Scott is breath of fresh air on TV’S big kick-off
AAppointing her had predictably upset the easily triggered, but she is the new broom the format needed
nd so football has returned to our screens and sporting lives. Or top-flight English football at least: my own team, Hibernian, have already managed to qualify for the quarter-finals of the Scottish League Cup, and get knocked out of continental competition by an obscure Balkan outfit, and the Lord’s Test has not even finished yet. Even by Scottish standards, less a European adventure than a mini-break.
But for the media and the TV at least, it all began on Friday, with Brentford v Arsenal opening the opening weekend, and the Premier League’s 10½-month burlesque empire is now back to dominate all, to force all other sports to play for silver.
Football Focus on BBC One welcomed a new permanent host in the denim-clad shape of Alex Scott; Match of the Day’s Gary Lineker also sported a jean shirt, possibly a subliminal wardrobe message to help establish Scott as part of the presentational furniture, possibly evidence that they were looking out for the licence fee-payers’ interests with a tasty two-for-one at Matalan.
A pre-credits “cold open” on Saturday morning had Scott, with wingmen Micah Richards and Dion Dublin backstage at a studio, teasingly asking each other if there was anything new about the programme? Just Dion’s outfit and Micah’s haircut, they mischievously concluded.
The appointment of Scott to the programme had predictably upset the easily triggered, but seems to me just the sort of new broom that this vintage format needed. I had stopped watching Football Focus some years ago, finding its approach a bit too children’s TV, but this seemed an efficient and thorough scene-setter for the weekend, taking in a bit of human interest in a young Brentford fan with Down’s syndrome, a catch-up with Trent Alexander-arnold, an interview with Lionel Messi, no less, and various other bits of preview, transfer round-up, gentle football chat and general affability from three highly likeable broadcasters.
It is not easy to call to mind that many programmes where all three experts on display are black; football continues to do plenty for representation on screen.
Also on the you-have-to-see-itto-be-it tip, there was an advert for the Hundred, with enthusiastic boys and girls extolling the appeal of something called cricket. That sport might find itself nine wickets down and in all sorts of trouble, but maybe the BBC can yet help it mount a Headingley 1981-style Lazarus manoeuvre. Joe Root’s heroics, at least, are on BBC Two in the evening. Maybe football can give other sports a hand up rather than crushing them.
Perhaps it is because the time difference in Tokyo had made the Olympics less essential, perhaps the lack of fans, perhaps that the BBC could not show as much as it once did, but there was less of a grinding of gears post-games and into the football season than we have had to endure in the social media clickbait era.
This has usually been a weekend when loudmouths and blowhards who care little for any sport browbeat us with their calls for footballers’ wages to be given to triple jumpers, comparing critically the excesses of Premier League prima donnas with the humble heroism of our golden kayakers and taekwondistas. Mercifully quieter this year: maybe that sprinter’s difficulties might have helped.
Yesterday, of course, meant the return of the Super Sunday behemoth on Sky Sports. Gary Neville, the leader of the opposition, has been in recess by his own prolific standards for a few weeks, his one-man assault on global capitalism afforded a short staycation. But on the weekend’s evidence, he and all the other Sky big beasts appear set fair for another season of high drama, bickering and barely-regulated hysteria.
Nice to have them back, and Match of the Day too, Lineker reassuringly familiar with his dad jokes about Burnley and Brighton starting the day in the top four by dint of the alphabet.
Football is back, as are fans, and as ever there will be all that you could possibly want of it, and probably quite a lot more besides.