Two hours of build-up for ninety minutes of football

Pre-match coverage keeps expanding, and the extra time is not being spent telling you anything you could not learn in five minutes.

Coverage starts at five for a seven-thirty kick-off. That is two and a half hours of programming about a football match that has not happened, and a fair chunk of it is a reporter standing near a coach park saying the team have arrived.

I do not think the length is the problem in itself. Long build-ups can be superb, and anyone who has sat through a Test match rain delay with good broadcasters knows filling time is a craft. The problem is what fills it. Interviews conducted under contractual obligation in which nobody is allowed to say anything. Segments trailing other segments. A pundit asked to predict a scoreline, which he does, and which is then forgotten by everyone including him. And the big one, the montage, in which a voiceover explains that tonight is about more than football over slow-motion shots of a stadium at dusk.

The economics are obvious. Rights are expensive and inventory around a match sells, so the window gets stretched, and every extra half hour needs content that costs nothing to produce. A reporter and a coach park cost nothing.

What would be worth the time is the stuff that never fits into a ninety-second preview. Somebody walking through the specific tactical problem the away side has to solve, with clips. A proper interview with an assistant coach, who is nearly always more interesting than the manager because nobody has media-trained the fear into them. A segment on the referee's tendencies, which would be treated as heresy and which every player in both squads has already been briefed on. Something from the supporters' end that is not a fan being asked to predict a scoreline.

Cricket does this better in the long formats, partly out of necessity. A pitch report is a genuinely informative piece of television when someone competent does it, because they will crouch, poke the surface, tell you what the cracks will do on day four, and be proved right or wrong in public.

That is the model. Say things that can be checked later. Everything else is furniture.