Photo: Twitter
Jesus wept… and so did we, watching this. Those banter merchants over at GB News delivered an exhausting alternative to Match Of The Day last night – producing an exercise in awful patter and bland, repetitive jokes.
The dream team of Mark Dolan, Patrick Christys, and Mike Parry were on hand to share their own football analysis on Saturday night, in the absence of the BBC’s flagship show. Match Of The Day was reduced to a 20-minute run, after pundits and presenters refused to appear.
This came in the wake of Gary Lineker’s suspension from hosting duties last week, after he posted a critical Tweet of the Conservative Government and its controversial plans for asylum seekers. Football Focus and Final Score were also pulled from the schedule.
The fiasco has left the BBC facing unprecedented turmoil. There are now long-term doubts about its sports output, given how many big-name figures walked out in support of their suspended colleague. It’s not clear when, or even if, Lineker will return to host Match Of The Day.
Always with their finger on the pulse, the GB News crew saw an opportunity. They scrambled to get their own version of a football highlights show out there. But there was one major problem. They didn’t have any highlights available…
With no rights to the Premier League footage, viewers were instead left to rely on the verbal descriptions of Dolan, Christys, and Parry. Needless to say, it was an absolute horror show. The trio droned about Brighton being woke, and Chelsea ‘not being left-wing’.
For a group who believe politics and football should be kept apart, there sure was an awful lot of mixing going on. Apart from the lame gags, there were also a number of technical issues that blighted the broadcast – reminding us of the early days of GB News.
Graphics failed to display properly, player names were spelt wrong, and some of the formatting choices were genuinely bemusing. If you can stomach it, there’s a compilation of all the worst bits doing the rounds online. It’s utterly excruciating…
