Читать книгу Jelleyman’s Thrown a Wobbly: Saturday Afternoons in Front of the Telly - Jeff Stelling - Страница 6

‘You're not even watching football on the telly. You're watching a programme on the telly, where four blokes are watching football … on the telly!’

Stop for a moment and see yourself meeting someone who has never seen Soccer Saturday before. This is difficult I know, but perhaps suspend your disbelief by picturing them as Martians or new Chelsea fans. Then, with this alien concept in mind, imagine explaining the basic idea of the show to these unfortunate souls. Believe me: it's not as easy as it sounds.

You will, of course, start by explaining that this football programme doesn't show any real, actual football. There are no goals, shots or near misses on the telly, so it's a bit like watching Derby County. You'll explain that the closest things to action are the replays of last week's goals in three hours of football analysis, discussion and general messing about that precedes the 90 minutes of match drama on a Saturday afternoon. And that the real drama takes place as the latest scores and events stream onto the TV screen on a computerized videprinter, while four men of varying ‘expertise’ – all of them former professional footballers – sit in front of TV screens displaying their designated matches, pull on headphones, and relay the afternoon's action with a series of gasps, groans, girly yelps and ‘Oh, oh, no, oh, ooooohs!’

You'll probably confuse your enthralled audience further by adding that the roll-call of experts includes a former football playboy (‘Champagne’ Charlie Nicholas), a one-eyed Liverpool fan and former England captain (Phil ‘Thommo’ Thompson), a former Southampton legend who dated an Australian soap legend (Matt ‘Le Tiss’ Le Tissier), and a controversial midfielder who once shared a house with Gazza and could be considered as a football equivalent to Amy Winehouse (Paul ‘Merse’ Merson).

But hang on a second! Curtail their confusion by explaining that this car crash of information, goals, bookings, red cards, referee blunders and substitutions is held together by ‘Jeff's masterful handling of the latest football results’ (GQ magazine, apparently – many thanks), as somehow, drawing all this together with a relatively calm head and a prayer to the TV gods, I perch on a precarious chair at the end of a desk as ‘anchorman’, with some notes and a dossier of information by way of reference while making some semblance of order from the chaos going on around the country.

Sounds strange when explained this way, doesn't it? But bizarrely, in this format, Soccer Saturday has drawn a cult following of fans, which is probably unsurprising given that, between the hours of three o'clock and four forty-five on a Saturday afternoon, it is the only place to receive a continual stream of match-related stats, facts and trivia, without suffering whatever it is Peter Schmeichel is waffling on about on BBC One. And if you haven't got a satellite dish, or even a cheap digital package from the local supermarket (shame on you), then you may have seen my mug gurning from a TV in your local Dixons as you've traipsed around the shops and peered at the half-time scores. This, if you are uninitiated to the programme (and if that's the case, I can only assume that you've been bought this book as a badly-planned present from a none-too-popular auntie), is Soccer Saturday. Hopefully you'll enjoy the show, and thanks for watching.