• Sky Sports have announced a deal with Golden Boy Promotions to show all the company’s big fights from the States. The first fight card on the contract is the Marcos Maidana v Devon Alexander bout on the 3rd March, followed by Mexican legend Erik Morales v Danny Garcia on the 24th March, and the still-to-be-rearranged Victor Ortiz v Andre Berto rematch. Many have been critical over Sky’s recent lack of big fights from the US over recent years, but this deal shows a commitment to boxing for the forseeable future.

• Elsewhere, Sky have confirmed a number of other big fights coming up separate from the Golden Boy deal. Firstly, Wladimir Klitschko defends his Heavyweight title belts against Jean-Marc Mormeck also on the 3rd March in Germany, while two weeks later Matthew Macklin faces a huge ask as he takes on Middleweight champion Sergio Martinez in New York. Finally, Amir Khan will get the chance to avenge his defeat to Lamont Peterson in a rematch on the 19th May.

• More boxing, and Channel 5 are back on the scene on the 18th February with a Hennessy Sports card headlined by exciting prospect Kid Galahad challenging former world title challenger Jason Booth at Super Bantamweight. On the undercard is Chris Eubank Jr’s second fight.

• After the news that Rally Sweden will be shown on Motors TV, ESPN have confirmed that they will be showing this weekend’s second round of the World Rally Championship. The channel broadcast the entire season last year, but their contract was voided when the FIA ended their contract with previous commercial rights holders North One Sports after the company went in to administration.

• Channel 4 will show the Indoor UK  Athletics Trials and Championships on Sunday 12th February, with live coverage from the track finals. It is their first foray in to the sport since their disastrous coverage of last year’s IAAF World Championships. Ortis Deley is nowhere to be seen as Rick Edwards presents.

• And finally this week, Sunday’s Super Bowl saw a victory for Eli Manning and the New York Giants, but the headlines for many was some woman sticking her middle finger up during the half-time show. But my highlight was this, the extended version of a Honda commercial shown during the game-an absolute must see for fans of 80’s John Hughes comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Enjoy:

• The new Sky Sports F1 channel will also show GP2 and GP3 live. The two feeder series to Formula 1 run for the most part parallel to the main championship, with GP2 having 12 rounds and GP3 just the 8 rounds. Each weekend features two races, both of which will be live on the new channel. There is no news on fellow support series Porsche Supercup, so that is expected to remain on Eurosport.

• Sky have also confirmed that their Formula 1 magazine programme with Georgie Thompson and Ted Kravitz will be shown weekly.

• ITV are expected to release football commentator Peter Drury and co-commentator Jim Beglin after Euro 2012 this summer. Former Irish international Beglin has been steadily phased out of his duties over the last couple of years as Andy Townsend has become more prominent, while the decision to drop Drury is more surprising. With ITV’s Champions League coverage moving to Tuesday nights, it means number 1 commentator Clive Tyldesley can easily do that match before travelling to wherever for a Europa League game on the Thursday. As the channel will still need more than one commentator, they could still keep Drury on as a freelancer unless he moves to another network full time.

• Sky Sports will show the Tony Bellew v Danny McIntosh fight for the British Light Heavyweight title after promoter Dave Coldwell won the purse bids and joined forces with Matchroom Sport to provide a TV date. Bellew (right) is signed to Frank Warren Promotions, who are a major player behind the rival BoxNation channel. After the announcement this week, Bellew said: “It’s a dream come true to be back on Sky Sports.” Don’t think his promoter will be too chuffed after hearing that.

• The Super League season starts this weekend. The early list of live matches on Sky can be seen here.

• Interestingly, from May Sky will be showing their secondary live match per round on a Monday night rather than a Saturday evening. This is down to the channel wanting more live sport on a Monday once the football season has ended during the summer. The now-traditional Friday night slot will stay untouched.

• Two of England’s rugby matches in the Women’s Six Nations will be shown live on television this year, with a third available online with a free, legal stream. First, on the 25th February the game against Wales will be on the BBC red button at 6.15pm. On the 11th March, England’s trip to France will be on the Sky Sports red button service at 12.45pm, while their final match against Ireland will be live on the RFU website on the 17th March at 2pm.

• The BBC are scaling down their coverage of the Australian Open tennis tournament that begins on Monday. In the past they had shown live action on the red button every day, with selected Andy Murray and later-round matches on BBC Two, but this year they will only televise both singles finals and one of the men’s semi-finals. British Eurosport will once again have comprehensive live coverage and highlights throughout the tournament.

• The Wrexham v Brighton FA Cup third round replay, that was originally only scheduled for Welsh-language coverage on S4C, will now also be shown on ESPN Classic on Tuesday 17th February. The match is on the Classic channel, as ESPN are also showing Leicester v Nottingham Forest at the same time.

• Premier Sports have added an extra live boxing card in the early hours of Saturday 21st January. The triple-header from the States is part of the Shobox series, and is headlined by an exciting Super Bantamweight title fight between Rico Ramos and Guillermo Rigondeaux.

