Idiots Write About Sports

So Arsenal — currently topping the table in the Premiership and unbeaten in their last 49 League games — meets up with Manchester United tomorrow. Yes, ManU struggled in the early part of the season, but they are unbeaten in eight Premiership games. And Arsenal has only won once in the last six games at Old Trafford. So tomorrow’s match figures to be a real hootnanny, the kind I’d gladly shell out $20 and wake up at an ungodly hour to see.

It’s a shame my cable provider is doing everything to dissuade me from doing that.

Here’s how the sinister Comcast advertises tomorrow’s soccer games on its allegedly customer-friendly pay-per-view ordering menu:

English League Soccer Catch the excitement of the Enlish Premier League soccer as some of the top players go head-to-head every weekend in the land where the game was invented. 7 a.m./8 a.m./7 a.m./8 a.m.

Well, that’s certainly helpful. But you know what’d be more helpful? Telling me who the hell was playing so that I could be sure I was ordering the right match.

I realize this might be hard for Comcast to grasp, but if I pay $19.95 plus tax for the sole purpose of watching Arsenal-Manchester United, I will be most disappointed if I ended up ordering the Southampton-Birmingham tie by mistake.

The solutionto my quandry? Keep my $19.95 plus tax far way from Comcast’s money-grubbing mitts, I guess. And mutter darkly about how this is the kind of service you can expect when you eliminate all competition from an industry. Though that does nothing to really address my desire to watch Arsenal nor does it do much to put extra money in Comcast’s pocket.

[Update: Hold the phone — the Arsenal game is Sunday, not Saturday, as the dopey man who can’t read calendars suggests above. This does not negate the central tenent of my thesis, which is that Comcast should do a better job of describing what you’re ordering so as to ensure that more people feel comfortable about patronizing their business.

A visit to the InDemand Sports site, however, implies that I’d be able to order the game I want on Sunday. So how come I gotta go trolling around the Web to find this out?]

They got me too. They merged their G4, a network of horrible video game shows with maybe a few good ones, with TechTV, a network of mostly good programming. The result is G4 shows going on as normal and the surviving TechTV shows whored up with L.A. juice.

Ratings-wise, G4 was doing crappy. TechTV was beating them with a third of the audience. Current ratings of the network carrying all the viewers from both sides are closer to G4 levels than TechTV levels.

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