Ford Super Sunday
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Ford Super Sunday | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Sports |
| Running time | Variable |
| Starring | Richard Keys Andy Gray Martin Tyler Jamie Redknapp Geoff Shreeves |
| Country of origin | UK |
| Original channel | Sky Sports |
| Original run | August 16, 1992–present |
| Official website | |
Ford Super Sunday is Sky Sports' flagship live football programme, televised most Sundays throughout the Barclays Premiership season at 3pm on Sky Sports 1. It has been presented since its debut in August 1992 by former TVam host Richard Keys, alongside a variety of guest match pundits. From the 2005-2006 season, former Liverpool FC player Jamie Redknapp joined the show as a regular pundit. For the majority of its run, the commentary team consisted of Martin Tyler and former Scotland striker Andy Gray, although since early 2005, commentators such as Ian Darke or Rob Hawthorne occasionally commentate the match with Gray, so as to lighten Tyler's workload - recent big matches such as those involving Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea have been commentated by Darke and Gray rather than Tyler and Gray.
In the first couple of years of the programme, Ford Super Sunday - the title due to major sponsorship by the Ford Motor Company - used to start at 2pm, giving viewers two hours buildup before the slightly untraditional kickoff time of 4pm, as opposed to Saturday kickoff at 3pm. Eventually, Sky decided this was a bit too much, and decided to start the programme at 3pm instead. From the 2004-05 season, some Super Sunday coverage started as early as 1pm if two live games were shown that day. From the 2005-06, coverage began at 3.30pm if only one live game was shown.
The first match shown on Ford Super Sunday was between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool on August 16th 1992, a match Forest won 1-0. Since then, Ford Super Sunday has mostly shown the Premiership's biggest match of the weekend, although occasionally due to the amount of times each club have to be shown by Sky Sports, a lesser match is shown. The highest viewing figure for a super sunday match was between Manchester United and Arsenal in 2003 where around 18 million people watched the game.
Over the past few years, the advent of PPV football has had Ford Super Sunday be led in by a game shown on Sky's Prem Plus PPV channel. Since the 2004-2005 season, the first after the latest rights negotiations, PPV matches were moved to Saturday afternoons, and an extra slot was given to Ford Super Sunday. The show now started some weekends at 1pm, with the first match kicking off at 2pm, followed by the next match at 4:05pm. However, this led fans of teams in the first match to have their buildup mostly ignored in favour of the teams in the second match, which was often the bigger match, and as a result, starting in the 2005-2006 season, the first game was brought forward to 1:30pm to allow a dedicated buildup to that match, leaving half an hour from 3:30pm to buildup the second game starting at 4pm. Liverpool have had the most Super Sunday airings with 88, Manchester United and Arsenal are joint second with 79 each.
Ford Super Sunday is scheduled to run until the end of the 2006-2007 season at the earliest, depending on the next round of rights negotiations - which are expected to result in BSkyB allowing other networks to show some Premiership football matches as recommended by the European Commission [1].
