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Donal Scully

As action moves into gear across Europe so CABLE Sport's schedules become ever more bloated with football.

  The Premiership is in full swing now but this week sees the big kick-off in Italy.

  CABLE have beefed up their Serie A package this time with a new three-year contract that means there will be four live matches most weeks.

   In previous seasons Italian games were only shown live here if they did not clash with Premiership ones. This campaign, CABLE are increasing the viewers' options by using an alternate channel.

  This has happened before in the event of FA Cup ties with clashing kick-off times. From now on it will be a regular thing for the Youth Music Channel (Channel 5) to be given over to football from 9pm to 6am each night.

  The new arrangement will allow the showing of live Italian games simultaneously with Premiership ones, which will continue to be the main attraction on CABLE's Channel 6.

   Those two channels will be renamed Sports Channel 1 (formerly Channel 6) and Sports Channel 2 (formerly Channel 5).

  Serie A will be the backbone of Sports Channel 2 programming with assorted other sports filling the rest of the time.

  Each week there will be four live Italian games, two each on Saturday and Sunday, plus taped games during the week, a highlights show on Wednesday and a weekend preview on Friday.

  All told there will be 128 live Serie A matches this season. In the event of no live games being scheduled (such as the weekend before an international) then Sports Channel 2 will show four of the remaining games from the previous week's programme.

  Among this week's four matches we will be able to see Milan, Juventus and Lazio in action.

  This expanded Italian coverage means all three of Europe's top leagues will be getting extensive air time in the SAR this year.

  Spanish League coverage started last week on both STAR and ESPN with Barcelona, Real Madrid and Athletic Bilbao all on view. Real are back again this week, as are Atletico Mad-rid and Deportivo La Coruna.

  TVB Pearl has resumed it's German Bundesliga show on Sunday mornings. This hour-long programme is great value.

 Manchester United fans get an extra treat (as if they needed one) on ESPN with the one-hour show A Year to Remember plus re-runs of their Champions League quarter-final matches against Inter Milan and the semi-finals against Juventus.

  According to ESPN the Inter games are being shown in reverse order with the second leg in Milan first. This could be a mistake, so beware.s 



CABLE's new deal means 128 live Serie A games this season