed the sale of the national stadium to the SFA in 2018 and already had a site ready for development, why the hell isn't that ready yet?" "Yes, it's all very strange isn't it?" "Probably nothing worth looking at in there, lets go back to VAR - should Rangers have had another penalty in that game three weeks ago?" Edited August 2 by A Diamond For Me 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CountyinBorders Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 (edited) 16 minutes ago, A Diamond For Me said: It's a disaster. But even though you get people who might be able to produce something more worthwhile spending their time with "Wow! These ten pictures show how much Union Street has changed!", "12 words that prove you're from Edinburgh!" (invariably a list of 12 extremely common Scots words used all over the country) or barely disguised property adverts, they have people who are ostensibly paid to write and talk about football, and they're just... not good at it. There's never any substantial discussion of tactics, or how new signings will fit into a manager's system, it's all really insightful things like "Rangers need real players of real quality if they're to compete with Celtic for the title" and "I don't know if they've enough character in that dressing room". Yogi Hughes and his "guid hoanest laddies" are a running joke on here, but that's genuinely what 99% of the punditry in this country is like. If that's what you're getting from the people whose job it is to know the playing side of the game inside out, what chance is there of substantial investigation of off-field matters? "Hey, Willie Miller, let's get your thoughts on the utter balls-up Queen's Park have made of developing Lesser Hampden They agreed the sale of the national stadium to the SFA in 2018 and already had a site ready for development, why the hell isn't that ready yet?" "Yes, it's all very strange isn't it?" "Probably nothing worth looking at in there, lets go back to VAR - should Rangers have had another penalty in that game three weeks ago?" I totally agree and this is a problem through all sports broadcasting and journalism in this country, it would be quite easy for BBC or STV to put out a proper Sportscene with other sports as well as football but they won't. It would be very easy to have a reporter as you say look at the real big issues in Scottish Football - Inverness, Hamilton and Queen's Park Stadium but they won't. Hell, there even used to be a dedicated Highland League Correspondent for the BBC but now we don't even have coverage or news for either the Highland or Lowland League. There have been two articels written about teams in the FA Cup extra qualifying round, but none about the teams in the Scottish Cup First Prelim round. How is it with the money around we are somehow far worse off for sports coverage and journalism than we were 40 years ago. Edited August 2 by CountyinBorders 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Salvo Montalbano Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 The BBC in particular have no excuse. They used to run an advert with the tagine "due to the unique way we are funded, we can do all this and more" and there is absolutely no reason for them to chase clicks etc. Not only do they not need advertising revenues, they are by far the most widely used site around (apart from the Daily Mail bizarrely, which a lot of Americans seem to use). It would not hurt them one bit to have stuff that they used to, and would actually be something as part of their charter they could use the next time a right wing government tries to take their licence off them, but instead it's all lowest common denominator stuff. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NorthernLights Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 The remains of their coverage of things like Airdrie are still there http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/a/airdrieonians/1172507.stm Most of the links are broken now but you couldn't imagine them doing something like this now. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A Diamond For Me Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 18 minutes ago, NorthernLights said: The remains of their coverage of things like Airdrie are still there http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/a/airdrieonians/1172507.stm Most of the links are broken now but you couldn't imagine them doing something like this now. Aye - you can see in the sidebar they've got a whole section for "Airdrie in Crisis". I was living abroad at the time and the BBC website was pretty much the only media source we had for what was going on at Airdrie. The Stoitchkov story. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
strichener Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 Don't worry lads we'll have Kheredine Idessane to add to the football staff now that Andy Murray has retired. Looking forward to the massive jump in quality of reporting. <snigger> 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stu Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 1 hour ago, strichener said: Don't worry lads we'll have Kheredine Idessane to add to the football staff now that Andy Murray has retired. Looking forward to the massive jump in quality of reporting. <snigger> Sure Andy is gutted he no longer has to put up with him after this earlier in the year. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DA Baracus Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 Punt Kherdine and get Murray on instead. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ropy Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 I suspect I don’t fully understand xG but Tom English just reported at half time that Hearts had 0.7 xG and Rangers had 0.4 and that Hearts should therefore be ahead. But surely that means neither team should have as much as a goal so 0-0 is the correct score? 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
starryfish Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 Quote https://x.com/faz1888/status/1819697842878861800?s=46&t=8l8ZN788k9Rkvi6gMRp6BA 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arch Stanton Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 17 minutes ago, starryfish said: Never a truer word. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jacksgranda Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 On 02/08/2024 at 11:55, NorthernLights said: The remains of their coverage of things like Airdrie are still there http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/a/airdrieonians/1172507.stm Most of the links are broken now but you couldn't imagine them doing something like this now. It's telling me "not secure". A bit like Airdrie were, then. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sophia Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 On 02/08/2024 at 11:36, Salvo Montalbano said: The BBC in particular have no excuse. They used to run an advert with the tagine "due to the unique way we are funded, we can do all this and more" and there is absolutely no reason for them to chase clicks etc. Not only do they not need advertising revenues, they are by far the most widely used site around (apart from the Daily Mail bizarrely, which a lot of Americans seem to use). It would not hurt them one bit to have stuff that they used to, and would actually be something as part of their charter they could use the next time a right wing government tries to take their licence off them, but instead it's all lowest common denominator stuff. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
miketheheadlesschicken Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/aug/03/hearts-rangers-scottish-premiership-match-report 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oscar P Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gordon9736 Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 17 minutes ago, Oscar P said: No Elgin City 4 - 2 East Fife 2? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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