• Meanwhile, BoxNation have confirmed two more live cards from Germany as part of their contract with promoters Sauerland. This Saturday, the 14th January sees Robert Stieglitz face Henry Weber for a Super Middleweight belt, while the 4th February sees a Cruiserweight title rematch between Yoan Pablo Hernandez and Steve Cunningham.

• Still in boxing, and ITV1 will celebrate the 70th birthday of Heavyweight great Muhammad Ali with a documentary looking at his many visits to Britain over the years, including interviews and archive footage. The programme airs this Monday, the 16th January at 10.35pm. Also over the rest of the week on ITV4 at 9pm, veteran presenter Des Lynam looks back at some of Ali’s best fights, including bouts with Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman.

• Finally this week, ESPN’s pitchside coverage of Monday’s FA Cup tie between Arsenal and Leeds had it’s problems. The Leeds fans were very audibly chanting swear words throughout the broadcast, and pundit Martin Keown suffered an unfortunate incident. Check the video below:

Vitali Klitschko and Chisora face off

Dereck Chisora’s tilt at Vitali Klitschko’s portion of the World Heavyweight title will be televised live on BoxNation.

The former British champion travels to Munich on the 18th February for the fight, and his promoter Frank Warren will presumably have had it written in to the contract that the fight would be shown on his television channel.

Chisora, who has previously had two fights cancelled against Vitali’s brother Wladimir  lost a controversial split decision to European champion Robert Helenius two weeks ago, and will go in to this bout as a huge underdog.

Recent Klitschko fights have been broadcast either on pay-per-view outlet Primetime, or Sky Sports, whom the brothers have a good relationship with, but Warren would never have allowed this fight to happen on either of those channels.

BoxNation are offering an incentive to fans who subscribe to the channel before Christmas. Those who do so will receive two tickets to a Frank Warren show of their choice in 2012. This will be very disappointing to those who have already signed up at £10 a month, although the offer suggests very few actually have.

Meanwhile, the channel has put together a provisional schedule of domestic fights for early 2012, which include both Nathan Cleverly and Ricky Burns in action on the 25th February and 10th March respectively, plus James DeGale v Jose Maria Guerrero on the 27th January.

BoxNation, the boxing channel spearheaded by fight promoter Frank Warren will go subscription-only on 1st December, at a cost of £10 per month.

The channel launched at the end of September, and has been available free-to-air on the Sky platform since then. It has broadcast fights from the UK, as well as Germany, Russia and the big bouts from North America. But the intention was always to charge before the end of the year, and that date has come just a couple of days before the monster Miguel Cotto v Antonio Margarito rematch from New York hits the channel.

The same date also sees the launch of BoxNation on the Virgin platform, whose customers have unfortunately missed out on the free period. Subscriptions on Virgin will also be £10 per month, although Sky customers will receive six months for the price of five.

While there is no registration fee, punters are tied in to a minimum six month contract before they can escape if they wish.

The channel has certainly delivered the goods when it comes to the quantity of the cards broadcast, but has seen criticism over picture quality and production values of live shows, and has still not increased its support programme output since the launch, leaving plenty of blank spaces and repeats in the schedules.

At the original launch press conference Warren hoped to gain 100,00 subscribers to break even, which still seems a wild number considering that big boxing events on Sky only get around the 100,000 mark. That includes the casual fans who tune in for a couple of hours boxing on a Saturday night, but have no intention of paying £10 a month to watch a sport they have a passing interest in.

It remains to be seen whether BoxNation will be a success. Personally, I think they will struggle to break a quarter of the subscriptions they need amongst the sport’s hardcore fanbase, but time will tell.

This weekend’s controversial third fight between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez marked the end of another series of HBO’s hugely successful 24/7 series.

For those unaware, 24/7 follows the two men through their training camps in the lead up to a big fight, with behind-the-scenes access, stories and tales of the team and people involved in the three or four weeks before a pay-per-view fight, complete with dramatic voiceover by Liev Schreiber (Cotton Weary in the original Scream trilogy).

The programme is flashy, bright, bold and very Hollywood. As such, it suits one man in particular-Floyd Mayweather Jnr. Love him or loathe him, there is no doubt this programme is a perfect outlet for the superstar’s brash ‘money’ persona, and any edition without him certainly suffers.

Mayweather featured on 24/7 in September ahead of his Welterweight title fight with Victor Ortiz, and produced one of my favourite moments in television ever. This is right up there with Pearl Diving and that fight on Coach Trip a couple of years back. Enjoy…

This most recent series was fine, but had a number of issues which prevented it being considered one of the better 24/7s. Firstly, for both the Filipino Pacquiao and the Mexican Marquez, English is obviously not their native language. Now while for the most part this doesn’t really matter, as most of the programme is subtitled, it does mean you miss out on those little nuggets of chat and jokes between fighter and trainer during sparring which don’t translate as well in subtitles.

