Tuesday night Champions League

I caught the last few minutes of Real Madrid’s match at Zenit St Petersburg, as Zenit were chucking the kitchen sink at Real in a search for an equaliser. Megabucks Danny missed a chance right at the end as a Real Madrid defender got his arse in the way. I often wonder how UEFA feel about having Russian clubs in the Champions League, as the temperature and time difference means matches have to be played in what is the end of the afternoon in the rest of Europe. Looked pretty cold too judging by the winter warm clothes on some of the spectators (apart from a few hardy topless souls). The evil part of me wants Luch Energiya of Vladivostock to one day make the Champions League, which is on the far East of the country!

Then watched Manchester United’s fairly low key match in Aalborg. United eased to a win with goals from Rooney and two from Berbatov (who could have had a hat-trick, but missed a sitter), without really seeming to extend themselves. It could have been a costly win though, as Scholes will be out for two months with knee ligament damage, and Rooney and Rafael also getting injuries. Rafael had another impressive match, and while learning the ropes defensively, looks very promising going forward, and must have Wes Brown and Gary Neville looking over their shoulder. The fluidity of the weekend performance against Bolton wasn’t there, as passing was sloppy in the final third, but a 3-0 win away from home in the Champions League isn’t to be sniffed at. Assuming Manchester United beat Aalborg at Old Trafford, they realistically need to pick up 3 points from their two matches with Celtic and trip to Villareal. Shouldn’t be too difficult, and shows how simple it is becoming for the bigger European clubs to qualify for the later rounds of the competition, almost without breaking sweat, whilst making plenty of money in the process.

Liverpool vs Manchester United, via a dodgy web stream

As I was at a wedding back home in Northern Ireland, my only football this weekend was watching the first half of Liverpool vs Manchester United on streaming site Justin.tv.

Justin.tv is a streaming site where users connect their telly up to their computer, and broadcast whatever they are watching. Originally set up to allow people to broadcast video gaming, it seems to have grown into a legally dubious way of re-broadcasting various satellite channels. Go there on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, and you’ll find most matches being broadcast. I ended up watching someone broadcasting Sky Sports over the service, along with around 23,000 other viewers. Given that several other users were broadcasting the match, it soon adds up to quite a few people not being included in Sky’s overall viewing figures.

Quality varies from user to user – some are blocky and jerky, some are very reasonable quality. It’s all done using embedded flash, like youtube and other video sharing sites, meaning you don’t need to download any clients like TVUplayer or SOPcast.

The channel is broadcast in a window about a quarter the size of your computer screen, with a chat window on the other side. The chat window is annoying, there’s no two ways about it, and unfortunately there’s no way of hiding it. Whilst it’s a nice idea, to let people discuss the match in progress, in reality most people use it for fairly basic insults of the team they don’t support, to make various sexist, racist or homophobic insults, or to ask who scored the goal. Every minute.

The match itself (as much as I watched of it) was a pretty exciting, fairly open contest. United look like they could run a cricket score to begin with, before gifting Liverpool an equaliser and falling apart from there. Not having seen the second half, I can’t comment on Liverpool’s winner, but it would be interesting to see how Liverpool would have performed had they not giftwrapped the equaliser.

I did catch the last 10 minutes of Real Madrid vs Numancia last night, seemingly the only part of the game not to contain any goals, but thankfully they won, and was the final result in a small accumulator I had, returning the princely sum of 2p for my stake of 1p. I’d been on a bad run until then, loosing 6 on the bounce. I’ve done a small accumulator for the Champion’s League, based on some of the home “bankers” there look to be. Fingers crossed my luck is changing!