The Petty Behaviour of Sky Sports

Sky Sports, you let your viewers down, you let your viewers down...

Just a little vent today. Did anyone watch Soccer Saturday for this weekends F.A. Cup score updates?

I can only assume that Sky won’t be broadcasting any live F.A. Cup games this season for one reason or another, but their conduct was so transparent and dismissive of the nation’s biggest domestic cup competition as to warrant an independent enquiry. In the studio were the usual group of slack jaws, commonly given the big games of the day. This week, in all of Sky’s petty, childish glory, they were given games that, forgive me, I can’t even remember, such was the quality of coverage. On FA Cup 3^rd round day, at least one of them was covering a run-of-the-mill league 1 game. To be fair, jeffntheboys looked genuinely embarrassed.

Every time the panel were cut to for an update of their games, it was ‘the lad’s played it down there’, ‘the fellas crossed it over’, ‘the strikers got on the end of it’. They hadn’t even given them a squad list to refer to the numbers on the back of the players shirts. Every time Stelling mentioned the phrase ‘cup shock’, you could imagine a Luca Brasi type standing behind the camera. Silent, head shaking, stroking his gun.

I’m sure they’ll point to an attempt to cover all of the days play, but when they’ve got a correspondent on the end of a crackly phone line at Sunderland v Notts County, Norwich v Orient, Blackburn v QPR and Burton v Middlesbrough to name but a few, you’ve got to start questioning just what kind of service they are providing.

They aren’t the BBC, but they are a paid for service by their subscribers, and as such, have a duty to provide them with coverage from the compelling games of the day. On FA Cup 3^rd round day, as churlish as it may sound, viewers want to hear about shock results and cupsets. What happens in a hastily re-arranged league fixture between teams that have already been knocked out has little or no appeal in comparison. Their conduct was embarrassing and a big 2-fingered salute to their customers who’ve paid and tuned in to watch them provide their football coverage.