Gary Neville on Sky Sports Sunday Supplement, talking Loris Karius, Jurgen Klopp, the press: TV review – Telegraph.co.uk
Jason McAteer filling out the credit-card application form is one of football’s most cherished, if perhaps apocryphal, anecdotes. For the section ‘position at company’, the man they called Double Trigger of course wrote “full-back”. Watching Sunday Supplement, the viewer might have wondered: what position would Gary Neville say that he holds? Is he a former footballer, a former football manager, a future football manager, a pundit, a journalist, an entertainment personality or, as he put it, “somebody who gives content out”?
The former Manchester United man has drawn near-universal praise from journalists and fans alike for his punditry on Sky’s Monday Night Football.
But he has enjoyed a spicier relationship with others of late, including Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius and manager Jürgen Klopp after what they perceived as two-footed challenges from Neville about the German gloveman’s erratic performances.
He has also recently expressed dissatisfaction with football writing, tweeting “print journalism is becoming really s—!!” with a link to an article on The Mirror website about, erm, Gary Neville tweeting about football. And so an appearance on the Sunday morning discussion show hosted by The Sun‘s chief football reporter, Neil Ashton, seemed to suit all parties. Neville: “I invited myself on.”
The big beasts of the newspaper world assembled around the stunt croissants were Henry Winter, Martin Samuel and Oliver Holt. Neville argued that football journalism had become “about quantity over quality” and “less analytical”.