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Why I Love...Soccer Saturday

Soccer Saturday presenter Jeff Stelling
  • Posted at 5:16am
  • 15 March 2007
  • by DavidWhitehouse-RT

One of my favourite history lessons is a tale about the advent of moving pictures. It is said that when film cameras were first developed, someone decided it would be a good idea to record footage of a steam train coming down the tracks and to show it in a cinema as proof of the fantastic new technology.

Having never seen two-dimensional moving images before, the majority of the audience at the screening ran screaming from the auditorium, convinced that the train coming towards them was going to burst through the screen and crush them all into a big steamy film pulp.

I'm reminded of this when I think about the first time I ever saw Soccer Saturday on Sky Sports News. Before Soccer Saturday I was limited to teletext for my statistical kicks. I'd sit for hours watching the three-colour display fail to update itself, wondering what the truth was when goals miraculously disappeared ten minutes after first appearing (which in turn was about 15 minutes after they were actually scored). It was crap of course, but it was all I had to satiate my need for information about the game I loved.

And then I saw Soccer Saturday. I almost hid behind the sofa and watched through my fingers. It was like my head was going to burst. I had never seen anything like it - a constant bombardment of stats, facts and information force fed into your brain from all directions at an incredible pace. It was like I was being intravenously injected with all of the world's gathered knowledge, like the infant Superman on his way to Earth in his Krypton escape pod. And now I'm addicted. This is televisual crack.

Now, of course, the Soccer Saturday template has been adopted by every other football results service, but the original remains the best. It's essentially four middle-aged men at a desk whose idea of humour goes little further than the occasional joke about one of their colleagues not being as fit as he used to be. And we watch them watching football for hours and hours and hours. That's it.

What makes Soccer Saturday unmissable, its secret weapon, is its host Jeff Stelling. Jeff is the silver-tongued lothario who holds the entire thing together, the conductor of an orchestra of rotund dads.

It's Jeff's job to make sense of the stats these men dribble out, to balance a constantly shifting list of scorelines and results without making the viewer want to pull their own brain out through their ears, and he does so with some considerable confidence and charisma, a renowned statesman of sorts. It's like watching Bill Clinton spinning plates.

And all it is, essentially, is numbers. Numbers, numbers and more numbers. Who would have thought maths could be so much fun?

And all it is, essentially, is numbers. Numbers, numbers and more numbers. Who would have thought maths could be so much fun?

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