The UK's biggest commercial broadcaster has blamed an error by ITV's transmission provider, Technicolor, which resulted in coverage of the England versus USA match being interrupted for approximately 20 seconds on ITV1 HD.
It was long enough for newly subscribed HD viewers to miss Steven Gerrard's fourth minute goal.
Thousands of irrate fans turned to the web to voice their anger. Within hours an online spoof has been created to mock the blunder showing an scoring the winning goal in the 1966 World Cup final.
Meanwhile, a forum on the Digital Spy forums in a thread called ‘ITV miss another goal’ has attracted 90,396 posts.
One poster called Steveweiser said: "ITV just missed Gerrard’s goal! They did it again!", while Jaxkeser said: "I can’t believe that just happened!! 3 minutes in and they show adverts??!!."
Richard Cross, group technology director, ITV, said: "We apologise unreservedly to viewers for the unacceptable interruption to high definition coverage of the match.
"We met with Technicolor first thing this morning to put in place measures to address the issue and to ensure that Technicolor takes the appropriate action with immediate effect."
The blunder at the weekend follows last month.
In better news for the broadcaster, viewers for England's first World Cup match peaked at 20.1 million at 21:15, representing 73% of the TV watching audience and ITV's biggest TV moment since England played Sweden at the 2006 World Cup (watched by 20.9m).
A spokesman for ITV said ITV's Sport production team in South Africa were in no way responsible for the error which originated from the London control centre where Technicolor provides ITV with broadcast television services.
An average of 13.2 million people watched ITV's coverage between 6.15pm and 9.45pm across ITV1 and ITV1 HD, a 56% share of the available audience.
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