The Times review of Saturday's coverage.
Quote:
“Was this the start of a new football season? Or were we present at the dawn of television itself? “These are LIVE shots from Anfield,” breathed an amazed Jake Humphrey as the miracle of moving pictures cohered behind him on the walls of BT Sport’s shopping-centre studio. “Look at these.” A blimp hovered over an empty football ground. The British weather obligingly spattered the camera lens with rain. “What’s it like in that city ahead of a new season?” Humphrey asked, undeterred. “It’s absolutely crazy,” Steve McManaman attested.
This was after Primal Scream had blessed the occasion by performing Come Together, BT Sport’s chosen anthem. “I’m free, you’re free,” Bobby Gillespie sang. “Though only to existing BT Broadband customers who are prepared to renew their contract for a further 12 months,” he somehow neglected to add.
Primal Scream are the perfect band for BT Sport, being about 98 per cent derivative. No shame in that, of course. It’s just that, even as your foot taps, you can’t quite shake off the feeling that all this was done, slightly more excitingly, by other people a long time ago.
Half-time on this self-described “revolutionary” channel was four blokes at a desk, the usual replays and the professionally unsmiling Owen Hargreaves saying: “He’ll be disappointed that he hasn’t done better.” Then it was back to Anfield and David James, standing beside the pitch and rambling on until Ray Stubbs, realising he was going nowhere, loudly stopped him.
There was no containing Humphrey, though. “What a reintroduction to the Premier League . . . What a great start . . . It’s been great, hasn’t it? A great start to the season . . . ” The nadir was reached when Humphrey attempted to channel his enthusiasm for 45 minutes of Liverpool v Stoke into a trail for BT Sport’s next match. “If that game is anything to go by, it’s going to be pretty special.” The notion that anything can be inferred about the likely entertainment value of Fulham v Arsenal from the quality of a match played a week earlier by two other teams is not one that can be sensibly entertained, except by someone being paid to sell football, and selling it too hard.
Innovation seemed to have been largely limited to the on-screen positioning of the logo and the clock. Other broadcasters go top; BT Sport has gone bottom. It’s the biggest risk they have taken. The most obvious opportunity to be properly revolutionary has been spurned: there are no women anywhere. On the plus side, a touchingly nervous Mark Halsey comes in to give a former referee’s view, although, as with goalline technology, the story of the season could be how infrequently we genuinely need to hear from him.
Meanwhile, a man in purple trousers has been employed to sit at a computer screen and monitor unspecified “social media” for “positivity” or “negativity”, about, say, Arsenal, represented as percentages — thus reducing the pop and crackle of instant messaging to a dull High Street poll. Otherwise, it’s screeds and screeds of by-the-yard punditry with Tony Pulis agreeing with Humphrey that this is “a massive season for Liverpool”.
But what other kind of season is there nowadays? The arrival of BT Sport has raised the temperature across the board. The heat could be felt on Sunday in Niall Quinn’s suggestion that Roberto Soldado’s goal for Tottenham was “a fantastic penalty”, rather than just a penalty. And it could be felt, emphatically, in Sky Sports’ new Saturday Night Football output, which has drafted a Top Gear-style live audience, who chiefly stand around in the gloom but occasionally whoop to order. What this adds is hard to calculate, beyond an extra flush on the faces of the presenters and a rise in the volume and pitch of their voices. It’s the channel’s worst idea in 20 years.
You would suppose all this spelt doom for the BBC’s Match of the Day. With its crusty adherence to highlights, its careful antipathy to giant touchscreens and honking onlookers, MOTD is dial-up in a wi-fi world — a horse brass in the window of Carphone Warehouse. And yet, at the same time, it is open to the truth, well understood by supporters, that football doesn’t exist in a permanent shower of sponsored fireworks but is very often, on the contrary, an exercise in frustration and even misery. Accordingly, the show finds room to be unfashionably proportionate in its reactions and wouldn’t dream of drawing an unstable link between a solitary Daniel Sturridge goal at Anfield and the likelihood that Fulham v Arsenal this Saturday will be a cracker.
On Saturday, one watched with growing relief as Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Danny Murphy said mostly sensible things about stuff that had actually happened. It felt like a refuge — perhaps even the only sane place left.”
). Although some custom will come from pubs that used to subscribe to Sky, I suspect that they'll get new subscribers from pubs that haven't previously bought in sports TV.