Also, anybody who has watched the series before will know how much of a superstar Pacquiao is, how big of an entourage he carries, and how much he likes singing. We have all seen this half a dozen times before, so there wasn’t really anything new there. Plus, with the respect there between him and Marquez, there was no real animosity or much controversy to liven up the programme.

It can be easy to forget that the whole point of 24/7 is to sell pay-per-views at $60 a piece, so as with all reality tv it is shot and edited in a certain way to suit an agenda. Many of HBO’s pay-per-view main events can be considered very one-sided, with an obvious winner barring a major upset. So 24/7 will often add little elements to make you believe the ‘opponent’ has a better chance than he actually does.

An example comes from last year’s fight between Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito. The world and their dog knew the Pac-man was most likely going to win by a mile, so HBO made his strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza seem really worried about his fighter, who was busy in his second job of a congressman. Ariza came across as a whiner who thought his man was not giving his best effort in training.

Despite this, it must be doing something right. 24/7 is now seen as an integral part to the build-up of a big fight, and any PPV not supplemented by the series (such as the recent Bernard Hopkins v Chad Dawson fight) seems to come up on the quiet without any buzz. It has been imitated by rival network Showtime’s Fight Camp 360 programme, which is slightly less Hollywood, best reflected by the lack of dramatic voiceover and often more down to earth participants.

And 24/7 has moved in to other sports as well. First with Nascar, and most recently with ice hockey and the build up to the NHL Winter Classic. That first run was a real joy to watch last year, and the cameras will soon be following the Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers ahead of their outdoor meeting on the 2nd January 2012.

But before that, 24/7 returns this weekend with the hype and build-up to the Miguel Cotto v Margarito rematch. With the hate between these two, it should be an absolute belter.

Light Welterweight world champion Amir Khan will fight on Sky Sports for his next three bouts after penning a new contract with the satellite broadcaster.

Khan left Sky in April this year after the poor undercard for his fight with Paul McCloskey fell apart, and the broadcaster wanted to pull it from pay-per-view on Sky Box Office down to standard Sky Sports. Khan and his advisors were unhappy at the move, and instead went to a company that would offer them a pay-per-view outlet for the contest, the independent company Primetime.

After defeating the Ulsterman, he moved on to fight Zab Judah in a title unification in the States in July. This was also on Primetime, and despite both parties claiming otherwise, the fact that no viewing figures were ever released suggests they were embarassingly low.

But his next fight against Lamont Peterson in Washington on the 10th December will be televised live on regular Sky Sports, and not Sky Box Office. Sky have said they have no plans for any further pay-per-view fights in the near future, but this attitude will no doubt change if, as expected, Khan fights Floyd Mayweather Jnr. next year.

Khan is scheduled to commentate on Primetime’s coverage of the Manny Pacquiao v Juan Manuel Marquez fight this weekend, which makes the move back to Sky more surprising.

This will no doubt be a huge blow to the ego of Khan and his advisors, who have gone running back with their tail between their legs after having it drummed in to them since he moved to Sky in 2008 that he is a pay-per-view fighter, despite continued poor figures along the way.

 

 

The recently launched boxing channel BoxNation has been on air for a month now. The channel has screened fights from all across the globe, but seems to be lacking any support programming on top, bar the return of old Setanta favourite Steve Bunce’s Boxing Hour, which interviews boxers in the studio and via the phone.

The channel is currently available for free on the Sky platform, and executives suggest it will be coming to Virgin soon. However, the price will go up to £10 a month some time in December-most likely in time for the Miguel Cotto v Antonio Margarito rematch on Saturday 3rd of that month. But what do people want for their money? This is the kind of channel that only the hardcore boxing fanatics are likely to subscribe to, so I have put the question to a couple of boxing forums asking what kind of support programming BoxNation needs, and whether or not these extras will make people more interested in handing their money over?

To get things started, I came up with a few ideas for programmes that I thought would be a good idea for the channel…

1. A daily news programme
This probably only needs to be 15 minutes, in a similar style to the news reports the Hatton Promotions website does. It should cover any latest developments, contract signings, press conferences etc. mentioned.

2. A boxing discussion show
Once a week, get a few boxing personalities (fighters and journalists) together for an hour sat around a table discussing whatever issues the sport are facing. A bit like a cross between an extended version of the debates they do on Sky’s Ringside, and the Between the Lines programme on ESPN. But different from the Bunce Hour’s chatty style with guests.

3. Top 10/Countdown style shows
This idea comes from the sport-specific channels they have in the States. Basically countdowns of, for example ‘Top 10 Heavyweight title fights’ or ‘Top 10 Joe Calzaghe fights’ etc. Obviously there might have a problem with footage for certain bouts, but the old trick of still images interspersed with some talking heads would suffice.

4. A Monday night analysis programme
My favourite idea of the four. Every monday night, get 2 or 3 ex-boxers to analyse the weekend’s fights from BoxNation-but properly. It should be filmed at a gym, with shadow boxing in the ring to demonstrate points and how they think the fight was won or lost. I’d like to see a telestrator involved for an alternative view of key moments in the fight.

Hopefully I will be able to detail some of the responses on here.