In the last few years, what with the increased coverage of football on tv, it appears to me that the quality of what was the bastian of football highlight coverage, Match of the Day, has fallen dramatically. Obviously gone are the days from years back when you would get excited about seeing a TV camera at the ground, knowing that your club had been chosen to be a main match on MOTD, but it's still nice to know that anything worth seeing again, or something you may have missed at the game, will be shown later, so you can have another look, and from a different angle.

It was a shame when the BBC lost the rights to ITV for Saturday night highlights a few years ago, as apart from delivering a poorer product, they also helped engineer the demise of a presenter who seemed to catch the ITV footballing disease after transferring from BBC1. Des Lynam was a good anchor on BBC1, but all of his charm seemed to disappear along with the content of the highlights package offered when he transferred across. Of course the continual adverts certainly didn't help.

Unfortunately, since MOTD came back, there doesn't seem to be any improvement in my opinion. In their eagerness to show highlights of every game, we no longer get proper coverage of any match, as the quality is reduced dramatically. Personally I would like to see in-depth highlights of 2 or 3 games with perhaps just the goals and a couple misses from the others, with in-depth analysis given to the main matches. Of course supporters of less glamorous teams might argue, and rightly so, that teams such as Arsenal would be included in a featured match more regularly than other so-called lesser teams. That would be a valid point, but having said that, teams who are challenging for the title should be shown more often, (which wouldn't have included us in the past couple of years), as more is riding on those matches, and most of the general public would largely prefer to see more of the bigger matches/teams anyway.

As highlights are shown of all matches, a lot of the editing is lazy as a result, and you can go from one team having an attempt at goal at one end, to the next camera shot of them suddenly defending a corner you never saw them give away. Also there are a number of occasions when you see matches on the MOTD highlights and wonder from the editing if you were at the same match. Our recent game against Wigan was one of our poorer displays I thought, and Wigan looked like getting a 0-0; but from the commentary of the match you could be forgiven for thinking that we were all over them, and it was only going to be a matter of time before we scored. Surely a more balanced highlights package could have shown a bit more from a poor first half where we struggled to break down what was a determined Wigan team. Not that there was a lot to see but it doesn't have to be goal attempt followed by goal attempt all the time. By not doing so the highlights did a disservice to Wigan if nothing else on this occasion.

Another sign of MOTD's stature diminishing is that a lot of top managers refuse to even speak to the programme (or the BBC in general) and get away with not doing so, something that would never have happened years ago, or even been allowed to happen. It's not that I particularly want to hear the views of the managers in question, as we know who they are, but I would have liked to have heard Alex Ferguson's after match views against us aired so they could at least have been seen for what they were, and have been argued against or just laughed at.

Going back to content, maybe I am in a minority and highlights of games should in fact be what they say they are, i.e. just highlights, and not anything else. But I would argue that by trying to get a better balance of fewer featured matches, less can be more.