A high price for football’s small talk

It is hard to imagine now, but as lately as 16 years ago it hadn’t crossed the fine minds at Sky Sports that people would watch men watching football.

So Jeff Stelling — in turn with Paul Dempsey — presided instead over Sports Saturday; a bit of everything and mainly nothing. It was the kind of setup that broadcast horse racing on ice, or where a synchronised swimming troupe would arrive in studio to perform their full routine, only to find the scarcity of water make them look like, as Paul Merson would later put it, a fish up a tree.

But in 1998 somebody had the big idea and the terrible beauty of Soccer Saturday was born. Even then, nobody was convinced this could work. So George Best, Frank McLintock and the lads would chat about the upcoming matches until around ten-to-three when they would hide from view somewhere else in the studio and ‘phone’ in their match reports — as though they had been teleported to the grounds.