UEFA cocked up the draw for the second phase of the Champs League, in such a way that Arsenal were the only English club playing on our match nights. How on earth were ITV going to manage to give preference to Man Utd (and Liverpool?).

Well, according to Chris Parry (who spoke to someone at ITV earlier today), when ITV announce their Champs Lge TV schedule later today we're going to find that they've rearranged things so as to avoid showing our first match live.

In that first week, Liverpool play Barca on the Tuesday, clashing with Man Utd vs Bayern Munich. Arsenal play Deportivo on the Wednesday. So if they went by their previous system, we'd be live on ITV1 (terrestrial) on the Wednesday, while Man Utd and Liverpool shared the ITV digital channels on the Tuesday.

But it seems that they're going to change the policy, and show a game live on ITV1 on the Tuesday and not on the Wednesday. Apparently Carlton are being offered the chance to show the Arsenal game on the Wednesday as well, but if their track record is anything to go by, they'll choose not to do this and we'll be on digital only that night (as Chris says though, best to wait and see exactly what our complaint is going to be before we make it).

ITV's excuse is really laughable. They claim to be trying to show each of the 3 teams live on ITV1 twice. So our subsequent Wednesday matches against Juventus and Leverkusen will preumably be shown on terrestrial TV, while Liverpool and Man Utd get 2 each as well.

On the face of it, this appears reasonable.

But hold on a sec, wouldn't it have been reasonable in the first phase too? In case you've forgotten, in the first phase we had 1 ITV1 match, Liverpool had 2, and Man Utd had 3.

By refusing to mess about with their schedules, and simply showing the Wednesday matches as drawn by UEFA according to their previous policy, ITV could have evened things out so that at the end of the second phase all 3 teams had been shown live on terrestrial telly 4 times.

But no, that would have been fair. Instead, under the guise of fair play, they concoct a way of making the score Man Utd 5, Liverpool 4, Arsenal 3. They'll bleat about the Liverpool and Man Utd matches being bigger events, but arguments along those lines never affected them when they worked in our favour.

Well played ITV. We've got used to the way you treat us as a second class club, but this is your most imaginatively nasty move yet.