On the brink....

 

Yes, it's that time again.

The Community Shield game - English football's traditional curtain-raiser event to herald the imminent resumption of the Premier League - will kick-off at Wembley this Sunday afternoon, at 3pm, BST (that's 2pm UTC, because English clocks 'go forward' during the summer months). It's a 'super cup' kind of affair, between last season's winners of the two main domestic trophies, the Premier League Championship and the FA Cup. This time, of course, that's going to be Liverpool v Crystal Palace.

This charity fund-raising game had long been dismissed as just another meaningless 'friendly'. But in recent years, the participating clubs have been mostly starting to take it much more seriously - seeing it as potentially a rather more serious and useful test than the majority of pre-season games (largely on overseas 'goodwill' tours, where youth players often get as many minutes as the established starters), and an opportunity to throw down an intimidating marker to their rivals for the season ahead.

There might be a bit more intensity to this year's game if we had Arsenal or Chelsea or Manchester City in it, one of the teams expected to put up the best challenge to Liverpool retaining their league crown. Palace will probably again be content with a mid-table finish in the league. But on their day, they can be very dangerous. And they already pulled off something of a 'giant-killing' feat at this venue just a few months ago when they got a deserved win over City in the Cup Final.

It could be a very, very good game, I think.

And it will be (would be...) interesting to get a close-up view of the new-look Liverpool for the first time, after this frenzied summer of transfer activity.

But, unfortunately, most of us will probably never know what the new Liverpool are looking like, or how good the game was - as TNT Sports, a pay-per-view media behemoth, has just acquired the rights to the event, and it won't be appearing on any of the UK's terrestrial channels this year - as it has done, as far as I recall, for decades now. Very sad.

I suppose we'll probably be able to dredge up some highlights on Youtube eventually, but that won't really give us a proper picture of how the game unfolded, or a feel of the occasion. (Oh, it seems there should be a proper highlights show on the BBC in the evening. That should be quite a bit better. Um, nope! I'm sure I'd seen a highlights programme on the Beeb advertised only a few days before, but it did not happen. The TNT rights-purchase seems to have happened at the very last minute, creating a lot of confusion as to what additional TV coverage there might still be. What a mess.)

Even if the big day out at Wembley excites little interest in itself for some football fans, it does serve as a useful reminder to everyone that the beginning of the new football season is drawing near.

After this game, sometime next week (not too soon!), we can finally start thinking about selecting our FPL squads for this year.