Happy birthday, Match of the Day.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Premier League season kicks off tomorrow, and with it, for a 50th year, returns the original television football programme.
But like many of us as we enter late middle-age, there are increasing signs of infirmity, and even suggestions from old friends that early retirement might not be out of the question.

The BBC’s relationship with televised sport, once all-embracing, is increasingly marginalised and irrelevant, caused by its loss of rights to the satellite companies and a terminal lack of budget. Maybe, too, the 24/7 digital age is hastening the moment when the controller of BBC1 decides the time has come to abandon a highlight packages show, pretending that no one already knows the scores, and the scorers, of games that finished five hours earlier.

The Saturday “Pinks”, the special edition of regional evening papers, have all but disappeared from around the country, out-dated by a range of devices, starting with steam wireless, but now extending through television, to smartphones and tablets. Might MOTD go the same way?

There was a time when Match of the Day, and the ITV Sunday lunchtime version, the Big Match, with their limited selection of a few minutes of highlights from three or four games, was the only football on our telly, apart from the occasional disaster of a live England game from Wembley or the annual jamboree of the FA Cup final itself. Now, there’s near-saturation coverage of football, especially Premier League football, with 154 matches being shown live this season by BSkyB and BTSport.

For anyone who isn’t in a ground on a Saturday afternoon (or Sunday lunchtime or Monday evening, as kick-off times are swapped around for the benefit of the TV schedulers) and is determined enough to see their team play, there’s usually a savvy pub landlord somewhere who has his satellite dish honed in on a Greek or Turkish channel. With the sound turned down, obviously.

And therein lies another problem for MOTD. Because besides just picking up the broadcasting crumbs from the table with its heritage highlights package, Match of the Day no longer offers anything distinctive. If you’ve already seen the game, or games, and found out all the rest of the results from Sky Sports News or online newspapers’ “live” blogs, what is there about the old programme to make even the most committed sports fan switch on? The charisma of Gary Lineker? Think again…

Matthew Norman pin-pointed another of BBC Sport’s problems in his Telegraph column this week when he asked: where have all the great commentators gone? 

“The elocuted Geordie elegance of Ken Wolstenholme, Barry Davies’s caustic, sometimes bombastic intelligence, and the infectiously nasal zeal of the early John Motson. Whatever you thought of them, their voices were as instantly recognisable as those of your closest family, and their verbal stylings equally distinct.

“These days, you would have to deploy the CIA’s most sophisticated voice analysis software to distinguish the seven or eight BBC TV commentators.”

It is not just in football that the BBC appears to be losing its great “Voice of …” [fill in name of sport to suit]: John Arlott in cricket; Dan Maskell in tennis; Harry Carpenter in boxing, verbal artists of the microphone who were taught to let the pictures do their talking for them. And when they had something to say, it was worth hearing.

Increasingly, Match of the Day’s future will depend on ratings, and possibly on what fraction of digital rights the BBC can hang on to as they stand on the sidelines watching Sky and BT slug it out in the next round of multi-billion-pound negotiations. But with hundreds of BBC News staff being axed to save money, trophy programmes such as MOTD with their mega-contracts for the likes of Alan Shearer, Phil Neville and Robbie Savage to spout punditry platitudes may be playing into the final few minutes of injury time.

ON THE TOPIC OF great commentators, which we sort of were, it is worth stating here that, by accident or design, the BBC has managed to find a winning team of live action commentators for its athletics coverage, which has been operating seemingly around the clock from the European Championships in Zurich this week.

If only they would make greater use of them.

Steve Cram, schooled in the Eurosport booth of day-long stints covering the arcanities of the women’s 50-kilometre hammer-throw, has been joined recently by the non-athlete Andrew Cotter, pictured above, a philosophy graduate who learned his trade covering golf, and thus provides some calm, intelligent wit. Backed up with former javelin world record-holder Steve Backley’s analytical approach to field events (when the director deigns to show any), this trio has done very well this summer, first in Glasgow at the Commonwealth Games and now Zurich.

But then the BBC goes and spoils it by indulging surely the most incoherent and inarticulate commentator known to the world in Brendan Foster, or by pretending that Denise Lewis or Colin Jackson really do have anything worth saying.

Much, especially production personnel, has changed since BBC Sport’s forced move to Salford in 2012, and not always for the better. But with their athletics coverage, just as with Match of the Day, the BBC would do well to return to an old guiding principle of less is usually more.

It took Des Lynam to say it, but Clare Balding might want to consider sticking to horse racing.

Lynam, the doyen of television sports presenters, emptied both barrels in his sport on TV column in the Telegraph today, accusing the BBC's coverage of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow of being everything from "amateurish" to Alan Partridge-like. And Balding was not immune from his criticism.

