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says alot for Shearer that he was calling David Silva, Villa all the way through his analysis until Lineker corrected him!

Very nice blog entry SP. Like yourself I feel quite strong about this topic and its annoying as feck when you hear and see things like that. I'd imagine it annoys the hell out of most calcio fans, but particularly those like yourself and myself who are surrounded by the hype and glory of the all-powerful and mighty Premierleague. Like Tom says, stereotypes and cliches will always exist and are very hard to lose, but even more so because of the subject at hand in this case. Another important factor to remember is that pundits in the UK – not just on Sky Sports but also on ITV and even BBC – are, quite simply, idiots. I don't know about you but I have little time for the likes of Shearer, Dixon and Lineker and rarely listen to them, at least not for their footballing insight. That would apply to a lot of pundits I guess. I also believe that a lot of people continue with the old "Italian football is boring" for the most obvious of reasons, in that they simply don't watch it. The likes of Sky Sports never bothered showing Italian football even though it easily could have, and so it did not get aired or highlighted in the UK for a long time, but now with Setanta and ESPN showing lots of calcio weekly that is changing, and so hopefully in time the most annoying of calcio cliches may change too.

while i agree about the cliche of footballing cliches, i think yesterday's game between chelsea and citeh would be a bad example to exploit the argument because it was, from most of the match reports, not an open game. apparently, chelsea took only 1 shot in the first half.

i agree with everything you said in the first paragraph and with regards to the second paragraph its an unavoidable fact that Serie A is a slower paced game, but i kept track for a few weeks last season and on average out of 10 weeks Serie A had a higher goals per game and goals socred in total compared to the EPL, unless chelsea had a stormer and battered somebody 7-0!

One of the problems is that stereotypes and cliches are very hard to root out once they've become established since they require only a very little nourishment to be kept alive: that is, it only takes one dour game in 10, say, to allow the cliche to be trotted out and so kept current. On the other hand, it requires quite a lot of energy for them to be overturned: an improbable 8 end-to-end, attack-focused crackers every weekend for a year, say. And so even if there are objectively fewer dull, defensive games in Serie A than in the Premiershite (let's say), the difference is unlikely to be enough to overturn the cliche. Another problem, of course, is that it suits the English pundits to propagate the cliche: it suits both themselves and their viewers to be able to continue to believe in the myths the Premiershite has constructed about itself.

On the other hand, I do tend to think that Serie A as a whole produces more tactically careful games and games which are played at a slower pace than the Premiershite does (Italian teams are more inclined to press only within their half rather than higher up the pitch). This is one of the reasons I find Serie A more interesting to watch - because relentless hustle and bustle is, for me, at least, rather more boring and unimaginative in its own way.