Last on MOTD: Bridesmaids and breakfast shows
1st September, 2007
ALWAYS the bridesmaid, never the bride. That was a saying often applied to Middlesbrough. I should point out it referred to their long-held inability to win any trophies, rather than a fetish for dressing up in wedding outfits. I would like to make it absolutely clear that no Middlesbrough player has ever attended a wedding dressed as a bridesmaid.
Anyway, Middlesbrough’s ‘close but no cigar’ history looked as if it was going to extend to the MOTD Gubbometer this season. In both of the season’s first two shows, their game was on second to last. Would they ever be selected as the final game? Well, tonight they were – and anyone following this experiment will have noticed a familiar voice describing the action.
Tonight’s final game: Middlesbrough 2 Birmingham 0. Commentator: John Roder.
WHEN I was an impoverished student, I often used to wake up to the voice of John Roder, as he read the sports bulletins amid the enforced hilarity that was Chris Evans’ Radio 1 breakfast show in the mid-1990s. As the show slowly drowned in Evans’ ego over a period of months, Roder’s reassuring Midlands twang brought some kind of sanity to proceedings.
The intervening 12 years have seen Evans go through a very public marriage and divorce, a career implosion and a spell presenting possibly the worst chat show in the entire history of ITV before he re-emerged as an award-winning drivetime DJ on Radio 2. Roder’s life, I suspect, has had fewer twists and turns.
And here he is now, yet again, given the final game on Match Of The Day. That’s three times in five shows. I know any work is better than none, but has he upset someone at BBC Sport?
I would write more about the match itself, but there’s not a lot to say. I could also mention some of MOTD’s other talking points this week, notably Alan Hansen’s beard and the number of jokes Gary Lineker made about it, or the fact that there was a Goal Of The Month competition that wasn’t actually a competition, because of the BBC’s current ban on text voting. But Martin Kelner will make all of those observations far more humourously in Monday’s Guardian. So instead, here’s another irrelevant anecdote.
A few years ago, I covered at game at Darlington’s new stadium, then called the Reynolds Arena (now the Darlington Arena). As I watched 3,000 fans rattle around in a stadium built for nearly 30,000, I remarked that it felt like watching a Premiership reserve game.
Well, that atmosphere now seems to have transferred a few miles down the road to The Riverside where, judging from the empty seats, Middlesbrough’s first-team games also now have the atmosphere of Premier League reserve games. They couldn’t even fill the place when they played Newcastle last week. Doesn’t anyone care?
If not, then they deserve to be on MOTD last.
Gubbometer
1. Roder – 3
2. Wigan – 2
3. Gubba – 1
4=. Fulham – 1 (Gubba difference: +1)
4=. Bolton – 1 (Gubba difference: +1)
6=. Everton – 1
6=. Newcastle – 1
6=. Aston Villa – 1
6=. West Ham – 1
6=. Middlesbrough – 1
6=. Birmingham – 1
6=. Aston Villa – 1
(NB. Gubba difference decides placings where teams are equal. It is the number of times a team has appearade last on Match of the Day with Tony Gubba commentating.)
