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Forest (A) League cup QF

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Any team selection will have caveats re injuries .

What is the situation I wonder with Podence , Costa , RAN , Moutinho ?

On top of all that , the performance of a fair few players on Saturday evening will have given Lopetegui plenty to think about . We have the additional issue of a massive match on Saturday to think about .

I was all for going full strength on Saturday evening and posted as such , as I didn't think we'll avoid a bad defeat by going with a weakened team . How wrong I was........and delighted to see it !!

Finally , we might have proper competition for starting places now, and be happy that those who come on as substitutes will pull their weight .
 
I'd keep the same side that we played against Liverpool, injuries allowing.
 
Lopetegui presser:

- Wolves waiting for an explanation from FA & PGMOL
- "maybe" some of the injured players can play. RAN had a knock, waiting to see if he can play
- Believes Forest will be a tougher game than Liverpool

(stolen from Liam's twitter)
 
This will be an entirely different match to last Saturday one would think . Could be a very cagey affair . A League Cup semi final is a nice reward for two clubs who have had difficult seasons thus far .
A win here for us is far from certain .
Forest had a decent enough Christmas / New Year . An away win and a home draw . Cooper seems to be steadying the ship . He cared little for the FA Cup and they got well beaten , with an eye to tomorrow evening one assumes .
 
No extra time or replays for these quarter finals . Straight to penalties if they finish level .
 
May as well rant about the absolute farce that is sports broadcasting in the UK (on the same day as the Government reckon they're sending the OB round to bully people with dodgy IPTV, yeah ok. For disclosure I don't have IPTV and find people who boast about paying "£60 a year for everything" intensely smug and irritating. Yeah mate, if I scan through a massive steak as a 30p onion at a self-service Tesco till and get away with it then I've had a brilliant tea for pennies, doesn't make me a genius, it makes me a very low level thief).

Without encroaching on any other sport, Sky regularly show live games on Sky Sports Main Event, Sky Sports Premier League or Sky Sports Football. They also have Sky Sports Mix and Sky Sports Arena which is just anything.

Tomorrow Southampton vs Man City is on at 8pm on Main Event and Football. Premier League is showing a variety of Soccerbox/100 Goals filler that they repeat forever and is always on catch-up any time. Forest vs Wolves is not on.

I have Sky (and BT, and had to pay for Amazon for the Everton game, despite me hating Amazon), they have the rights to the League Cup, they have the space to show both, hey they could gift the rights away to ITV or whoever if they can't be bothered showing it, but I can't legally watch my team in the other game. I don't even know what the reasoning is, one game simulcast on 2 channels, one game shown on 0 channels, in the same competition, between two Premier League teams, at a time when there are 0 other live games (or save for overseas horse racing, any live sport at all) on Sky. I'd understand if we still had Bruno Lage and they felt it fair not to subject the nation to that as enough people are already suffering, but he's gone. Meanwhile people in other countries can watch this.

STOP PREVENTING FANS FROM WATCHING GAMES WHEN THEY'RE PAYING YOU TO WATCH THEM FFS. This isn't even an argument about 3pm kickoffs being blacked out because that's a separate point, this is something you could very, very easily show, there are literally no barriers in terms of bandwidth, rights agreements, broadcast facilities, a low key tie that no-one would watch on TV, if it were shown live it would still absolutely be a sell-out, but you aren't showing it for absolutely no reason.

Ah, that's better.
 
Don't forget how the Premier League attempted to cash in on lockdown too.

What was it, £15 per game they tried to charge?

No wonder Shi + co have so much contempt for legacy fans, it's the overarching sentiment from the top down.

The face of broadcast football will change with the next TV deal, we know it and they know it, materially the number of stream viewers wont have changed significantly so why have they switched from whack-a-mole with stream providers to end-users now? If Sky want to stand around scratching their arses they can go the way of Blockbuster and Kazaa Lite.

I'm at ease with the 'morality' of people using streams but equally wouldn't hesitate paying a fair price for stable streams without pop ups and chat boxes full of racist trolls.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's the football league rather than Sky where the issue lies. They sell the rights package and within that there are a certain number of games per round, which for the quarter finals is 2, Sky don't have an option.
 
Think the wider point still stands though regardless of who is in charge of it.

Probably worse if it’s the EFL as they have the ifollow (I think, or did it change, some form of midweek streaming) so they could easily just do the same for this.

As an aside, I’m sure if we looked at Amazon’s ratings for when they have the multiple midweek games on the total number of viewers would be higher than when Sky/BT just have the 1.
 
Something else that needs updating is this assumption on the part of the football authorities that televising every game would crash attendances.

Across every form of live entertainment across the West, venues haven't been able to scale up fast enough relative to population growth. Music, theatre, comedy, sport, etc - part of why ticket prices have risen well beyond inflation over the last few decades isn't just to offset the losses of revenue after the switch to digital distribution, it's because there are a lot more people competing for the same tickets.

There may well be an argument for not televising the lower leagues, but I would shocked if it wasn't a net gain for the PL and Championship to have blanket broadcast of every game. And let's not forget that a lot of those "small" clubs were regularly getting tens of thousands of fans through the gates each Saturday back in the old terrace days when tickets were a lot cheaper. That latent demand hasn't gone away, there will be ways to encourage it to emerge again.
 
Don't the Bundesliga also charge very reasonable admission prices to stadiums too or is that an outdated myth?
 
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