So it’s another Sunday and another PPV game which has rightly wound many a Villa fan up, because it’s the third of four games that will have to be paid for on top of any existing Sky or BT subscription.
If anyone is paying these charges on top of a subscription, I can only say fair play to you, but I won’t.
Many fans have said the same and donated money to charities instead, with the latest total I’ve heard being £300,000. Now that deefinitely is fair play.
Given the criticism the PPV scheme has received it’ll be interesting to see what happens when this first period (which I believe is one month) is up. Seeing as the EFL are charging £10 a game, it’s hard to see how the EPL charges can be any lower than that, especially when the reasoning is that the prem is a better product.
I’d be calling for all the PPV charges to be dropped, but I suspect many of the EFL clubs would be relying on this money.
Even so, the important point here is that if we go down this PPV route, it’s only going to be good for the massive clubs and incredibly bad for the smaller clubs. I’ve picked them totally at random, but how many people are likely to tune in to a Rotherham game for example?
The broadcasters love the idea of PPV, as they’ll be able to milk the bigger club’s audiences even more over time. But we can’t let them get away with this, in my opinion.
The bad news is that if you go down the Vola sports route of watching the PPV games, you may have noticed that the company running the app has closed it down. It’s been replaced with another, almost identical app which certainly looks like an updated version of Vola. It’s called Sports live and is working, except it’s not showing any links to games.
I’m sure this will be sorted in the next couple of days, but doubt it’ll be up and running today.
I’d better talk about the game, which is awkward, because I don’t know what to think.
They’re a strange side, Southampton. Last season, their away form was Champions league standard.
Yet their home form was more like Championship standard. Which means it’ll be slightly interesting to see how their season pans out without any crowds to affect anything. Not that I really care, as long as we beat them.
Squad wise, both clubs are as they have been and the only new thing is that they have Walcott available after he was out last week.
I watched Southampton’s game against Everton and can’t say I was impressed. In fact I was left wondering why the Blues were riding so high in the league, as I didn’t think they were very good at all.
Which brings us to our position.
We’ve done well, but made Bamford look like Messi when we played Leeds.
I’ve spoken a few times about how our defence isn’t good as is sometimes made out and I’m sure Ings will be hoping we don’t get to grips with him, similar to Bamford.
I see this game as a very good demonstrator of our credentials this season and if we’re genuinely going to be, not quite challenging, but comfortable, we need to be winning this kind of game.
I think we have the tools to win, but the midfield will need to get far more involved and bring Watkins into the game more.
Fortunately Southampton don’t play anywhere nearly as intensely as Leeds, but they can break quickly and will put us under pressure.
A score draw looks favourite to me, but I think I could say that about most games.
I’m going to go for a win for us though, purely because it seems that many of the pundits are going for Southampton to win.
2-1, it is and fingers crossed.
UTV!
