Football League Tonight

Before I begin this review, I will say that this has replaced The Football League Show, which in my opinion, was one of my favourite things to watch during the entire week.

I watched this on the opening day of the season. I was so excited to see what they had done and what had brought to the table. But what did they do? They Americanised it. They got the presenters, doing the show in front of an audience. An audience that feels so plastic, as if they didn't want to be there either. And I wouldn't blame them.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The highlights are all over the place. They'll show you a game from League One, and then skip to the Championship, and then League Two. It's confusing. The "featured" games aren't long at all. Compared to The Football League Show's extended coverage, that lasts about ten-fifteen minutes, Football League Tonight only manages five minute highlights of these so-called "featured games". If they're really featured games, at least make the effort to make them featured games.

The presenters act like they're reading from a script. At least in The Football League Show, Manish would look down at the table, because maybe he does have a script. Remembering all of the fixtures isn't easy. While with Football League Tonight, it's as if they're trying to be Match of the Day, by looking at a screen that had the script scrolling down it, but don't even replicate the professionalism of Gary Lineker.

Channel 5 hasn't only embarrassed themselves with this dross they call a show, but so have BBC for selling the rights to Channel 5.

There are NO redeeming factors for this show. Not even the football you see, considering it's so damn short anyway.

Without a shadow of a doubt, this is the worst football coverage show I have ever seen in my entire life.

1/10

which tells you how bad it was originally. The studio audience are gone, the standard of punditry is not quite as woeful, the utterly ridiculous out-of-league-order structuring is gone, as are the rotating boards to indicate the league tables (and their spoilerish placing). They haven't done a Skyped interview with ropey video talking to an unknown self-styled 'expert' for a while. However, this is still an object lesson in how not to do football highlights.

The presenters are nothing short of incompetent, flubbing their delivery repeatedly (I counted three botches in one episode alone, including mangling the names of commentators Don Goodman and Bill Leslie into 'Don Leslie' - would it have killed them to re-record it?) Pundits rarely have anything useful to offer. Spoilers are frequent in the structuring - this week's episode (week 26, I think) told us that a Brighton win would put them back up to second - before showing the match which caused them to drop to third. Also, for no apparent reason, we've had a montage of the best goals scored in 2015 in mid-March - made worse by the lack of commentary.

I was pleased when the 9pm timeslot was announced, but right now I'd kill to wait an extra 3 hours for the previous Football League Show from the BBC, which was far from faultless, but at least it was made with enthusiasm, passion and a handful of brain cells.