Originally Posted by bwfcol:
“Good news
Everyone's favourite Robbie Savage is on Leicester vs Arsenal for BT tomorrow and not 606. Chris Waddle replaces him on 606.”
So due to the Olympics and BT, 606 will have neither of its regular presenters this week (though hardly the only shown affected).
After Waddle's 'They're a bunch of headphones' rant, he'll fit in perfectly on 606.
Not great news on Savage - but to be expected I guess. I just hope he's left as a pundit rather than commentary. He was good at the Euros on commentary but at times he's been truly awful in some of the BT 3-man teams.
On Darke, have to say I follow him on Twitter and haven't seen the tweet - any idea when it was posted?. Would be interesting to see it.
I don't think he can mean the whole season - I mean BT have only announced games until the end of November and while I don't know much at all about commentary assignments I'm not even sure they'd know those up to then let alone to the end of the season.
And it's important to remember there are plenty of international breaks coming up which makes any lack of games sound more dramatic than it is. 'No PL games for a month' on BT would actually probably mean just not doing 2 PL games.
That said not a great decision if so. I thought the previous arrangement was quite good - Fletcher and Darke mainly splitting games so while Darke was Number 2 (and the merits or not of that have been discussed several times) he still got some good games.
As others have said, Darke is a top-class commentator who deserves to be doing big games and it's a shame BT are seemingly demoting him. However, it's important to remember he will still be doing some form of CL and EL games. If he isn't doing any English team for those that is the point he should consider his options.
That said Darke was in the opposite situation with Tyler back at the start of this thread 12 years ago and he's probably more than aware of what the commentary world is like than any of us are.
These decisions certainly aren't helping Fletcher on here though. I don't think he's half as bad as he's made out to be on here but BT constantly pushing him over as high-quality an operator as Darke just leads to greater scrutiny and criticism on his commentaries.
Doesn't help either that he's above Drury or the fantastic Derek Rae.
Though let's be clear it's not just BT that rate him - once he was no longer able to do 606, 5Live made sure to accomodate him a new weekly slot in their schedule so they clearly rate him too.