A soccer -- I mean football -- fan's lament

Keith here for today’s entry. It’s Sunday evening and I’ve been thinking this weekend about what the sports fan in me misses the most by being here in London this fall.

Strange as it may seem, it’s been the ability to watch a live soccer match on TV. I’m sure I’ve seen more American football than English football since we arrived here about six weeks ago. It's a shame because unlike lots of Americans, I do appreciate the game and was looking forward to seeing a lot of it here. More about that in a moment.

Before we left to come here, I bought a remarkable device called Slingbox that's connected to our desktop computer and to our television's DVR unit at home. That enables me, via the Internet, to watch college football games on our DirectTV involving my Clemson Tigers and Florida Gators on Saturday and to follow the NFL and the Carolina Panthers on Sunday. (I’ve hit it lucky with kickoff times so far, given the five-hour time difference. A 7:30 p.m. game time back in the States is a 12:30 a.m. start here, which only the most die-hard or insomniac of fans could embrace.)

Anyway, to the original point, it’s a lot harder to find a broadcast of a live sports event on cable on the TV that’s across the living room from me right now. This would probably be a good subject for some research, but I’ve gathered that the TV rights to English Premier League football matches are pretty heavily controlled. (That’s Manchester United and Arsenal's league, to name a couple of teams that might be familiar to American sports fans.)

And as far as I can tell, they aren’t carried live on the BBC channels, a big difference from American TV where -- in addition to all the cable sports channels that make sports programming available -- college and pro football and baseball are all available to Joe Sixpack on basic cable or even over the air TV. (That is, if he’s not talking with Sarah Palin about the nation’s problems…) The average bloke here who wants to follow his or her team on TV has to pony up some extra for pay channels like SkySports 1 and 2 or Settanta Sports.

Or they have to do what I did to view the one live soccer game I’ve seen on TV since I got here, a match between England and Andorra in the World Cup qualifying round. I went to a pub and watched on the big screen.

But most of what I’ve seen of English football on TV is limited to the briefest of highlights on the evening news -- usually just “stand-up” type interviews with managers and players of the teams and very little match action. And there are some very early morning abbreviated replays of matches and a Sunday morning show on one of the BBC channels which summarizes the previous day‘s results with game footage.

Otherwise, all I know about “footie” here, I have to read in the papers -- which have next to no information about the NFL, American college football or the Major League Baseball playoffs. But that's another post for another day.