[Red Moon]

Champions League creates scheduling jungle

This has been the most disrupted season of I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! since the annual jungle endurance face-off went professional in 2002. Last week the programme was suspended for 24 hours to allow coverage of Germany versus England in Berlin. On Tuesday the show was nudged off the air by football again, this time Manchester United's Champions League group match away to Villarreal.

This stop-start situation has left the viewer feeling badly frustrated, deprived of the nightly rhythm that the world's leading televised insect-chewing contest demands.

That the United game was the kind of scoreless bore that had one crying out for a few shots of Timmy Mallett in a box of mealworms is neither here nor there. Television schedulers cannot be held accountable for the way that football matches pan out.

They should, however, take the rap for the aspects of this decision that were entirely predictable. Exchanging Ant and Dec for Clive Tyldesley, for instance, was a one-for-two swap that might once have looked appealing in relation to a leading brand of washing powder, but it was never likely to impress the recession-conscious consumer in the winter of 2008.

Clearly some kind of action needs to be taken to avert the fixture crowding that we are seeing. I'm among those who believe that Uefa should reorganise the Champions League so as to complete the group stage by mid-November, leaving a free run thereafter for the business in the rainforest. Quite apart from anything else, it would release Teddy Sheringham to take part. The former England striker, now working on ITV's Champions League coverage, is, surely, at this larval stage in his media career, crying out to be handed the coveted I'm a Celebrity sleeping bag.

One's impression of Sheringham, as he comes across during the half-time and post-match periods, is that he finds this punditry lark too easy. Or maybe too hard. One of those.

Either way, the well-preserved front man, who was famously ingenious during his playing career, would surely open up and show the best of himself in a competition that, in a real sense, involves pulling up trees - or, at least, gathering wood for the campfire.

The consequence of the scheduling mayhem is that, at the time of writing, we are waiting to see how Martina Navratilova got on in her slated Bush Battle. This required her to be locked in a dark trunk in the company of rats - the traditional I'm a Celebrity crowd-pleaser. By emerging victorious, and not too badly bitten, the nine-times Wimbledon singles champion may have secured immunity from the first public vote-off.

Even if she failed, at least she would have done something. The tennis great has been startlingly quiet thus far. Shades, here, of Neil “Razor” Ruddock in series three; he was widely tipped to do well but found the lack of food a big problem and became, within days, a peripheral figure, lying disconsolately on his camp bed. Accordingly, the phone votes failed to accrue for the former Liverpool defender, the public soon deciding that the sight of an almost entirely static former footballer, listening to his stomach rumbling, was something they could easily forfeit.

It comes down to strategy in the end. If you examine the ProZone stats, it is clear that being peripheral pays dividends in the first week, when the phone vote determines who should suffer the indignity of the Bushtucker Trials.

If you want to avoid standing in a phone box that is slowly filling up with eels - the fate of David Van Day, once of Dollar - then it's clearly a good idea to keep your head down. (Unlike inside the phone box, where it's a good idea to keep your head up.) It's only the people who have made an outstanding case for themselves to be plunged into a tub of crocodiles (Van Day, Robert Kilroy-Silk) who end up getting nipped.

However, once the eviction phase begins, the reverse immediately becomes true. At this point the public begin to vote proactively for the celebrity they want to save and if you haven't forced yourself into the reckoning by bouncing up and down a bit with your hand in the air, you are destined to die a very quick jungle-death by neglect - the sad fate of “Razor” Ruddock, all those series ago.

This is the pivotal stage at which Navratilova finds herself. She has survived by stealth thus far, but it will take her no farther and she needs to become positive and start mixing it. It's what José Mourinho refers to as “the transition from defence to attack” and it needs to be handled with supreme dexterity.

But surely if anyone in that spotlit clearing has the wherewithal for this tactical switch, it's Navratilova. Let's hope we see her coming in from the baseline and dominating at the campfire over the next few, blessedly football-free nights. It's what she was born to do.

Source: The Times

[pinkmichk]

as a non football fan football games bumping off over shows really winds me up i'm a celeb is only on for few weeks surely they can make it so it doesnt clash
football on a sports channel would be good (you dont see F1 playing this much havoc)

[Jackie]

Yes I was mad as well why do we have to put up with football being on?