They won the Ashes, it was always going to happen.

The biggest joke of the night was Fabio Capello getting the Coach of the Year. He's managed to get an England team, which was much better than all the other teams in their group, to qualify for the World Cup. Whippy do.

You do have a choice. Admittedly that choice would leave you without a TV but still you do have a choice.


Is that staff of 14 purely for the Chris Moyles or do some of them do jobs for the shows before or after as well?



The sport is covered fairly well on 5Live, and whilst their coverage to RL is very poor it is no different than any other media outlet.


What like the quality churned out by ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky tonight?

ITV:
All star Family Fortunes
X Factor
I Dreamed a Dream - Susan Boyle

Channel 4:
Elf
The Worst Christmas Jobs in History
Come Dine with Me
Epic Movie

Channel 5:
Highland Emergency
Raid on Entebbe
Constantine
CCTV Cities

Sky One:
Simpsons
Futurama
Bones
Fringe

Some real quality there from the commercial channels. The best things are probably the re-runs of Simpsons.

If you seriously think that RL will get a higher priority on a commercial channel you're kidding yourself. We get p!ssed off at the lack of coverage by the BBC, well compare that to the total utter non-existent coverage on ITV, C4 and C5, and lets face it we only get some coverage on SKY because of the TV deal.

The biggest joke of the night was Fabio Capello getting the Coach of the Year. He's managed to get an England team, which was much better than all the other teams in their group, to qualify for the World Cup. Whippy do.

Cant disagree with you there , Ladies Cricket should have won the Team award they won everything

Just got back from Sheffield and there was shocking decisions (not withstanding in a list of 10 sportsman with 6 world champions that a sportsman who in 2009 only won their domestic league competition and the 2nd most prestigious cup competition won 30% of the public vote when only 11 of the 26 publications who nominated sportsman nominated him.

The wrong sex English cricket team won the team award given that the Aussies sent one of the poorest touring teams in years and we only just scraped a series win against them.

The public haven't voted Ryan Giggs for his achievements this year alone though, it's for an outstanding playing career which has gone on for 20 years and doesn't look like stopping any time soon.

He was instrumental in Manchester United's 18th League title victory and his 11th personal winners medal, and the third in a row.

He's the most decorated British footballer ever, and many would argue he is the greatest footballer to ever grace the British game, maybe even the world.

He has rarely been in the spotlight for off-field actions, he is the model professional and the perfect role model for any young sportsperson out there for how to be loyal, look after yourself, conduct yourself and get the best out of your talent. His charity commitments often get overlooked, because he doesn't go hogging the limelight.

The award is a joke like the PFA Player of the Year award, in the sense that it should've been awarded to him many years ago, but you can't deny a person the award on a sentimental basis.

Two people who I thought deserved the award weren't even nominated, and that's Phil Taylor (won everything except the Premier League, including his 14th World title) and Tony McCoy (won his 3000th race).

It wouldn't have been so bad if they weren't up against a team playing the same sport who won more. Only difference been of course that one are a team of men and the other women. To get the best team for winning just one test series is stupid.

Since when has SPOTY been judged on career-long achievements though? You can blame the sports media for not nominating Phil Taylor and Tony McCoy. Someone on the BBC forum tallied the number of votes each sportsperson got (out of a maximum 26) www.bbc.co.uk/dna/606/A60297195 Tony McCoy got 6 votes, Phil Taylor 3 (and Ryan Giggs only got 11 putting him only 9th highest out of the 10 nominees tonight). I agree that Ryan Giggs is a true sportsman. Keeps out of the media limelight and playing for 20 years for one club is admirable but for him to win when there were 6 world champions nominated just proves that football is the most popular sport in this country.

Since when has SPOTY been judged on career-long achievements though? You can blame the sports media for not nominating Phil Taylor and Tony McCoy. Someone on the BBC forum tallied the number of votes each sportsperson got (out of a maximum 26) www.bbc.co.uk/dna/606/A60297195 Tony McCoy got 6 votes, Phil Taylor 3 (and Ryan Giggs only got 11 putting him only 9th highest out of the 10 nominees tonight). I agree that Ryan Giggs is a true sportsman. Keeps out of the media limelight and playing for 20 years for one club is admirable but for him to win when there were 6 world champions nominated just proves that football is the most popular sport in this country.

It hasn't and it shouldn't be. But when the media get to choose candidates and the public get to choose a winner from these candidates, results like this are always likely to occur.

Was Ryan Giggs the best player in the Premier League last season? No, in my opinion he wasn't even the best player at Manchester United. However, the fact he won his 11th title, overtook Sir Bobby Charlton as leading appearance maker for United and scored his 150th goal for the club, was what made his fellow professionals vote for him.

It was given entirely on sentimental grounds, in 1998/1999 he was awesome for United, yet missed out on POTY to Ginola (IIRC).

If United hadn't won the PL and he hadn't have won the POTY, he wouldn't have been nominated for SPOTY, but sentiment has made this possible.



Football is the most popular sport in the world. Which makes it more surprising at the very low number of SPOTY winners that have been footballers.

Footballing SPOTY

2009 Ryan Giggs
2001 David Beckham (for dragging England from the edge of a potential World Cup play-off match)
1998 Michael Owen (for having a pretty decent World Cup)
1990 Paul Gascoigne (see 1998 Michael Owen reason)
1966 Bobby Moore

I think the fact that England have won 1 title in the time that SPOTY has been running has been a factor.

Aye probably.

I thought Cavendish should've won the award tonight. A truly outstanding performance on the Tour.

I'm an Athletics fan anyway so my comments are biased about tonight's result. Quite a few deserved standing ovations tonight for Eddie Izzard and the Army Major as well as for Seve and Jessica Ennis.

By comparison to what ?

By comparison to the coverage that commercial radio give RL for instance ?

I think you'll find that local BBC Radio gives several hours worth of coverage to RL every week during the season.

As for the BBC's television output - its still light years ahead of anything that is produced in the UK by its rivals - the way that ITV is going they will soon have no production facilities left in this country and their commisioning editors seem to have the ability to choose the stuff that the BBC reject every time, as for Sky, buying American popularist trash series twelve months after they've been shown in the USA is not cutting edge TV production, its like publishing Heat magazine, you just take everyone elses copy and bundle it into your front cover every week.

Why do some people think Rugby League is bigger than it is? It gets about as much exposure on the beeb as is relevant to it's market.

His major achievment is to have the team and the players not embarass themselves and look like overpaid, spoiled, whingeing t@'s, or have their parasitic WAG's dominate the newspapers rather than the results.

A truly monumental achievement given what he had to work with.

Shouldnt he get a life time achievement award to recognise the facts you stated above......