‘Feel my heart. My heart is beating,’ a large Manchester United fan called KG, who was once handed some chicken by Bruno Fernandes after a match in Thailand, screamed at Danny Jackson, a Manchester City fan, as he tried to force the man’s hand on to the fabric of his red replica shirt.
‘I’m not doing that,’ recoiled Jackson, briefly looking like he was ready to land more than his hand on him.
This was perhaps the moment of peak drama, at the weekend, in the latest episode of the worst concept Sky Sports have yet dreamed up in their supposed attempts to ‘move with the times’.
KG and Jackson were standing uncomfortably close to each other on In The Box, a show for which three fans of the rival teams had their phones confiscated, were locked in the room and asked to shout a lot, as occasional stills on a big screen offered clues to the course of the match. When he wasn’t rolling around on the floor, KG really did shout a lot.
It had clearly been difficult to tap into the celebrity world for this one, given that there were only TikTokers, vloggers and podcasters for the Manchester derby episode, while Ossie Ardiles (who looked utterly disinterested) and Gary Lineker (who made the best of a bad format) appeared for the north London derby equivalent in the autumn.
Sky Sports presenter Dave Jones keeps the fans ‘In The Box’ guessing as to the result of the Manchester derby on Saturday in Sky Sports’ latest bizarre concept
United fans react in raucous fashion after learning the result, delivered by Roy Keane
But Sky’s quest for In the Box razzle dazzle saw Roy Keane playing a starring role, by appearing on the big screen to reveal who’d won the game 2-0, sending KG into such overdrive that you really started to worry for his health.
’He seems surprised, doesn’t he?’ observed Keane, and you wondered in that moment whether content at this intellectual level is really the best use of a man who was being paid so well for his highly intelligent professional insight.
Football talk is no longer enough to sate the audiences, Sky seem to have concluded, despite the levels of controversy which men like Keane are being asked to reach to feed the broadcast and podcast beasts.
In The Box, viewable through one of Sky Sports’ YouTube channels, meets the appetite for football’s watch-along style which was a big hit for Arsenal Fan TV and Mark Goldbridge, who covers Manchester United. Though Sky Sports’ brains trust have come up with the idea of a watch-along without a match to actually watch.
The net result on this show was people screaming. The first match clip, of Harry Maguire hitting the bar, extracted an ‘In your face!’ from KG to City fan ‘Big Steve’.
An image of Pep Guardiola with his finger on his lip, perhaps looking worried, met with something a little less impolite from ‘Big Steve,’ who sagely observed that when City have conceded, Pep always ‘drinks his water’.
If you like people screaming, this could be the show for you. There was certainly a lot of it
Sky Sports’ brains trust have come up with the idea of a watch-along without a match to actually watch
Mercifully, the digital sphere is preserved from the prospect of 90 minutes of this drivel by those excellent video editors at Sky, who have boiled it all down to 13 minutes.
But how long, you have to wonder, before In The Box is reduced just to the moment when Keane delivers the score to that box of people who, for reasons known only to themselves, have been willing to forego watching the actual match?
As of Monday night, a clip entitled ‘Roy Keane reveals the result of the Manchester derby to fans locked In The Box’ had been viewed 6.7million times.
It’s enough to make you want to lock yourself in a box.
