Adding up

The BBC's apparent doubling down on dropping classified football results from Saturday's Sports Report on Radio 5Live is a classic. 

With the addition of the 5.30pm live Premier League match to our coverage, Sports Report has been condensed into a shorter programme - cut from 1 hour to 25 minutes. The classifieds were taking around 5-7 minutes to read, which would have taken up around a third of the programme – constraining the range of sport we could cover.

As this blog has reported, nearly all the day's available results were read out during the programme, just not at the same time. The programme ran for 27 minutes 30 seconds (starting late 'cos of a BBC Sounds trail).  Given a shorter fixture list, and perhaps a faster reader than Charlotte Green, it might have taken 18% of the allotted half hour rather than 33.3%.  The bit about 'range' is nonsense, it was almost all football, on the opening of the Premier League season. 

The 5.30pm Premier League fixtures started in August 2009, when Setanta lost a package of rights for non-payments, and ESPN struck a deal, which nudged the Saturday evening game earlier. And for the first year, Radio 5Live had the radio rights. Here's the schedule from 15th August 2009.