Tonight's game between Switzerland and Ukraine was truly dreadful - happily the Guardian's minute-by-minute report made it bearable. As did the BBC's public service remit - and concomitant lack of pressure from commercial sponsors - which meant that they were perfectly free to bemoan the sheer unadulterated tedium of the game, loudly and at length. Whereas ITV would have gone to ads and exhorted us to come back for some sort of football mayhem.
(Did I correctly hear the crowd boo the 3 minutes' of added time at the end of normal time, on the presumptive grounds that they wanted the 90 minutes over sooner?)
For some reason, L'Equipe's readership still rate the Switzerland-Ukraine game marginally more interesting than England-Ecuador and Ukraine-Tunisia, and a tie with France-Switzerland. (Spot any patterns here?) I can only assume that they're upping their ratings because of the first penalty shoot-out (which was rubbish - who wins a penalty shoot-out 3-0 after failing to score their first penalty?)
