For a few ‘glorious’ years transfer deadline day was, much like actual live football, very much Sky’s domain. It basically invented the concept of trying to get people excited about this final day of transfer action, of hyping minor loan deals between Premier League clubs as cataclysmic events akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But now BT, as with Premier League matches, has tried to muscle in with its own deadline-day coverage. And while going toe-to-toe with the supreme force in sports broadcasting for the last 25 years is one thing, challenging Jim White’s domination of the ‘bellowing into the camera as if addressing an elderly relative’ area of expertise is quite another.
One wonders how long BT debated trying to take on Sky in this sphere. For some years now Sky’s deadline day coverage has been an epilepsy-inducing assault of hype and colour, a little like Don King barging into your front room to shout at you and flash a strobe light in your eyes. If the adage of never picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel rings true, then anyone attempting to run a similar transfer broadcast would surely take a deep, deep breath before doing so.
Perhaps aware of the competition, Sky Sports News seemed to up its game this deadline day. The big punditry guns were wheeled out to have their say, from Jamie Carragher to Thierry Henry, the latter of whom exposed the whole affair by replying “Do I have a choice?” when asked if he was sticking around for a bit. Matt Le Tissier’s opinion of Southampton’s new boy Filip Djuricic was sought and he did a reasonable job of looking as if he had heard of him.
The Sky studio is flashed with so much yellow that it looks more like a particularly lurid paint swatch, adorned with wild-eyed hype-merchants, all clad in yellow too. In some cases that was a dress, for others a blue and yellow tie that looked as if it was from a provincial rugby club, while Gary Neville opted for a rumpled pocket square, jutting out of his jacket and making him look like a grumpy child forced to change into something smart for a family christening.
At various points a man with an iPad would stand next to a screen that said “Sky Sports Investigates” in massive letters as if he was a nattily dressed version of Woodward and Bernstein laying out their case to Ben Bradlee, when in fact he was checking out rumours that Matt Jarvis was on his way to QPR. At one stage, White referred to Big Ben as “our old friend”. Even in the absence of half a Stoke youth club jumping behind their on-site reporters and waving multicoloured marital aids, it was not dignified.
By contrast the BT coverage made for reasonably pleasant television despite the presence of the haircuts sometimes known as Robbie Savage and Simon Jordan. One moment summed the whole thing up; as Sky blurted the “breaking news” that Carlton Cole had arrived at West Brom, BT was having a surprisingly adult conversation featuring salient anecdotes about transfer windows past during which Savage nominated himself as the worst January transfer of all time.
Perhaps more than this was the sense that while Sky takes it all depressingly seriously, BT knew exactly how absurd this whole business is. This was helped by the anchor Des Kelly, a man who will go to his grave with a cheeky twinkle in his eye and who frequently admitted that nothing was happening. Inevitably at times things got a little too loose, specifically in an excruciating and surreal segment when a Katie Price impressionist and a fictional player named Jason Bent discussed conjugal intimacy with assorted footballers and spat on the studio floor, respectively. It was a little like a comedy frying pan skit dropped into Have I Got News For You without warning.
And, of course, with Jordan and Savage around there was always the possibility of the odd baffling exchange, particularly when Jordan launched into a lengthy lecture on the merits of combatting player power, illustrated by the time he told Andy Johnson he was not leaving Crystal Palace despite interest from Everton. Of course, the morality tale would have held slightly more water if Johnson had not left Palace for, well, Everton.
Obviously, this is transfer deadline day, and it is impossible to make the thing entirely palatable but against all odds BT seems to have discovered that less is indeed more. Sky, they are coming for you.
