Walker turns 50 next year. Only old people mourn its passing. Young football junkies are so spaced out on a never-ending smart phone diet of clips and reels they have no bandwidth left for outmoded previews of the weekend’s fixtures or perfunctory interviews.
The surprise is not so much the fall of Football Focus, but that its progenitor, Match of the Day, continues to broadcast to a diminishing audience, down 10 per cent according to the latest published figures.
The conditions that torpedoed Football Focus are the same epochal forces pushing MOTD into the margins. Though the BBC claims the figures for MOTD are buoyant, the reality is they are lumped in with the highlights clips of every Premier League match available on digital platforms two hours before the show is broadcast on TV.
Continued investment in legacy programming from the analogue age seems economic madness when the corporation is engaged in 10 percent job cuts to save half a billion quid. The eight-minute reels meet the needs of the modern consumer, who appears less inclined to invest cognitive power in processing the thoughts of lads on sofas in the post Gary Lineker period.
And that is not a reflection of Lineker’s replacements, Gabby Logan, Kelly Cates and Mark Chapman, who bring their own broadcast expertise and sporting depth, qualities which find a more apposite home at live matches with commercial broadcasters.
Watching Match of the Day and Football Focus was a cultural staple shared by the community of football lovers in an era of scarcity. The 24-hour content provided across myriad platforms today was not the reality for viewers in 1974, when your options amounted to weekend highlights programmes on BBC One and ITV, coupled with Sportsnight on Wednesdays.
Live football then was a delicacy taken one day in May on the occasion of the FA Cup Final, a marvellous double dollop of football exotica broadcast by both the BBC and ITV, which began at the crack of dawn outside the team hotels and rolled until the winners climbed the Wembley steps to lift the trophy.
Read more
Pete Hall: I went in search of Mark Goldbridge – and found why Gary Neville paid him millions
Daniel Storey: Liam Rosenior epitomised everything wrong with Chelsea
Oddly cricket and tennis were the primary source of live sport on TV in the 1970s with England Test matches broadcast across the summer, and Wimbledon filling its traditional late June slot, brought to us by another Dan, the inestimable Maskell.
Other than the FA Cup, football gloried in the home internationals. Yes, England played annual end-of-season fixtures against Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. How brilliantly quaint, and way more nourishing than today’s tepid international breaks.
With so little live viewing to consume and nil social media, the weekly fix of Football Focus delivered by presenters in jackets and ties was unmissable, offering heavily digested talking points debated all weekend and on Mondays by school children arguing the toss over their teams.
Bob Wilson formed arguably deeper attachments to his BBC audience than to punters on the North Bank at Highbury, in front of whom he played for a decade. He was certainly better known as a television presenter than a goalkeeper by the time he put down the Football Focus mic after his 20 years in the post.
Wilson quit the show in 1994, two years after the Premier League launched with its Sky Sports broadcast deal, which transformed football coverage and began to erode the significance of the type of weekly digest served up by Football Focus.
Perhaps, it should have gone with Bob, gracefully accepting relevance had passed. What is it they say in this game? Leave the football before it leaves you.
