Got a reply: Dear Michael

Thank you for reaching out to us about Premier Sports, we always welcome feedback from our customers.
Virgin Media does not typically comment on commercially sensitive negotiations with channel providers, however, we can confirm that we are in talks with Premier Sports and as soon as there is something to announce we will do so. We continuously strive to provide our customers with the best quality and most popular channels in the market, but we have to balance cost and potential demand when we assess new channel launches.

We are delighted to offer our customers a fantastic line up of sports channels which includes all four Sky Sports channels plus Sky Sports News, Eurosport, ESPN (at no extra cost to XL customers) and a growing list of specialist sports channels, including Racing UK, Man Utd TV, Liverpool TV, At the Races, PrimeTime, and the recent launch of Box Nation. We’re also delighted to be offering all our basic TV subscribers a free month of ESPN in January. We hope that you enjoy the service.

Thanks again,
Kind regards

Emma

So because SKY dont value the on field entertainment enough to continue , we're to get ' comic cuts ' instead

Bloody marvelous

Just took out my annual subscription. Needed multiroom so had to phone up. Usual call centre farce, put on hold to run the phonebill up, operator then suffers with number dyslexia and had to go through card details several times. Then given total cost for year and payment taken. Put on hold and transferred to customer services who then told me the initial operator couldn't do multiroom and had to go through it again.
Eventually sorted after 25 minutes but near instant activation.
My tip, use the online subscription if at all possible. It's got to be much less painful.

Excuse my ignorance, but where it says enter the viewing card number, is that number the 9-digit one grouped into threes?

Yes

Many thanks!