By Alex Beazley-Long — February 2, 2012

The Super Bowl is fast approaching and once again it is that time of the year when everyone pretends to care about American football.

The cursory patronising articles in the newspapers, bars begging you to give them some rare Sunday service and TV channels goading you into justifying the money they paid for the right to show the ‘biggest game in the world’.

As a genuine fan of gridiron, I find this all to be rather annoying, as the sport is actually gaining in popularity in this country, and deserves more than the annual perfunctory hat-tip it currently garners.

As far as tangible evidence for this goes, there is the rampant success of the NFL International Series, which has sold-out an NFL regular season game at Wembley Stadium every year since 2007, and plans to do so until at least 2016.

The NFL itself estimates there to be around “11 million fans in the UK” and Sky Sports have seen their ratings for the sport increase by “91 per cent since 2006”, all of which the NFL is using as support for a potential London franchise in the future.

In terms of less tangible variables, the advent of the internet has obviously made American sports much more accessible to the modern fan. Those who were interested in the sport only 15 years ago had to rifle through papers to find minimalist box scores, whilst today fans can easily follow games as they happen on their phones.

Whilst the NFL has not embraced YouTube in the same way the NBA or NHL has (in fact they were one of the companies that supported the recent SOPA/PIPA bills in Congress), their website offers free highlights pretty much instantaneously, something the Premier League has failed to capitalise on in this country.

For the more dedicated, NFL Game Pass and Sky Sports offer high definition quality coverage of matches on their computers or televisions; and if they don’t feel like paying there are always the slightly more nefarious corners of the internet that offer alternatives.

Whether you are a diehard or not, this year’s game promises to be special as it is a rematch of Super Bowl 42, one of the best Super Bowls in recent memory and all-time classic.

In that game four years ago the underdog New York Giants beat the previously undefeated New England Patriots, preventing them from completing a staggering 19-0 season, as Eli Manning led a game-winning drive in the fourth quarter.

Whilst the squads involved this time are admittedly noticeably different from their last encounter on this grand stage, the fans will not have forgotten.

Some players and coaches may have moved on, but the head coach-quarterback combination for both teams remain, and once again New York’s Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning will be attempting to out-duel their more illustrious New England counterparts, the three time Super Bowl winning duo of Bill Bellichick and Tom Brady, who are appearing in their record-breaking fifth championship game together.

While all the headlines before and after the game will inevitably belong to the quarterbacks, I personally feel that they will not have that great an effect on the outcome of the game; instead the result will hinge on the performances of the Giants’ defensive line and the Patriots’ secondary.

The Giants pass rush is the best in the league, and if they can generate pressure on Brady and force him to make mistakes, they will be able to keep, and the score low, whilst Patriots’ secondary on the other hand is the league’s worst, something Manning and his receivers will look to exploit. An above average performance by them could well be enough though, whether they are up to this is debatable however.
History has already repeated itself to pit these teams against each other, and I suggest you tune in on 5th February to find out if we have another potential classic on our hands.