The point of Match of the Day

Telegraph | Sport | Pie in the Sky as MotD manage to miss the boat[registration required]
With so much live football available to those who can and will pay, what is the point of Match of the Day? Recorded highlights, however well presented, are now of historical interest only.
You do have to love the Daily Telegraph, you really do - where else would you find anything half as facile (and I'm excluding Private Eye as they do it on purpose...)? Many (although admittedly no-one who reads the Telegraph) can't or won't pay to watch live football. As an aside, many of us in this latter group pay (through our license fee...) to watch MotD.

Humour me if you will. Assume that there are ten Premiership games on a weekend (which, for the point of this exercise, will be deemed to include Monday night). Three of them will be absolutely god-awful. Two will show some potential but turn out to be mostly dire. Three will highlight middling/decent/good teams who may or may not decide to put in a decent performance, depending upon the phase of the moon, the number of r's in the month and whether a dead chicken has recently been waved over the centre-circle. (The latter two groups invariably overlap.) There may be one game with a good team playing well, and then there's the Arsenal game.

Now, would you willingly sit through all that, hoping for the good bits?? Of course not. Would you even sit through four or five games, hoping for he good bits? Of course not. Would you watch four or five simultaneously, to make sure you know the instant anything happens? (Of course not, that's what Radio 5 Live is for...)

Which is why you watch MotD, because some poor sod has had to suffer through all this for you, and you get to see whichever watchable bits they can find, plus quite a few more un-watchable bits they sneak in to fill the time slot. The joys. Which is why we watch recorded highlights: most of the time they're the only interesting bits anyway.