RTÉ boys? They go too far
On the coverage by RTÉ analysts...
“I think it goes too far. I think they’re too critical. What I’ve seen of them I think they go a step too far.
JEFF STELLING: I think it’s fair to say that in the early days there was never a bad game on Sky. Never, ever. Picture: PAl
RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB: “We’ve had people come in that just haven’t quite gelled with the other guys. You’ve got to be a team player. And you’ve got to be thick-skinned, because you’re going to have the mickey taken out of you — frequently.” Picture: PAI
HARLIE NICHOLAS understands. It’s okay, he’s not offended. He might be over in Ireland along with Jeff Stelling to promote a new Sky Sports iPad app, he might have famously scored more on and off the pitch in his day than most Premier League stars of today that you care to mention, but he appreciates he’s not the one you’ve come to talk to, he’s not The Talent.
“We’re used to it,” he smiles. “Us ex-players just call it Jeff’s Show.”
It shouldn’t work, really, the show. Think of all the footballs that will be kicked in grounds all over the UK between 3pm and 5pm today, yet watch Gillette Soccer Saturday between those hours and it’s the one thing you’ll never see — a football being kicked. Instead you’ll see five-middle-aged men sitting around, looking into their television monitors, describing, or at least trying to describe, what they’re seeing from some match maybe a couple of hundred miles away.
And yet, incredibly, this form of second-hand football works. Stoke-Liverpool might be on another one of the channels today yet droves of us will instead opt for Soccer Saturday. There we’ll get killer putdowns and killer stats; laddish banter to go with serious insight and constant updates; why actually watch football when you can have so much fun hearing and laughing about it?
Orchestrating this magical blend is the masterful Stelling. There’s something rather Kiplingesque about the show’s anchor: on one hand he can talk with crowds and on the other, walk with kings. He can slag the most vicious of dressing room jokesters; stump the most pedantic of stattos with the most obscure of stats; quote an Andy Williams lyric one minute and then a line from Byron the next. He’s that rare broadcaster, one who could host This Week and then turn right around and compere Have I Got News for You.
The Irish writer Declan Lynch has described him as probably the best broadcaster in the world. The British sports journalists’ awards haven’t gone quite that far but their Best British Sports Broadcaster of the Year category is still awaiting its second winner since the scheme was founded five years ago.
As well as all that peer cred, he happens to enjoy serious street cred as well. The Jeff Stelling Soccer Saturday Drinking Game Facebook group has had up to 75,000 members, with participants drinking a shot whenever a goal is shown on the vidiprinter, or three shots if the goal is for Stelling’s beloved Hartlepool. And should James Brown happen to be their goalscorer, then last man to engage in the Stelling-instigated, JB-inspired ‘I Feel Good!’ song and dance routine has to down another three.
Stelling’s so popular, a fan of the show waited three hours outside a hospital he was visiting for charity, just to present him with the James Brown toy figure to use on the show whenever Hartlepool’s JB found the net.
In person Stelling seems comfortable with all the acclaim while still maintaining an admirable sense of humility and a sense of history to go with it. He reminds you that when the programme started out in the mid-’90s, it wasn’t so much Jeff’s Show as Rodney’s, as in Rodney Marsh.
“Rodney played a major part in establishing the show because he was so controversial. He and Frank McLintock made a great double act, the arguments that they had, and even then Rodney stole the show. For a long while it was basically Rodney and three others.”
Rodney wasn’t for everyone. The show isn’t for everyone. Ask Stelling what qualifies and disqualifies a prospective panellist and he talks as if the panel were a dressing room. “We’ve had people come in that just haven’t quite gelled with the other guys. You’ve got to be a team player.”
It doesn’t help if you’re somewhat standoffish, staying in a more upmarket hotel to the one Stelling and the other guys stay in on the Friday night and have their few bevies.
“And you’ve got to be thick-skinned,” says Stelling, “because you’re going to have the mickey taken out of you — frequently.” Which is why David Ginola lasted even shorter on the show than he did at Everton.
Nicholas remembers it well. Cheeky chappy Rodney would regularly try to throw a rookie off at the start, he even tried it with Nicholas but the Scot was able to handle it.
“I left the studio that evening thinking, ‘I won’t like this man’ but then I had a beer with him and got to know him and got to really like him, even if he did like to talk about himself a lot.”
