Brendan O'Brien
THEY haven’t gone away, you know.
Well, actually, they did for a while but Andy Gray and Richard Keys returned to broadcasting duties yesterday at 9am on TalkSport, a London-based radio station which won’t have caught the attention of too many people in Ireland.
It’s probably fair to say that very few people in this country knew TalkSport even existed until Keys dug himself an even bigger hole on the station with his mea culpa shortly after Sky came crashing down on him and his Scottish sidekick last month.
Their new gig is a three-hour morning slot dedicated to the beautiful game and it was interesting to see the normally suited duo posing for snaps in open-necked shirts and jumpers before the whistle sounded.
Callers were encouraged to contact the show’s number regularly but none were invited on air, an unsurprisingly cautious start by the producers given the brouhaha that brought them there in the first place.
The closest anyone came to any mention of Sian Massey or Karen Brady came soon after the opening curtain when Keys did his, as always, very professional and smooth, intro before turning to introduce his old mucker.
“You alright?” said Keys.
“Yeah, good actually,” came the reply. “It’s nice to be back working and talking about football again and enjoying what’s been an unbelievably eventful Premier League season.”
And that was that. Before long, Gray was lost in a monologue on his old club Everton’s difficulties and on it went for another, long and by all accounts boring three hours with a few interviews thrown in.
And therein lies the problem. Without all the bells, whistles and visual gizmos that they could fall back on at Sky - not to mention the games themselves - what it all boiled down to was two middle-aged men discussing the weekend’s action long after everyone else had put it to bed.
Still, they have each other.
Having met the pair of them last summer when they were on a HD promotional trip to Dublin, there was something fitting about the fact that they have picked up where they left off with their double act. And on Valentine‘s Day, too.
After almost 20 years and over a thousand games together, Gray and Keys know each other far better than most star-crossed couples, to such an extent that they were able to finish each other’s sentences that day in Dublin without missing a beat.
They will still be able to do that on TalkSport but, looking at them yesterday, you couldn’t help but think that theirs is a paradise lost.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/mCu5PW2HMFo/post.aspx
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