In my book, skinny jeans are a big no-no, white ones even more so, especially when they finish halfway down the shin, giving an ample view of the sock-less feet quite literally shoe-horned into a pair of shoes you used to use for PE in primary one.
That whole ensemble is hard on the eyes when slapped onto a 20-something hipster, but when a 40-something ex-footballer is attempting to sport said look, it’s a basic affront to decency. Nobody needs to see Robbie Savage in a pair of white skinny jeans at the best of times, let alone at nine bells on a Saturday morning.
And yet this is what BT Sport deemed acceptable viewing on the morning the new Premier League kicked into action following Friday night’s pre-season kickabout between the birds of the liver and canary variety.
In a bid to coax the bleary-eyed football fan away from Sky Sports’ ‘oi, oi’ funfest that is Soccer AM, BT have plumped for something called the Early Kick-Off, which is a bit confusing because they wouldn’t being showing any live football for the guts of another four hours. The only thing likely to ‘kick-off’ was a two-footed lunge on Savage from a Chris Sutton after the former Norwich and Celtic front and back man had finally snapped and graduated beyond his passive-aggressive glances of disgust in the direction of the gobby Afghan hound who was someone helming this show.
As it was, Robbie and Chris were joined by freshly-retired Peter Crouch and Karen Carney of Chelsea and England, eh, fame. There was no time for them to get comfy on the couch as Robbie whisked everybody off to a briefing from former Premier League ref Peter Walton, who is now BT’s retired official of choice after Howard Webb and basically anybody who has something better to do on a Saturday morning.
There was the minutiae of the new handball rule to rattle through which Walton managed to do with all the poise of substitute teacher who just knew he could lose the class at any moment. Robbie was being chippy, Sutton eye-rollingly unimpressed and Crouch and Carney perched beside each other in shades of Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox presenting The Brits that time, with the dialogue every bit as clunky.
It all quickly became tiresome as frankly nobody really needs that level of critical thought at first clip on a Saturday morning.
For all its faults Soccer AM seems to get the mood just right for that time of morning. Jimmy Bullard looks similarly ill-at-ease with the actual presenting side of things, but he does come across as more self-aware version of Savage. He might not get his head around the intricacies of the handball law, but he will ‘ave a good ol’ natter wiff ‘Arry Redknapp abawt the ‘Ammers and that’. Triffic.
Throw in an obscure indie band, a couple of beefcakes off of Love Island, a few clips of people doing silly things on the outskirts of football matches and an admittedly spot-on impression of Jeff Stelling from ‘Fenners’ and you’ve got the kind of inoffensive start to a Saturday’s sporting viewing that isn’t going to be too taxing on the grey cells.
Round it all off by taking everyone out to the carpark for a kickabout and some footy games ‘against the clock’ and it’s basically a gunge-free version of Going Live or SMTV, only with footballs.
Having Aston Villa fans with haircuts veering somewhere between Jack Grealish and Tommy Shelby trying to whack a football into a wheelie in the top corner of a goal may not tell you much about the destination of this year’s Premier League title, but it’s much less horrifying sight than the blond bombsite that is Robbie Savage thinking he’s the Ant and Dec of football.
