Sky Sports: Do Me a Favour

The return of Sky’s Monday Night Football coverage for the 2010 season was met with collective joy from millions of armchair sports fans across Britain.

To mark its return following a three year hiatus (when Setanta and ESPN secured the rights), Sky unsurprisingly pulled out all the stops and put together a promotional package which provided a nostalgic look back at some of ‘MNF’s’ finest moments throughout the 1990s.

Yeboah’s blockbuster against Liverpool, Collymore’s last gasp winner against Newcastle and Keegan’s infamous rant were all used to highlight the intensity and excitement of Premiership football on a Monday evening.

Keegan’s Monday Night Football Rant

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXpUdBlRZe]

When Sky made their Monday night bow in a game between Manchester City and QPR in 1992, we were on the cusp of a broadcasting revolution, with this slick new concept, fronted by Andy Gray’s razor sharp computer aided analysis and Richard Key’s cool professionalism, taking us into a new era.

However, while English football’s affinity with Sky undoubtedly broadened the game’s horizons, it has left many of us yearning for a simpler time.

As the rest of the league returned to domestic action following the recent international break, fans of Stoke City and Aston Villa were left scratching their heads and twiddling their thumbs, as they were forced to wait impatiently for their game on Monday.

Stoke had lost their opening three games, but were boosted by the deadline day arrivals of Jermaine Pennant, Eidur Gudjohnsen and the highly rated Marc Wilson, while Villa had the chance to atone for their hideous last away performance – a 6-0 drubbing at Newcastle.

Although the plethora of live football and Jeff Stelling’s Soccer Saturday provided some solace, this felt like yet another sporting vacuum of a weekend, with many blokes having to trawl around the shops with their other halves, instead of going to the match.

It’s becoming a cliché and has been done to death it seems, but how I miss the week long anticipation of Saturday 3pm. The armchair fan may enjoy seeing Andy Gray twonk about with his new iPad, as he needlessly deliberates over the finer points of Manchester United’s third goal at Goodison Park, but I don’t need such time consuming ‘fancy-Dannery’ to see that Sylvain Distin had a shocker.

Those who tuned in to see Stoke City vs. Aston Villa were in for a shock. After allotting a miserly 10 minutes of the hour long build up to the two teams actually playing, Gray further excelled himself by forgetting Matthew Etherington’s name, despite awarding him the man of the match moments earlier, and then referred to Jon Walters as; “that lad from Ipswich”. There’s your razor sharp analysis.

Despite the ironic aforementioned nostalgia (from the company who want you to believe that football didn’t exist before 1992), I am not fooled by Monday Night Football. It is yet another middle finger to the ‘supporter’ in favour of appeasing the ‘fan’ (the type that infuriatingly refer to the Premiership as the EPL as they lounge around on their sofas).

The most irksome part though is Sky’s continual drive to make us feel like they are doing us a favour. I lost count of the number of times that I wanted to punch my screen as Sky Sports News presenters Jim White and Georgie Thompson gleefully boasted that the news channel was being taken away from the Freeview peasants. Worse still is Keys’ insistence that watching him on a Monday evening is somehow meant to alleviate the depression of being back at work. Richard, we wouldn’t be half as suicidal if we had been to the football with our mates on Saturday, but your employers had other ideas!

Praise the lord that the scheduling of the Carling Cup third round has this week spared us another dose of ‘MNF’, but rest assured it will be back next week as Andy Gray picks the bones out of the ‘Big Four’s’ weekend exploits for an hour, before Wigan and Wolves rudely interrupt his egotistical ramblings for 90 minutes.