The Sport Thread

Of presentation note "Come Together" has been dropped altogether for rugby matches and the replay wipe appears to have changed.

Meanwhile today marks the start of the European Qualfiers so be interesting to see if the new branding means standardised graphics and music a la the other UEFA competitions - though historically UEFA (and FIFA too) has been less strict about enforcing standardised branding for international competitions (witness the BBC and ITV continuily being allowed to opt out of all or part of it) than for the club competitions where it insists on it being used without exception.

Although of course this is the first centralised contract for the qualifiers so it wouldn't be a surprise if things were standardised, especially as now most countries have a broadcaster which has the option to show all of them. Are Sky showing them all via the red button or just the selected matches on SS5 and other channels.

Talking of Sky notice that their second UK Champions League matches on Wednesday is being put on Sky 1 rather than a Sky Sports channel, with the first choice being on SS5.

You might get a case of having a generic world feed set but with broadcasters retaining the right to use their own graphics on games for example for their home nations.

Will be interesting to see how much airtime the other home nations get in the ITV highlights show on Monday night - they even claim they'll have highlights of Andorra v Wales, even though that's not played till Tuesday.

Looks like Sky are using a new red generic package, similar to the layout of the Champions League. Never caught the titles however.

It's a pretty ugly set they're using though.

RTE using it too.

Oh dear, it's very red!!!

It's on both, Sky 1 and Sky Sports 1.

The graphics are centrally controlled and supplied by UEFA, and the titles were from the package as well. "Ode to Joy" was the theme.

Eugh.

They've gone down the Europa League route of replacing the scorebar with name graphics instead of using lower thirds, I'm not too keen on that approach personally.

Not liking the positioning of the scoreboard on the European qualifiers it's too far down.

It says that because ITV have supplied the same billing for both that and the Tuesday night ITV4 highlights show. As far as I know they're actually only able to show highlights of all the games after a complete "round" of fixtures so it would appear that Monday's highlights show will just be England, as they've done for the England games since they got the rights in 2008, and which they can show as many times as they like because they showed it live. Certainly all the publicity has trailed Tuesday's ITV4 show as the main highlights show for all the home nations.

The awful colour scheme makes it stand out far more than it really should.

Meanwhile Sky Sports NFL coverage has a new intro adopting aspects of Fox Sports look including their theme tune.