As a Norwich City fan, I cannot agree with the BBC's Match Of The Day presenter Gary Lineker that it has been "a brilliant start to the Premier League season". Still searching for our first Premier League win of the season, we (Norwich) have been very poor at time, while at other times just unfortunate. However, at no point have we actually ceased to exist...
Why, then, was there no mention of Norwich in last night's Match Of The Day?
The Chelsea/Norwich game was the first to be featured on Match Of The Day last night. They showed clips of all the highlights, and then interviews with both managers. And then Lineker, along with Alan Shearer and Martin Keown, gave us their analysis of the game - or rather, their analysis of Chelsea. Not a word about Norwich was there to be heard in the analysis.
Yes, Chelsea beat us 4-1 (and fair play to them - they're a great team, and likely to be challenging for the title this year) but we weren't exactly invisible in the game. In fact, it was Norwich's Grant Holt who opened the scoring in the game. Is that not even worth a mention?!
The one-sided analysis consisted of the three presenters fawning over Chelsea's performance: "oh, look at Chelsea's fluid style. Aren't they so special? They're like Britain's answer to Barcelona!" (A less surprising comparison than you may think, given how many Spanish or Brazilian players feature in Chelsea's first team squad.)
The analysis is meant to give us the experts' opinion on all the pivotal moments of the game - not give us the chance to listen people waxing lyrical about one of the teams, while the other team gets totally ignored. I'm not bitter about Chelsea winning the game (I'm disappointed, yes - but not bitter) and don't resent the Match Of The Day analysis showing their goals, and discussing their style of play - as I've already said, they are definitely title contenders this year, so they deserve the plaudits they received last night. I just feel that there may have things which Norwich players did that deserved a mention too: Holt's goal, in particular, and some very impressive saves by John Ruddy too.
Personally, I enjoy watching football, but I'm getting a bit tired of the bias towards the so-called "big clubs" on the BBC; it takes two teams to make an exciting game of football, and I believe an experts' analysis should be impartial.
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