Hereford United - Tuesday 3rd February 2009 (Postponed)

While flicking through the hundreds of channels on SKY one recent midweek afternoon in an effort to find something worth watching I stopped at ITV4. The reason being that I had stumbled on them showing a repeat of the Big Match, this one being Manchester City 2-3 Chelsea from January 1979 in the old Division One (ask your Dad). The game played with a hearty covering of snow on the pitch while an extremely, were they really THAT orange, bright ball was punted around the park.

What was as intriguing as anything else was seeing the advertising hoardings around the side of the playing surface, along with the fact that even at the top level there were still big spaces between adverts, how times change. For the World Cup 1970 watchers they may have been more transfixed and traumatised though by the sight of a grey haired Peter Bonetti keeping goal for Chelsea, The Cat actually being 37 years of age by 1979.

Some of the companies advertising at Maine Road make you wonder, to a degree obviously with people losing their jobs, what the fuss is about a few high street names closing down at the moment when it has been ever thus. Visionhire being one who were eventually taken over by Granada, who then merged with Radio Rentals, the old VHS vs Betamax wars in the late 1970s when video recorders hit the mass market keeping Visionhire busy in that era.

I was surprised to see a big advert for Johnstone's Paints behind one goal as I wasn't aware that they had been involved in football sponsorship for so long, CIS Insurance being another company still backing the national game. For the XL Cheese fans there was a hoarding for Burton's crisps as well as another one on the food side being Jaffa Oranges and Grapefruits, don't see many of those advertised now.

A few other things to note from the game being the use of only one substitute plus I was asking the television why it wasn't a free-kick the first time Joe Corrigan picked the ball up from a back pass. The last thing I noticed being the old style scoreboard where you matched up the letters in the programme to the scoreboard to work out the half-time results. I'm not old enough, or I just can't remember when the old Brunton Park one was taken down, perhaps you can?

There are also plenty of these kinds of games being shown on ESPN Classics every day as well, with an ever extending library of matches to show now that we live in an era where there are around ten or so live television fixtures every week. We were actually on it a good while ago when they repeated a 1985 Match of the Day. The Blues surprising commentator John Motson by winning 3-1 at Maine Road in the old Division Two thanks to a Malcolm Poskett brace and a solitary Ian Bishop strike.

Watching football on television was a rare treat then though, unlike today where you are (too much) spoilt for choice. I remember living in Skipton as a teenager I was able to get Granada on the black and white portable television upstairs, rather than the Yorkshire TV we had downstairs. Granada at the time showing more games on a Sunday afternoon than Yorkshire used to, I think it was Martin Tyler and Clive Tyldesley that used to be the match commentators then.

Perhaps that is where Granada should have called it a day though considering the ITV Digital collapse in 2002. Joint owners with Carlton, the two having already sunk £800m into the loss making venture before it went into administration. Numerous Football League clubs, some of whom had, perhaps unwisely, already spent a lot of the money they were due to receive, from ITV Digital's crazy £315 million three-year deal to screen Nationwide League and Worthington Cup matches.

Gillingham in particular having put all their eggs in one basket on the contract. The club at the time rebuilding their Priestfield Stadium with projected money to come from ITV Digital and NTL, only for the media companies to collapse and force the Gills to finish the project by borrowing. Chairman Paul Scally eventually selling the stadium to himself in 2007 in an effort to clear to a holding company £9.8 million of the club's mammoth £13.3 million debt.

Whether or not there will be a television channel on the go showing Gillingham or Carlisle games in 30 years time remains to be seen, but they always make for an interesting watch and a good trip down memory lane. You see a few current managers in their playing days too, so perhaps Greg Abbott will be cutting up videotapes as we speak.