Accepting failure....

At the peak of it's day, the idea of running an blog dedicated to English Soccer in all its forms - Premier League, National Team, Champions League, Carling Cup, on and on and on was a novel idea. But in all honestly, my meager attempt has lead to miserable failure. Oh well. No one died.

But on the other hand, I guess I have to accept that the project was doomed from the start. Not only are there hundreds upon hundreds of sites dedicated to English Football, all reporting timely news and appropriate commentary, but my opinion on the topics were not outside of mainstream thinking or reporting by the average fan. At least not original or timely enough to warrant a 24/7 blog that I could hardly maintain. (And at times, this one is hard to maintain consistently).

I first started that blog so as not to clutter this one with English soccer stories, and it seemed every other day, I had a number of stories that centered around Premier League activity; this became confusing to my readership which found two sides which decried that my blog was either too sporty, or too political.

Whatever it was it was at least more active with new posts and stories.

Now, I guess I just don't really care.

This blogs main purpose is to make me happy. So if I write about how great Manchester United is or how crummy Hillary Clinton is, I guess I shouldn't really care about what the readership thinks. At least not entirely. A few of you that I know, I do care about what you think.... its the drive by types that "think they know me" but don't have a clue. I think I might even have relatives like that.

So moving forward, expect to see a few more comments on the world of sport here. For those who don't like sports, I guess your a click away from the next blog.

As for English Soccer, I get plenty of it these days. Fox Soccer Channel and ESPN have been doing their duty to keep me well entertained over the past several weeks and months. I still wish I could get Setanta, but that would require a dish, and you never get something without giving up something. And the whole dish thing seems pretty complicated to me. Not to mention that my wife doesn't want a thing that looks like a radar tracking station on the roof of our nice house.

I look forward to the day that the cable industry no longer finds it profitable to divide channels and line ups into rigid territories, and we can move to where all channels are a la carte - if you so choose. You pick what you want, and pay for what you REALLY want to watch.

The only negative to this suggestion is that channel surfers would lose the ability to watch shows they don't normally watch ... you know.... five minutes of mongooses in the wild, or the building of a Sherman Tank, or a biography of some drunken Hollywood boob. You know, stuff that entertains you for for less than five minutes until you feel obliged to move on.

Americans are big on options. We just aren't big on paying $120 a month when 95% of what's broadcasted is unwatchable garbage.

If I had a line up, it would probably look like this (not in order of priority or anything):

1. CBS Local Affiliate
2. ABC Local Affiliate
3. NBC Local Affiliate
4. NESN
5. ESPN
6. ESPN 2
7 ESPN Classic
8. SCI FI Channel
9. Fox News
10. Fox Local Affiliate
11. Fox Soccer Channel
12. Setanta
13. Gol TV
14. CNN
15. Discovery Channel
16. History Channel
17. Travel Channel
18. History International
19. Noggin
20. BBC
21. PBS
22-30: My wive's choice; she may throw in a few channels that she watches, but I'm not sure.

That would probably do it. The rest is crap.