Petty, ill-informed and 25: Off The Ball’s unlikely tag team celebrate silver anniversary of show no one expected would go into extra time

Greeeeeeetings: Football’s odd couple tell all after a quarter of a century sharing laughs, friendship and a radio studio

It is the self-proclaimed pettiest, most ill-informed football show on the radio but, after 25 years, for many Scottish football fans it remains the funniest.

Radio Scotland’s

Off The Ball was never expected to run for a quarter of a century when it started in 1994 with three unknown names cracking gags about the beautiful, and sometimes not so beautiful, game.

While two of the hosts of the first season went on to the obscurity of a niche comedy show called Still Game, host Tam Cowan became a mainstay long after Greg Hemphill and Sanjeev Kohli had been subbed.

And this year the show achieved a silver anniversary, a milestone nobody could have predicted when it was launched.

After its first run of 30-minute shows, the format was rejigged, bringing in football analyst, media polymath and St Johnstone fan Stuart Cosgrove as the intellectual foil to the pies-and-pints of co-host Cowan’s Lanarkshire wit.

And it has always played to its strengths – off-beat analysis and reflection on the highs and lows of all things Scottish football, and very often none of them.

Cosgrove was 42 when he joined the year-old programme, and Cowan, an acerbic newspaper football columnist, was 25.

They’ve since embedded themselves in the country’s cultural landscape, as the “odd couple of Scottish football” and feature in a BBC Scotland documentary to be shown this week.

Here, we sneak into the Off The Ball training camp to get each host’s candid views on the other.