The weekend, part two: the Championship and beyond, with ITV

ITV's English Football League highlights have taken a bit of a kicking this season, but is there anything in it, or do people just fear change?

The very first thing that strikes you when you switch on the English Football League highlights on ITV’s catch-up service is how little of it there actually is. One hour, seven minutes and seventeen seconds, to be precise, all of which means 23 minutes of adverts if you happened to have been watching it as it’s broadcast. Match of the Day is seven minutes longer, and they only have to deal with 20 clubs. Depending on the exact fixture list, ITV have to get through 60-something. On this occasion it was 64, plus one from the night before.

It is utterly unsurprising that they lead with a match involving Leicester City. After all, they are, well, Leicester City, Premier League champions of 2016 and FA Cup winners in 2021, and their opponents Bristol City are managed by Nigel Pearson, who laid a substantial proportion of the foundations of that 2016 triumph. And they’re top of the table going into the weekend’s fixtures, with six wins out of seven.

But it’s difficult to believe that this is the lead story, the most dramatic and gripping of the afternoon, in the Championship. They beat a pretty lacklustre City side 1-0 thanks to a second half Jamie Vardy penalty. The commentator bellows with a ferocity that the pictures don’t really deserve. And I get it. Editing all this down for a 9.00 broadcast on a Saturday night, even in the digital era, is a logistical nightmare to get all this stuff trimmed down and in place.

The big story of the day in the Championship came with the second match, and Plymouth Argyle’s 6-2 win against Norwich City didn’t disappoint. This was the third time that Norwich have lost in their last four league games, and there were few signs at Home Park of how they’re going to get anywhere near challenging for a return to the Premier League. Their defending was hesitant to the point of being lazy, and by the time they woke up they were already 5-0 down. Plymouth, meanwhile, showed much of the effervescence that they demonstrated on the way to promotion last season.

Talking of the newly-promoted, I wildly predicted Ipswich to do well in the Championship this season (well, I described them as “the most likely to be able to at the very least hold their own at this higher level”), and blow me down there they are in second place in the table following a knockabout 4-3 win against Blackburn Rovers, although perhaps the goal-happy nature of this game wasn’t such a surprise, considering that their last two games at Portman Road had ended in a 4-3 defeat to Leeds United and a 3-2 win over Cardiff City. And in third place it’s perennial mid-tablers Preston North End, getting a whole couple of minutes from ITV for their trip to Rotherham United, which ended in a 1-1 draw. There’s only a point between these three, and then a five point gap to the chasing pack. The Championship might be at it again.

Meanwhile on ITV, Gary Presenter leads us into Leeds, who’d had a best of times start to the season. On the one hand, they’ve now lost just once in their first eight games of the season after a handsome 3-0 win against a Watford team who were apparently also on the same pitch. But on the other, that inconsistent start has already cost them. They’re already eight points off second place. Watford are now in 17th place in the table, having only won once since the opening day of the season.

By this point in the show—we have forty minutes of our allotted 67 left by his point—things are starting to get dark. You know, EFL dark. Swansea City and Sheffield Wednesday, we’re reminded, hadn’t won a game between them this season going into their match at the Liberty Stadium. Swansea won 3-0, and it’s difficult not to look in wonder at the amazing amount of goodwill that Wednesday owner Dejphon Chansiri has burned through in the last three months alone. It almost feels impossible to believe that they even got promoted at the end of last season. West Bromwich Albion and Millwall played out a goalless draw of little to no excitement, barring a first half Millwall penalty miss.

Another advert break—and a brief check of Gaviscon’s seven symptoms of… something, they’re not exactly clear on what—and we’re back for Middlesbrough vs Southampton. Crisis club versus crisis club. Middlesbrough were expected to do well this season and their start to the season has been as inexplicable as it has been surprising. They fall behind yet again, but this time they rally to a 2-1 win, their first of the season. Southampton, meanwhile, are now in 16th place after having lost four of their first eight matches of the season. From Match of the Day to last of the Saturday Championship matches on ITV in just a few months. How the mighty have fallen.

ITV finish up their Championship coverage with Friday night’s goalless draw between Birmingham City and Queens Park Rangers, about which the least said the better. Birmingham are a point off the play-off places. QPR are three points above the relegation places. St Andrews remains a building site, although it does look as though work might actually even be being carried out there at the moment. After forty minutes, and with less than half an hour for the league’s bottom two divisions, we’re off to League One.

Portsmouth continue to lead the way in this division with Oxford United in close pursuit, but time is running out for ITV so they have to rush through this section a little. Goals, goals, goals, but few actual stories. We get the bare bones of where teams are in the league table and the voiceover guy does a valiant job of adding a little context to each match, but when you’ve got 32 of them to cover and only just over two minutes per match, time is tight.

By the time we get to League Two we’re starting to slow time and space around us. There are thrills and spills a-plenty. Crawley come from two behind to win at Grimsby. Harrogate Town and Salford City play their match and the “Jimmy Savile, he’s one of your own” clearly audible on the YouTube highlights have been skilfully clipped out. Elsewhere, Stockport County beat Wrexham 5-0, which is definitely funny, while Notts County lead the table following a 4-3 win against struggling Forest Green Rovers.

There are extremely interesting matches at this level, but there’s just no time, you see. When something approaching a feature does land, on the laudable subject of green initiatives, it’s squidged into the last three minutes of the show. And that’s the theme of it all, really. Everything in the English Football League Highlights on ITV seems pancake thin. Just get all the goals in there, and if we can squeeze some extra highlights out of the Championship then that’ll pad it out okay.

It’s easy to become misty-eyed and nostalgic about the past. At least this show is on at something approaching a reasonable time, unlike the Football League highlights shows of the 1990s, which would usually be put out by ITV some time after midnight on the Monday night after the weekend’s football had been played. And it is worth remembering that ITV and the EFL are very comfortable bedfellows. These highlights packages have been shown for more than thirty years now, and on only a couple of occasions—once with the BBC, once with the already half-forgotten channel Quest—have they not been on ITV. We may not like these highlights, but they are at least on the home that perhaps they’re supposed to be on.

But… this is not a good highlights show. Trimming the length of the show from two hours to an hour and a half has squeezed the space out of it. All that matters now is ploughing on through it all, goals, goals, goals with the occasional pause for a league table. Little context is offered to much of it beyond the voiceover guys, and there is a feeling of emptiness to it all which didn’t exist in its previous incarnations. The funky theme music is downright annoying, when cut down to its pre-commercial break sting, and the feeling that you come away with having sat through it is surprisingly empty. I’ll continue to squeeze this show in every week out of something approaching professional obligation, but I wouldn’t criticise any of you lot if you decided to give it a swerve.