In Praise Of Robbie Savage

At Sexy Football we don’t spend much time watching tele on a Saturday night. We are always at football somewhere (as long as it’s cheap, obviously…)

There are way more important things than watching whatever nonsense Ant and Dec put out and I have never liked Doctor Who (as an aside is there ANYTHING worse than Science Fiction – or is that just us?)

So I have to confess that the whole Robbie Savage on Strictly Come Dancing thing has passed us by.

However at Sexy towers we do like Sav. We subscribe to his Twitter Feed, we read his column in the Mirror and we admire the fact that he made the most out of his career as a footballer despite, in brutal honesty, not being the best player to ever grace a midfield (it also helps, probably that I don’t recall ever seeing him play live, so he never got the chance to wind me up!)

He does a nice line in self deprecation too; apparently his routine on Saturday isn’t shaping up to be the best, as he put it in the paper today: “"I've got the foxtrot. Looks like I've got the trots when I dance it. I'm hopeless.”

No doubt, as he acknowledges himself, Savage is a real “marmite” type character. You either love him or hate him, I guess and we are in the former camp. I was, as it happens watching the news headlines on BBC Red Button this morning, before flicking to the sport. The sport feed had a small programme with Robbie answering tweets from viewers, and as normal, he attacked the thing with gusto, calling the sending off of Jack Rodwell “a joke” and demanding that referee Martin Atkinson be suspended after administering the red card and launching an attack on the board of Nottingham Forest for allowing Billy Davies to leave and appointing Steve McLaren without backing him.

Yes he was a little outspoken of course, but that’s not a crime. In a world where most pundits are bland and anodyne, never saying anything particularly interesting, it makes a change to have one who says what he thinks.

Some of his antics on the BBC show Lake Kick Off (the Midlands version which I get to watch, has Robbie as a pundit along with Manish Bhasin) are worth the license fee alone. Witness this from last year when Shrewsbury player Dave Hibbert scored a great goal. They go back to the studio and Manish, chirruping with childlike enthusiasm, says “what about that technique from Dave Hibbert, Robbie?” At which point a clearly distracted Savage can manage to mumble, “I don’t know Manish, I wasn’t watching!”

And no Savage blog would be complete without mention of this story: A couple of years ago Rob was doing a signing session in a Derby shopping mall. After he’d met all the fans he was walking back to his car. A fella comes running out of a bedroom showroom and says: “Mr. Savage, can I interest you in a new bedroom?”

Robbie’s reply came back, quick as a flash: “No thanks mate, I have already got seven.”

Robbie, we salute you. And I wouldn’t know a good foxtrot from a bad one.