Last week I did something terrible. After many happy years of devotion and loyalty I was unfaithful (Mrs Mike, please put that frying pan down and hang on). I tried something new.
At first it felt exciting, a change from the usual same thing you experience week in and week out.
But I soon felt dirty, guilty and ultimately unsatisfied. I wanted the new relationship to work out. I tried to go in with an open mind. On another day without the competition of old faithful it may have lasted longer, but I did ultimately go back.
I may give the new relationship another try in the future, but I now know it has so much to live up to.
Anyway, before that frying pan does get wrapped around my head I must declare I was in fact unfaithful to Sky’s flagship football programme Soccer Saturday.
The hussy who tempted me with their wayward charms, and glint in their eye, was a new pretender to the throne, BT Score.
For more years than I can remember, Jeff Stelling et al have been there for me. Always friendly, making me feel welcome, and giving me instant updates of how well the Hammers are faring and how well my bookmaker is doing in relieving me of my cash in my traditional 2 accumulators that afternoon.
We’ve been through joy and sadness. Jeff has given me a 95th minute penalty winner for Forest Green Rovers to turn what looked like a losing four team bet in to a glorious winning one. On the flip side he has also given me many, many examples of teams losing games that were ‘bankers’ on my betting slip.
But I always forgive him.
And up till now Jeff and the team have had a pretty clear run at my affections.
Nobody has had the infrastructure to attempt putting together a programme like it. The BBC of course has Final Score, but it is a half hearted affair, mainly only starting from half time and often relegated to the red button. The only excuse for tuning in is to see how many pies and donuts Garth Crooks has consumed that week.
But now the TV football, and sport in general, landscape is changing. BT have thrown serious money at hoovering up broadcasting rights and personalities, along with splashing big cash on glitzy presentation.
Up until now though, they haven’t attempted to take on Sky’s Saturday afternoon behemoth.
Obviously feeling confident they have everything in place to take a good stab at making a similar programme they have gone all out to woo people across.
Their big coup (and the reason I tuned in) was the hiring of Mark Pougatch to front BT Score. Mark has for a long time been the radio equivalent of Jeff Stelling on BBC Radio 5 Live. Holding together several hours live programming whilst whisking us to reporters around grounds, keeping everyone up to date with scores, results and information.
Pougatch has the same unflustered style as Stelling, with an air of confidence that he knows what he is talking about and won’t send you wrong.
The Soccer Saturday format is genius in its simplicity. Scores, information, simple easy to read graphics and a bit of ‘banter’.
BT know there is absolutely no point in reinventing the wheel. The best you can hope for is a set of fresh tyres and a different type of hub cap.
Their format therefore is the same but just polished a different way. Pougatch hosting 5 ‘experts’ who report on live games going on in front of them, jumping to various reporters around the grounds with a live videprinter showing goal news as they go in.
Instead of being behind a desk the experts have the luxury of a long sofa with a bank of monitors on the floor in front of them showing their particular live game.
The experts were the usual fare of ex pro’s and managers. Harry Redknapp, always good for a witty one liner, Dion Dublin being too cool for everyone.
It appears as if they will be having a rotating roster of pundits as only 2 of the 5 had appeared the previous week.
To make things a bit more ‘edgy’ Pougatch wandered around the studio, standing behind and talking to each expert as something happened in their games.
And that was about the long and the short of it. Just a slightly different take on a well tested format.
I stuck with it for about 30 minutes, but all the time I had nagging feelings in my brain. “Is Jeff coming out with puntastic one-liners?”, “Is Kammy making an idiot of himself somewhere , completing missing a goal?”, “Has Paul Merson formed a whole sentence in English?”
When my wife came in she summed it up, “oh no, that just doesn’t look right”.
And there lies the BT Score problem. Soccer Saturday is an institution and is ingrained in our televisual watching. The format and look has not changed for many years, because it doesn’t need to. It works.
Is BT Score a bad programme? Certainly not.
But my infidelity has taught me that you just can’t run in to the arms of another without realising in some cases what you had was pretty darn good.
COYI