After a long and frustrating phone conversation with a stupid woman at my currently to remain nameless broadband/TV company, I resigned myself to having to wait another week before I got Sky. With this in mind I decided the pub was probably the best place to watch Everton vs Manchester United but through a combination of late sleeping and extreme laziness I decided – at about 12.42 – that that wasn’t going to happen and that instead I’d watch the match on the Internet.

Those of us who have watched football on the Internet before (through clearly legal and upstanding means of course) are in almost unanimous agreement that – no matter what the FA thinks – it isn’t the future. After a few minutes trying to find a feed that didn’t look like footage from the moon, I finally found a fairly clear one in Arabic. Arabic commentators are interesting creatures, seemingly under the impression they’re delivering radio commentary for a horse race rather than aid to a visible football match. They talk constantly. Much of this is taken up by constant repetition of the player in possession’s name - the longer he runs with it, the longer this goes on – just to reassure the blind or distracted that he’s still on the ball. Despite this, or maybe because of it, it somehow makes what’s happening seem far more exciting than it may actually be, such is their infectious enthusiasm for their job.

Eventually I found a better, clearer stream with a much larger picture and in English but not before I’d missed Dimitar Berbatov’s opening goal because my Arabic one had frozen, which is a constant problem with internet streams and one of the many reasons it isn’t the future of sports broadcasting along with clarity, cinematic-ness and bad posture.

Hunching over my desk, I loaded my newer, clearer stream just in time to see Diniyar  Bilyaletdinov wallop in an equalizer so hard it lifted the net off the ground. The Goodison crowd roused themselves from their routine of booing Rooney and shouting for handball at every opportunity and it suddenly looked like we had a game on our hands. There was a frantic pace about it in the first half with Rooney rounding Tim Howard but failing to score and Landon Donovan attempting to copy Paul Scholes’ new “standing leg shot” trick but to no avail. United had changed their recent winning away formation of 4-5-1 (acting occasionally as a 4-3-3 in attack) in favor of that good old stalwart 4-4-2, and while it seemed to be working fairly well in the latter half of the pitch, at the back Donovan and Saha had the measure of United’s weakened center back partnership. Jonny Evans didn’t seemed to have recovered from essentially being shouted at by his dad in front of all his friends on Tuesday night and Wes Brown could’ve conceded a penalty when the ball ricocheted off his arm only for Landon Donovan to scuff his shot.

At half time I tried to think of Neville Neville jokes as he’d been shown on a couple of occasions watching his two boys captain their respective sides. The problem with Neville Neville jokes is that it seems too easy, but if you do eventually think of one that’s quite funny you’re sure it’s probably less funny than something someone else has come up with before. After 10 minutes of trying to work out something along the lines of “Jo-Jo, Djemba Djemba and Neville Neville walk into a bar” I gave up (partially because Jo Jo was the only third person I could think of and I really wasn’t happy with that) and waited for the second half to begin.

The first thing I noticed from the second 45, was that the Everton fans had hit upon a good solution to the problem of  keeping former prodigal Wayne Rooney quiet – Keep quiet themselves. It finally seems to have occurred to football fans that booing an opposition player only generally succeeds in making them play better. Today they gave him a halfhearted chorus at the start but then forgot about it pretty much by the end and with seemingly nothing to rise too - and no vitriolic opportunities to badge kiss - he was relatively threat-less. His frustration wasn’t helped by the removal of Berbatov, but Everton can’t be denied their credit.

Leon Osman was superb for most of the match, as was Sylvain Distin and Steven Pienaar and the introduction of Gosling and Rodwell (who I always imagine as Gobbling and Rodwell, a porn detective duo from the 1970s I invented in my head when they first broke on the scene) were inspired, especially compared to Fergie’s rather odd decisions to bring off a striker for a midfielder with the scores still level.

After Gosling had put the Toffees in front my stream decided to freeze again so as quick as I could I opened another - rather rubbish moon stream - in another window. The clearer stream then decided it was going to start working again – sporadically - but a good minute and a half behind the other one, so I kept flicking between the two in the hope that the good one would eventually stop freezing whilst still keeping up to date with what was going on in actual time. This meant I had to watch something I’d just watched, all be it in much better quality, and then jump a minute and a half into the future whenever it froze again, missing anything that may have happened in between. This I decided was a nice little analogy for life – While you may think the past looks better to you, if you stay stuck in it too long you’ll miss what’s happening now. Happy with this insight, both my streams decided to bring me back down to earth by freezing at the same time meaning I was back to Arabic for the last five minutes where the commentator had worked himself up into such an excitable frenzy of name shouting I’d have been forgiven for thinking I’d just stumbled upon footage of the great final battle for humanity between Ninja Jesus and the King Fu Anti-Christ.

As the final whistle blew I reflected on a deserved victory for Everton and the mouth-watering prospect of getting Sky Sports next week, thus rendering my need for inconsistent and appalling quality football coverage obsolete. Except for 3pm kick off’s and untelevised interesting foreign matches of course…But I still refuse to accept it’s the future.