Miss of the Day

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Probably best to leave post-match analysis of last night’s England vs U.S. game to the others (I don’t want to hog all the England chat just because I’m English) but simply had to share this with you all.

As incredible as it may sound in this modern age in which we live but the network broadcasting the game in Britain missed the all important England goal. Before that howler (on a par with Rob Green’s gaffe), some background. The BBC and ITV have the rights to the 64 games and they decide on the split of games beforehand, apart from the final and any possible semi-final involving England, which they would both screen live. As often happens in the early stages, ITV take exclusive coverage of England’s first two games in the group (ITV shows adverts so this plays into prime-time hands), and the BBC have the third game as well as the second round and quarter-final England matches. This is somewhat of a gamble on the Beeb’s part, as England are never a sure thing to progress out of the group.

England’s first game went badly for the football team and ITV: viewers watching in HD (roughly 10% of the audience) were treated to an inadvertent ad break, which had kicked in by mistake as the third party responsible for inserting them in the show made a mistake. Despite the network switching back to the match pretty quickly, bemused viewers were greeting by Steven Gerrard wheeling away in celebration. See below for the highly unfortunate moment.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6YHr7jZsxg&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

It’s the second such occasion in recent times where this has happened: a Liverpool vs Everton FA Cup game on ITV was marked by Dan Gosling’s winner for the Toffees being missed by viewers for exactly the same reason. And bosses at the network will certainly be feeling equally blue (or should that be red-faced?), though they will be pleased with viewing figures of 13.2 million, which equated to 56% of the total number of people watching television at that time. How goalkeeper Green wishes his mistake had been the one England fans missed.