Before our own game today, Sevco played a piss-poor Hearts team, run by a manager who basically did his own job interview, and who turned in a typically uninspiring performance.
That game wasn’t remotely entertaining, but it was rendered just about unwatchable by the co-commentary of one of the most unlikeable men in the whole of the Scottish media.
I refer, of course, to Andy Walker.
The Scottish media is filled to the brim with people all trying to be the new Gerry McNee. It says a lot for how abject they are that this is their goal. They believe saying controversial stuff just to get a reaction is some kind of admirable quality. Some of them, in fact, are at it in more ways than one; Chris Sutton actually uses it to hide a reasonable knowledge of the game. I’ve seen him ambush people with logic, when they were expecting bombast, more than once.
BT Sport has become good at this stuff. But it also offers analysis and insight. I never thought I’d write that sentence, because I once accused them of dumbing down to suit the level of the daftest viewer, but in fact they knew exactly what they were doing and the show isn’t dumbed down in any way, shape or form. They brought in the viewers using guys like Sutton, but they keep them by doing the more important stuff better than their rivals.
Walker is a symptom of everything that has gone wrong with Sky Sports, and especially in Scotland where they just got rid of the detestable Sevco toe-sucker David Tanner, who’s “open letter” to Pedro Caixinha ought to haunt him beyond the grave.
Walker is a class apart though. Whereas Sutton and guys like him say daft things just to stir the soup and cause arguments, I never get that impression with our ex-player. He says stupid stuff because he believes stupid things, and because what started out as an effort to try and show he was balanced – i.e. someone who can put the boot into Celtic – has morphed into him instinctively assuming the worst about us and taking Sevco’s side of everything.
Take today; today he suggested that Ryan Jack should win his appeal in front of the SFA disciplinary board because Kirk Broadfoot behaved like an eejit. Does Walker actually believe this, or is he trolling? I think he actually believes it; he actually thinks that a player acting up entitles another to chin him or kick him or stick the nut on him. He thinks it’s the player who provokes the incident who should be punished and not the one who spectacularly over-reacts.
There was a time when I’d have said this was just Walker toeing the party line – when he’s not on Sky he does PR work for Ladbrokes, and the company that got him the gig was none other than Jim Traynor’s own Level 5 who run all that stuff for them here in Scotland – but now I think he’s just a complete muppet, a guy with low grade gelignite for brains; if he ever has an original thought I swear to God, his head will detonate like a bomb going off.
Walker is the real evidence of “dumbing down” because how can expect an audience to follow a match intelligently when the co-commentator ought to be working elsewhere, wearing a clown costume and driving a little wooden car that squirts water when you honk the horn? That’s his level, not one intelligent word ever coming out of his mouth.
This is the fourth time in a single year that I’ve ranted about him in an article on this site; the fourth time … not even Keith Jackson has earned that kind of recognition. I suspect there’s room for Walker to make a clown of himself a little yet.
But Sky Sports Scotland have a larger problem than that; today they had Lee McCulloch in the studio, fresh from his sacking at Kilmarnock. I will not labour the point, but since he was dismissed the team has drawn at Ibrox and at Celtic Park, which goes to show you what a ridiculous appointment it actually was. The idea that a man with an IQ lower than the price of a Chomp has something intelligent to say about our game just weeks after he was booted out the door by a club … that’s an insult to aspiring television journalists everywhere and to the audience as well.
It’s people like these who keep real talent out of media jobs, and that’s why Sky continues to lose viewers and BT Sport has replaced it as the best place for coverage of the game here. As long as it employs people like Walker that downward trajectory will continue.