Rodney and Ginola never quite got to that first beer.
“We were all in there already,” recalls Nicholas, “when in arrived Ginola, tanned like a god. So the make-up lady was getting him ready while we were all talking away to him, as pleasant as could be: what do you think of that, David? David this, David that. Two minutes into the show then and Rodney turns round and says, ‘What do you make of that, Dave?’ And Ginola’s jaw just dropped. ‘’Dave?! Who is Dave? I am David! Dav-eeed!’”
Stelling cringes yet smiles at the memory. “David was a lovely guy but it just didn’t feel right. By the end of the show Rodney and himself virtually had their backs to one other. I was walking up the corridor afterwards with David and he said to me [Stelling puts on his best ‘Because I’m worth it’ accent], ‘Rodney. He is not a nice man’.”
As things would later transpire, Ginola wouldn’t so much have the last laugh as Rodney wouldn’t, his ill-advised attempt to link the South East Asian tsunami with the Toon Army that once idolised Ginola prompting his own dismissal from the show. Stelling was sad to see Marsh go, the decision, he says, “had nothing to do with me, I just get on with it and work with whoever they give me to work with”. He hasn’t heard from Marsh in a while, now that he spends most of his time in the States, but Stelling believes Marsh’s legacy remains.
Take the noises they all make. An OWWW! here, a YESSS!! there; as Stelling says, at times the studio can sound like that famous When Harry Met Sally restaurant scene, yet those sounds are part of the show’s appeal, leaving the viewer excitedly wondering just who scored or just missed.
“Rodney was the instigator of the noises,” says Stelling. “At first I’d be saying, Rodney, shut up!’ But it gradually became an established part of the show.”
One afternoon, Marsh had been assigned to a desperately drab game when he suddenly exclaimed “YESSS!!” as if England had won the World Cup. Stelling’s ears almost burst but his brain was even more perturbed.
“What is it, Rodney?”
“Half-time,” said Marsh, nonchalantly.
That was another departure for Sky. On Soccer Saturday they weren’t afraid to call a bad game a bad game, in stark contrast to their counterparts on Super Sunday or Monday Night Football. Stelling thinks the mothership is striking a better balance now.
“I think it’s fair to say that in the early days there was never a bad game on Sky. Never, ever. But if you watched the Man United-Arsenal 8-2 game nobody could say that Paul Merson and Gary Neville weren’t incredibly opinionated or critical. So times have changed though you need to accentuate the positives too. I think it’s about getting that right balance.”
It’s a balance he finds the RTÉ panel too often fail to strike. He’s familiar with the work of Messrs O’Herlihy, Dunphy and Giles, as is Nicholas, and thinks that in trying to counter the anodyne analysis on other channels the Montrose boys have nearly gone to the other extreme. Stelling’s loath to criticise anyone — “I’ve been on the other end of it sometimes and it can be mighty hard to take” — but if he has to, yeah, he’d be critical of Bill and the boys for being, well, too critical.
“I think it goes too far. I think they’re too critical. What I’ve seen of them I think they go a step too far. It goes beyond the bounds of fairness.
“I think they get a bit too personalised,” concurs Nicholas, acknowledging that he himself was fiercely critical of Bertie Vogts during the German’s tenure as Scottish national coach.
“I understand that you’ll always be that bit harder when it comes to your own teams because you’re passionate about it but sometimes when you’re at someone quite regular it can get too easy to just keep knocking and not seeing what’s actually in front of you. Sometimes it’s as if they have to keep at the same agenda. It’s almost if they’re showing up just to be critical.”
Stelling’s view in particular on such matters carries considerable weight. Just like Bill O’Herlihy, he was trained in the old school of news journalism. He had to learn his shorthand, take his proficiency test, he covered the courts and his town council meetings. He loved every minute of it, working for the local Hartlepool Mail. It’s where he had wanted to work ever since he was 12.
“They had a football edition that would come out on a Saturday night, The Green, and I used to write letters about football into them. And the star letter every week was a pound and I always won it so I thought, ‘This is fantastic, this is what I want to do, I must be a really good writer!’ It was only years later when I actually went to work for the paper that I realised my letter won all the time because it would be the only letter they’d get. The rest had been penned by members of staff.”
