It's the big Merseyside derby this weekend and if it was 2010 it would’ve been brought to us on television by two men who were seemingly unassailable in their dominance of the satellite broadcasting of football, grinning like cats that not only got the cream but the whole dairy industry as well.
But in 2011 that all changed. In January, it was the 10th anniversary of when Richard Keys and Andy Gray were sacked from Sky Sports for...well you know what for. It was “one of the biggest carve ups in TV history” according to Richard, who is presumably keeping a list of carve-ups against which to compare the size of theirs.
Men with a Union Jack or flag of St George in their Twitter handle might well agree. It was political correctness gone mad; the revenge of the soya latte fascists. Their only crime, as they saw it, was to talk like everyone else who had ever been in a dressing room. It was locker room talk they said, even though many of us had never said such things in a locker room, or anywhere else for that matter.
But although the banter defence was deployed with gusto, it failed miserably as more recordings emerged. Sky couldn’t get rid quick enough, which in itself was revealing. Clearly, everyone had had enough.
Sian Massey-Ellis, the official who was their target, has gone on to have a great career and is widely accepted as one of the best assistant refs in the business. Keys and Gray on the other hand drifted around for a while, including a surreal phase which saw them recording videos on a phone in a car, before snagging a massive gig in Qatar. They have long since decamped to Doha to work for BeIN Sports doing the thing that they did for Sky for many years, but for even more money.
So in the end, they won, right? They came out on top as winners. Still doing the football, still trousering large wads of cash. Sorted.
But if that is the case, you wouldn’t really know it. Keys especially will not let it go. Just last month he was saying about their sacking: “That anger that I carry in my back pocket, I will never, ever put away.”
In your back pocket? That’s the worst place to store anger. It must make sitting down an uncomfortable experience, like a bad case of football-sized haemorrhoids, which may explain a lot of Richard’s default expressions, actually.
Sometimes it seems as though they see themselves as deposed Emperors, unfairly overthrown by ungrateful underlings and are just waiting for a sexist insurrection to welcome them back as Kings of Football Banter, so the rightful order of things can be restored. Once again female officials can have the pish taken out of them, women can be referred to as “it” and shouting “tits out for the lads’’ is funny and everyone will laugh. And if women don’t like it you can shout, “can’t you take a f*ckin’ joke love?” and everyone will nod and agree that you are the real victim, not her (who I never fancied anyway, actually).
This new theocracy will be based on the principles established in Wimbledon FC’s dressing room in 1988, because in the K&G world, the dressing room is apparently the default standard against which to judge all human behaviour.
So they were out on their ears. How the mighty had fallen. Except they were never really mighty. Even if they thought otherwise, they were never really household names to non-football people. Given the numbers watching in those first few years of Sky were small, and to this day rarely delivers even two million to watch a game in the UK, this meant the lads were not broadcasting to the nation but more accurately to a handful of self-employed plasterers from Essex called Dave.
For a while, Keys’ Twitter feed regularly had photos of them living it up in various Qatar bars and hotels. It resembled nothing so much as a couple of divorcés determined to prove to their exes that they’re having a great time and if anything wished they’d divorced sooner. There was something almost a little sad and embarrassing about it, like seeing your dad in Lycra.
Richard was keen to tell The Athletic: “We don’t get watched at the weekend by tens of thousands of people, we get watched by tens of millions of people. This is a far bigger job than the one I had at Sky, far bigger. Talking to far more people now, in a far more influential part of the world now.”
This is part of the problem really. He seems under the delusion that the presenter and the pundit is the star. They are not. Football is the star. Who brings it to us and who talks about it is irrelevant to half the audience because they turn off as soon as the game is done.
Andy claimed about their new home that, “It’s a small place. It’s a glorious, glorious lifestyle.”
I’m sure it is for rich men, Andy, but less so for the immigrant slave labourer toiling to death in the desert sun. Their promotion of Qatar like some sort of quasi-tourist information service has felt very Partridge-esque and given the bigger picture, distasteful to say the very least.
There’s no doubt the lure of big money and the charms of Andy and Richard have meant they do get big guests on their show, such as Arsene Wenger, who just last week sat in the Doha ice palace-cum-Starship Enterprise engine room, with Andy, in these Covid times, reduced to being a giant head on a big screen, silently peering down on proceedings.
It’s all a bit odd. And in truth, they seem a bit odd, but ironically, it is that very oddness that gives them presence; whereas others in the business have disappeared into the desert with a metaphorical bottle of whisky and a revolver, they have lived on. We don’t spend much time considering what Elton Welsby, Ray Stubbs, or Gary Newbon are doing these days. We understand that many people come and go in the football broadcasting churn, making way for new voices.
Most are probably a bit miffed when they get the old tin tack but accept it for what it is and move on. But there’s a sense that the K&G double-act are not able to do that.
That their perceived injustice of their decade-ago defenestration still rankles badly, though not badly enough for Richard to have any degree of self-awareness when saying in a recent blog:
“The question I’m asked most often is ‘of all the guests you’ve sat with — who have you enjoyed the company of most?’ My answer is always the same ‘the opinions I respect the most are from those who’ve spent time in the technical area’. These are the guys that understand, better than most, what comes with coaching. But I always add this — that I expect those that have tried and failed to act with a little more humility when they return to our screens.”
Well, indeed, Mr Partridge. A-ha.
But could they return to our screens, with humility, or more likely without it? After they left, Sky Sports moved up and on and joined the 21st century. It was very late to the non-sexist diversity party, but it got there in the end, albeit looking around itself suspiciously and wondering if it should’ve brought a carton of oat milk and not eight cans of Guinness. So it’s impossible to imagine the erstwhile Lords of both Smashing It and Hanging Out The Back Of It, in front of Sky’s cameras in 2021.
Their Doha contracts are apparently up in 2023 by which time both will be in their mid to late 60s. Could the two return to the UK to work on TV again?
If you consider it unthinkable, do not underestimate the power of nostalgia and some are indeed very nostalgic for the K&G glory days, feeling they were the best and were badly treated. So don’t be so sure that they won’t be invited to return to UK broadcasting once again in some capacity, even if it is just filming themselves talking about the Premier League live from the back of a minicab, on their way home from a curry house with a takeout.
There is a ready-made audience who already feels that football has for too long given in to wokery and other liberal notions and yearns for the old days when men were men, you could call a spade a spade, and a woman’s place was sat in your lap. They’d quite like football to be brought to them by people who, they believe, also yearn for those days.
The K&G roadshow would strike a blow against the liberal fascists that they see everywhere forcing them to eat quinoa and have a sex change. Mind you, Richard’s public stance against Brexit as a confirmed Remainer may ironically prove more problematic for these acolytes of the illusory Golden Age When Everything Was Great.
They have been the easiest of targets for the burn of satire and have unintentionally fed those fires, but as they discovered themselves in 2011, times move on, new opportunities open up as different societal pressures emerge and cultural wars are fought. We might think we’ve seen the last of Richard Keys and Andy Gray talking to us about the Premier League over here, but don’t count them out yet.
Dewy-eyed sentimentality for times past is a powerful money spinner and cultural force, and let’s face it, they are very much part of the past.
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