Few dare to challenge la Balding's status as a "national treasure", but as the former sports broadcaster of the year continues to appear on all our television and radio channels, sometimes apparently simultaneously, there is a growing sense of the Emperor's New Clothes about the phenomenon.

From fronting Channel 4's horse racing coverage (when she's available), to rugby league for the BBC, to Olympic and Commonwealth Games swimming, through the occasional walking or cycling travel shows on radio and TV, to her little-watched "chat" show on BT Sport, there seems to be no project that Balding will turn down. 

"She's in a trap of her own creation," one veteran television sports presenter - not Lynam - told me over lunch at Joe Allen's recently. "While she's flavour of the month, she's almost obliged to accept any reasonable offer of work. We all fear that the next call we get might be the last.

"What it demonstrates is the terrible lack of vision or imagination among some of our broadcasters' top executive producers - or a real dearth of presenting talent. But for Clare it is all a bit double-edged, because if she is over-exposed, the public may get bored of her, or the backlash might be bigger."

Balding, who had the privileged up-bringing of a woman whose father trained race horses for the Queen, knows racing inside out, and is also an adroit live presenter at most sports. Her folksy know-nothing approach can let her down sometimes, though. Such as when anchoring at the Tollcross pool in the past week and she asked how people recognised the black-hatted English swimmers. Neither Mark Foster nor Rebecca Adlington had the heart to point out that the swimmers are all in lanes for their races.

Lynam's broader criticism of BBC Sport's saturation coverage from Glasgow echoes complaints heard increasingly from other sources. 

The Blue Peter-isation of BBC sports coverage: not necessarily a direct criticism of those who have graduated from the children's programme, or Newsround, to grown-up sports and news programmes, but some of them really do need to realise that when your audience has an average age of more than 14, constantly patronising them can be a big turn-off.

The often complete absence of what might regarded as journalistic rigour about the cheer-leading style of presentation, with fawning interviews and frequently incoherent commentators, is intended to make sport appealing to those who have no interest in sport, without considering the obvious problem with such an approach.

The NBC-ification of BBC sports coverage: Lynam is from the Grandstand era, when the BBC had a bucket-full of sports rights and took it as its mission to show the best sport, live as it happened. 

Oh, how we Brits used to scoff when we heard that  American audiences did not see, say, the Olympic 100 metres final live as it happened, but were shown it on tape delay - and sometimes not at all if "Team USA" failed to deliver the anticipated success.

Alas, that's the way the BBC is going, preferring talking heads - often with little insight to offer - and pre-recorded "packages", rather than showing real, live sport. 

In Glasgow in the past week, for instance, nothing was shown of the men's high jump final until all had finished, and then just three jumps from the entire competition were broadcast. With the heptathlon - the seven-discipline event in which Jessica Ennis won gold at the London Olympic two years ago - the only second-day element shown live was final 800-metre run.

Red faces on the Red Button: The new-fangled digital offerings clearly need some work. With BBC1/2 and BBC3 providing recorded "features" and "human interest" content introduced by a dozen-strong team of presenters, in theory, the red button ought to allow the BBC to show all the sport, live as it happens, all the time. Yet somehow, at one point this week, the BBC managed to show live lawn bowls on BBC1 and BBC3 at the same time... Seriously.

The red button service for athletics was available only spasmodically, so that some competitions at Hampden Park just did not get shown. This was also where the BBC had hidden away the commentary "talents" of Rob "SHOUTS-every-OTHER-word" Walker and someone who really did sound like Alan Partridge. 

Too much of a good thing: No one at BBC Sport appears to have considered that, as Usain Bolt put it, the Commonwealth Games are "a bit shit". 

The London Olympics were rightly considered to be The Greatest Show on Earth. Sadly, no one seemed to have told Mishal Husain, the Radio 4 Today presenter, that she was at something called the Commonwealth Games and not at the Olympics, as she seemed to think on the first weekend of competition when doing the post-Breakfast Time slot. #Awkward

Wall-to-wall coverage for 12+ hours a day on BBC1/2 may have been justified for the Olympic Games, but Glasgow 2014 was not London 2012. An event called the "triathlon mixed relay", in which there were just nine competing teams, including one from the Isle of Dogs, and in which one of the competitors did breaststroke on the swim (and only one of those stats is made-up) really doesn't cut it as world-class sport deserving of more than an hour's live coverage. 

Not that any of this is likely to see the senior producers at BBC Sport change what, undoubtedly, will be described as their "direction of travel" when they get together in one of their "break-out areas" at the head office in Salford.