[Newshound47]

Electronic News Gathering vs Independent Radio News? I think I'll wait until ITN play. I hear Rageh Omaar is a splendid midfielder.

Slight tangent, but in the Olympics Iran's code is IRI (i.e. Islamic Republic of Iran). IRA is certainly best avoided though (could be confused with Iraq is another good reason).


Back to the coverage, and I'm surprised the highlights shows haven't cut the highlights of some of the final group games together, like as is seen often on the final day of a season. It could have helped strengthen the telling of the narrative, especially with, for example, Group E (Spain/Japan/Germany/Costa Rica) where the standings kept changing all ways, and possibly made editing a bit easier as there would have been needed to block spoilers of the other game.


And thirdly, an interesting piece from ITV's Mark Pougatch in Doha. As much as the one central studio usually looks great, I think it has been a positive to have more coverage based inside the stadiums. It will be a lot harder logistically to do it in future (especially the next World Cup with every venue hundreds of miles away from any other) but I hope that it could be a bigger part of future events than it has been in the past (a final being an obvious time to be in the stadium for example).

The small area of Qatar is probably one of the few positives of the location, I don't think any live TV commentary has been done offtube either which has not always been the case.

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And finally, hopefully the rumours of the ditching of the three team groups for 2026 becomes reality, as the final round of group stages has been fantastic drama and entertainment. There has been a few 'interesting' scheduling decisions by both UK broadcasters to show the bigger names on their main channels over the match that had more importance, but that is not the biggest issue really with BBC Two and ITV 4 both widely available. The next ITV X app on my TV I think has had a higher quality picture for ITV 4 than what came before which lessen the issue further for me at least.

If the British/Irish bid for Euro 2028 is successful then every match will likely be hosted in stadium for that tournament. We know the BBC and ITV have already secured the rights to it.