The best part of the job was probably the football, even though he’d never cover it during the week. “The paper went to bed at 1pm, so all the boys would try to get our stories in and hit that deadline, one of us would stay behind in case a story broke and then the rest of us would head to the beach to play football.
“We worked Saturdays as well on The Green. The paper’s offices were 400 yards away from Hartlepool’s ground so we’d go and watch the game, then leave early at 4.30 to be back for the teleprint results coming through and then we’d put the paper together in 45 minutes.”
In those days they had to work out the league tables for themselves, and naturally, it was Stelling who took on the job of making out those calculations. Everton move up three spots to eighth, Bolton move down four spots to 18th; working out all those permutations would come in handy down the line.
After four years in the Mail he moved on into local independent radio and then onto TV for all kinds of people — Eurosport, Channel 4 and, worst of all, GMTV’s TVAM.
“It was the worst year and a half of my life,” he smiles, “the most tedious, boring job imaginable.
“It was a hideous place to work, basically because there wasn’t any work to do! I wasn’t onscreen, my job was to write the sports bulletin which was just one minute. Now, we work on the basis of three words a second, so my job was to write 180 words from 9pm to 9am. And it was a question of going in there and thinking, ‘Well, will I write it now? Or shall I wait until six in the morning?..”
His next early-morning gig was a good bit more stimulating, reading the sports bulletin on Sky News anchored by the venerable Bob Friend and the vivacious Penny Smith.
“You’d never be sure what Penny would get up to. One morning I was reading the sports news and next thing she puts her hand under the table and on my knee. And as I was going on, her hand would gradually go higher and higher and higher. I managed to get through the bulletin somehow and though it was only 6.20am the phone rang immediately when I got back to my desk. It was my then girlfriend. ‘What was she doing to you?!’”
Stelling himself can be quite playful onscreen in his own inimitable way. A variety of his catchphrases and lines have acquired legendary status.
When a Guylain Ndumbu-Nsungu from the Republic of Congo once scored for Sheffield Wednesday, the twinkle-eyed Stelling quipped: “Local boy makes good.”
Whenever a Welsh Premier League club, named after their sponsors, would eke out a win, Stelling would invariably beam, “They’ll be dancing in the streets of Total Network Solutions tonight!”
Some more recognisable clubs have been the subject of a discreet dig too. “There’s been a penalty awarded at Old Trafford,” he’s remarked, “and I don’t think you need me to tell you which way it’s gone.”
He knows the show needs that light touch to go with all those stats and facts, just as the show needs all those stats and facts to go with the quips. Usually he’ll devote all day Thursday and Friday to sifting through the stats pack prepared by one of the off-screen researchers or some notes he’s stored away himself.
A classic of the genre was when Brian Barry-Murphy bagged one for Bury and Stelling was able to inform his audience that Barry-Murphy’s father was a distinguished Irish sportsman, winning the highest honours hurling and football can bestow.
Just as no one else does cheese with quite such panache, no one dishes out stats and facts as wisely and as wittily either. He has an excellent memory; as the interview ends, he can still recall our name, a full 45 minutes after we were introduced; given all the names and press he’ll meet today, it’s an impressive measure of his brainpower, as it is of his social skills.
And as Nicholas will vouch, he hasn’t forgotten his roots either.
“We were staying in the Marriott Hotel out by Heathrow one Friday evening when I saw this team bus outside. It was Hartlepool FC, staying in our hotel. And when I got downstairs who was there, sitting and talking away with them all, only Jeff. He was just like a big child, in his total element. He knew them all! I was going, ‘Are we going for our beer here or what?’ and he was, ‘Work away without me, I’m going to stay here with the boys!’”
Last season was the first since he was a kid he went without even catching one of their midweek games. Stelling, Liz and the three kids live by the south coast now, five hours from home, and anyway he was finding that whenever he did land up, he was a bit of a Jonah. “We’d always lose 1-0 at home and it would always be a last-minute goal.” Even the club’s chief executive was asking him could he not head away early, like he used in the old days of The Green, or even better, stay away altogether.
As it is, he has plenty to be doing on a Saturday. Do you still enjoy it, more than 15 years on?
“Oh yeah,” he grins, “it’s the best day of the week. I don’t know what I’d do on Saturdays if I didn’t have Soccer Saturday.”
So would a lot of us. It’s unbelievable, Jeff.
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