Blog: The hottest October day in 500,000 years (or something) came and went far too quickly on Saturday.

Stepping out into a sticky, summery heat as the light dimmed on the horizon left Britain with a thoroughly continental air.

It was, in short, the perfect sort of day to attend a football match. Mind you, in my book, any Saturday is a fine sort of a day to attend a football match.

One would hope that withthis new ability to watch football from across the globe in any pub you enter on a Saturday afternoon, that attitude will not change.

The value of television rights to the Premier League are one consequence of today’s ruling that pub landlady Karen Murphy could use a foreign decoder to screen live games on a Saturday afternoon.

It strips worth from the domestic ownership of television rights to games, and the announcement saw share prices at Sky plummet this morning.

There are those who follow lower league football, such as that enjoyed in Shropshire every Saturday, who might celebrate the have-nots landing a blow to the collective face of the haves who benefit from the millions pumped into the Premier League each year.

But rarely does such a blow land cleanly, and it should be with caution that fans of Shrewsbury and Telford, or other sides from the lower echelons of the footballing hierarchy, celebrate today’s announcement.

The reason this ruling needed to be made in the first place was that so many people would rather spend their Saturday afternoons slumped in front of a telly slurping Stella than supporting their local club in person.

And the legal right to show top level games between your Manchester Cities and your Liverpools deified in the national press and slobbered over because of, rather than in spite of, a lack of competitiveness, at the same time as Shrewsbury and Telford are playing at home can only strike a blow to the smaller clubs’ attendances.

The cynic in me can only imagine that the haves will decrease in number but strengthen against the pack, or split off to form a European ‘super’-league, burying the egalitarian base on which all football is constructed under dusty layers of hype and hyperbole.

All those who complain that supermarkets are taking over the high street must surely recognise that once more the little man trying to work in a community is being swallowed by multi-national brands, but while Tesco at least provide jobs and circulate some cash in the local area, Manchester United and Chelsea want to suck your money away.

It’s hard, as a lower league fan, not to feel a little schadenfreude seeing the value of Sky’s money buckle under new pressure, and the reasoning behind the decision to rule in favour of Karen Murphy seems to me to be sound.

Indeed, pubs should have no qualms about showing the games – they as much as any business need to attract customers wherever they can in an increasingly difficult climate for the licensed trade.

But clubs which work in the local area require the participation of the public, and this decision should only be taken as a pointer that now is not the time to be complacent – now is the time to show all the armchair supporters out there exactly what they are missing.