Archives for May 2008

Today BBC Sport launches a new permanent blog for the first time in over a year, as the Euro 2008 blog goes live.

Whilst we did launch a new blog last autumn, for the Rugby World Cup, that was switched off once the tournament finished.

We are not planning to do that with the Euro 2008 blog, but instead are planning to keep it going as a general football blog once the action in Austria and Switzerland has finished.

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Our report on the number of English players in the Premier League reveals the full extent of the task facing Fabio Capello over the next four years.

A semi-final appearance (at least) at the World Cup or European Championships is the Football Association's stated ambition. It might not seem too demanding for a nation which has dominated this season's Champions League, but take a look at the figures.

The number of Englishmen playing top-flight football in their own country has never been lower.

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We've come to the end of this run of Inside Sport so I wanted to respond to a few issues some bloggers have picked out and also look forward to the next season and ask for your input into how we take the show on.

Perhaps the issue that provoked most response online was Mihir Bose's piece on racism in Polish football. The responses to the blog he wrote were overwhelmingly positive and some people had some thought-provoking points to make.

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Regular users of the BBC Sport website will be aware that we re-launched our front page and the design for our individual story pages at the end of March. We also promised at the same time that our other indexes would all follow suit, over a gradual period. Today the next big index is getting that makeover.

So users of our main football page will today see it change to be more consistent with our front page. We know that some users bookmark the football page or subscribe to it, and for those users the design will be brand new, but for anyone who goes through bbc.co.uk/sport to get to football, there should not be too much by way of a surprise.

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For BBC Sport, the even-numbered years tend to be manic: World Cups, Commonwealth Games and Winter Olympics every four-year cycle, and the Olympics and Euros in between, in the leap years.

For the Match of the Day team, 2008 has already been a remarkable year, even before the big summer events kick in. Unlike our Radio and Online colleagues, we have had no direct involvement in a momentous year of European club football, but the Premier League's finale was exceptional (of which more in a moment). We've also seen the most extraordinary FA Cup campaign of modern times.

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So it's been a great year of football, and we've also recorded some excellent figures for our TV flagship programme Match Of The Day. An interesting statistic from Sunday is that the peak live audience for Wigan Athletic v Manchester United was 1.8m, whereas the MOTD high was 4.7m. And that fits into the overall story of the season with the highlights show routinely getting 2 or even 3 times the viewing figures for individual live matches.

We have a Fulham fan in the office so for the last few weeks we've been living the Great Escape, and I was out in the sunshine plugged in to the 5 Live commentaries on Sunday afternoon as we zapped from Wigan to Chelsea and then picked up the relegation battle.

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All of our bloggers are keen to hear your views, so comments will be moderated 24 hours per day seven days per week (0900-1900 for the Sport Editor's blog).

Please keep your comments clean. If they fail our house rules (listed below), they will be removed.

And do try to keep your comments relevant and below 200 words. We may fail posts that are too long and also reject off-topic comments because we want to keep this blog focused. Readers looking for broader discussions on sport should visit our 606 pages.

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After a midweek of watching those thrilling and tense Champions League semis from the sidelines, we're all looking forward to being at the sharp end of what should be the most exciting Premier League finish since its inception.

We've had last-day drama in the chase for the title before (though not so far this century) and we've had relegation going down to the wire, but this year we should have both at the same time on the season's last Sunday.

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When we began the process of re-designing the BBC Sport website a few weeks ago, I promised we would keep reviewing the changes we were making and would respond to feedback on this blog.

In particular I said we'd take another look at the whole issue of the mix of content on the front page of the site - after we received comments that we were no longer providing a quick snapshot of the headlines from around our various sections.

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