The Football League Play-Offs

It's currently 3.38pm, we're 38 minutes into the championship play-off final between Cardiff City and Blackpool, and so far it's the team from Wales that are leading 2-1 in the glorious sunshine of Wembley stadium.

Scratch that, Blackpool have just equalised, it's 2-2 now. This pretty much encapsulates what the play-off system is all about. It takes four teams whose seasons might otherwise be over, and injects some interest into the last few weeks of the season for them. This game has so far been an end to end affair with each team giving as good as they get.

It's now 3-2 to Blackpool with 46 minutes gone...

A friend of mine is a Nottingham Forest supporter. He recently complained to me that the newest member of the English Premier League family will either be Welsh, or a club with a three sided stadium. Sour grapes you might say, especially since it was the club with the three sided stadium that knocked his beloved Forest out of the play-offs this season. In truth this is regularly one of the best games of the season, and not just because the winner gets a place in the English Premier League and all the financial bonuses that come with that (approximately £90m). It's a day out, it's the sort of thing that years later you can tell people you were there.

As of this moment Blackpool look as though they will be in the Premiership next year, if the championship didn't run the play-off system they would have been 9 points short of 3rd place and have nothing to play for. Is that fair on Nottingham Forest who finished 3rd this year? No, but it makes for a much more entertaining end of season and gives 6 sets of fans across 3 divisions a memorable day out at Wembley, a place that is hard enough to get to with the premier league's dominance of cup competitions.

On a side note, the Champions League Final should never have been moved to a Saturday, now i have to wait until Monday to talk about it around the water cooler...

Robinho