Yesterday evening and tonight, football fans all across Europe will have settled down with their cans of beer, pizza boxes, team colours on and watched the people they support deliver hopefully their best performance of the season. Games are played at a convenient 7:45pm and the only barrier to entry is typically having Sky Sports and an interest in football.

However, for the world of politics, despite the lack of barriers, there is no prime time equivalent.

Ed Miliband delivered his set piece speech yesterday early afternoon, arguably his most important of the year. The speech itself had been heavily trailed such that those lucky enough to see it live largely knew what was coming. So, not many people will dig out the footage and watch it in its entirety and certainly very few people, if any, will call in pizza, get their friends round and have a few beers on the go for the occasion.

Most people, probably myself included, will learn of Ed’s speech through the prism of the television and newspaper media. I’m certainly not going to give in to the Labour leader’s game of kiss-chase to see what was said, as it was said, for the same reasons for why I wouldn’t watch games of football in the evening if they had been played during that day.

I believe this is a terrible shame.

The expenses scandal, the tuition fees issue, the too-centralised party structures and so on has resulted in a public regard for politics being stuck in a rut. There is too little access to the decision-makers of parties these days and, even when they do appear on our screens, it is often to deliver well rehearsed lines that have had their life spun out of them. Who can forget let alone forgive Robotic Ed’s delivery of the same line over and over again?

Well, here was a chance for Ed to show that he has some life about him, to cut out the middle man and tell us all something from the heart, with passion, in the hope that we’d sit up and take notice. Hope that we’d fall a little bit in love with Politics again. Just a little bit.

Alas, Ed went with the media-friendly option of remaining largely anonymous to the UK and deprived us of getting to know him a bit more.

The Telegraph can’t say Barcelona didn’t score a goal when they actually did, but it can say Ed Miliband missed an opportunity with his speech when he actually delivered a barnstormer, because barely anyone is going to tune in and watch the delivery to check.

The thing is, Labour even know this is the case. Ed Miliband has been talking for months about how he needs to stand up against the old broken ways of the mainstream media and stand up for Britain and yet here is providing advanced copies to journalists and delivering speeches to their timelines. Furthermore, Sadiq Khan MP told a Fringe event “many of you will wake up tomorrow and be disappointed by the coverage Ed gets”, which makes it all the more bizarre that the message isn’t sent to us directly.

It’s not for me to say how political parties should run their affairs but imagine David Cameron or Alex Salmond or Nick Clegg or Ed Miliband taking to the lectern in the evening and noone knowing what they are about to say, nothing has been leaked to the press. The speech is delivered to sizeable television audiences and a packed to the rafters conference hall. The public discusses the content from sofas in the evening and, who knows, maybe even the next day at work with colleagues. Meanwhile delegates at the Conference celebrate the end of a hard day and head into the hotel bar or local pub, swiftly followed by the party leader, also done for the day, who is welcomed with rapturous applause before he or she does the rounds talking with party members from the top of the tree to the bottom in a scene of general bonhomie.

You can keep your Man Utd vs Basles or your Celtic vs Udineses, that’s your Theatre of Dreams right there, that’s a political Paradise as far as I can see.

So come on, let’s bring back great political speeches. Let’s not just leave it all to Obama. A good place to start is bringing a bit of theatre to proceedings, or even just showing some of them on TV.

Anyway, I might as well go off and watch the end of the Man Utd game now, there’s precious little else on after all…