Square Peg, Round Ball by Ned Boulting

Author:Ned Boulting [Boulting, Ned]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472979292
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

14

Championship Form

READING 3–1 WEST HAM.

12 March, 2005. Madejski Stadium, Reading.

In which stuff gets real.

Though the Champions League sat incandescent at the heart of my footballing life, there was still proper Saturday work to be done. ITV’s coverage of the Championship had returned and cast a lengthening autumnal shadow across our weekends once more. As the sole inheritors of the Football League highlights contract, which had somehow migrated back to ITV with its fiscal tail between its legs after the debacle of the ITV Sport Channel, ITV used to put out an hour-long highlights show on a Sunday morning.

Since it concentrated mainly on the Championship, it went by the name of The Championship. It was a kind of low-rent Match of the Day, with more goals and no studio pundits, because there was no studio to sit them in. In fact, it was open to the vagaries of an English and Welsh winter.

Every other week I was sent out on the road to a match, in order to make a scaled-down feature around a game. Sometimes we’d select a club in crisis, which would inevitably require the extensive use of the gloriously irritating TV format, the vox pop. But more often than not we ended up following the fortunes of a striker in good form, or a team with a long unbeaten run, that kind of thing. The striker would fail to score, obviously, and the unbeaten team would get beaten.

These could be long days of work, full of driving up motorways, waiting around for hours until the moment came when Darren Bent, or someone about as good as Darren Bent, would disembark from the team bus at somewhere like Portman Road and we’d have to try and cajole him into talking to us before disappearing into the dressing room, shamefully hobbling along after him, imploringly saying his name ever louder.

Matt Smith was the regular host of the programme and presented the show from whichever fixture had been deemed to be the best match of the day. Often this involved West Brom, or one of the Sheffields. From time to time, when he was unavailable, I’d be one of the ‘B team’ of presenters who’d be called upon to deputise. This had the effect of sending me into a tailspin of anxiety the night before the shoot. It had to do with clothes. Dressing for telly on The Championship presented fierce complications. And while Matt Smith effortlessly managed to look both smart and down to earth, urbane and a man of the people, I simply looked a mess, often by trying to pair an impulsively purchased puffy jacket (it was always freezing on The Championship) with some slightly too skinny jeans and big clumping boots. No amount of offsetting this with a natty little scarf could rescue the sheer disjointedness of the image.

And then there was the dispiritingly long list of short ‘links’ that had to be shot:

‘Welcome back’, after a break.

‘Let’s hear from the managers’, before the interviews.

‘Your commentator at Loftus Road is Peter Brackley’, for a round-up of QPR’s match.

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