TV View: Roy, Micah and Graeme do their bit for the planet with Game Zero

David Jones advised Micah Richards to spend less time in the shower. Micah grimaced at the notion. “I smell lovely Roy, don’t I,” he said to the Keane man alongside him. “Smell me.” Roy declined the invitation, taking a step backwards towards Graeme Souness who was talking about his plant-based diet. “Plant-based is not for me, the size of me,” said Micah. “When you grow up,” said Graeme, “you’ll be a non-meat eater”. “I constantly turn the lights off at home, it drives the kids mad,” said Roy.

By now, all you could do was pity anyone who’d tuned in late to Sky’s Super Sunday expecting to hear chat about the first game on the menu, West Ham v Ronaldo United, but ending up dialling 999 to report severe hallucinations.

What they’d missed was David’s explanation that the second match on the menu, Spurs v Chelsea, was going to be “the world’s first ever net zero carbon football match . the hope is that this game does zero damage to the environment”. Game Zero, they’d dubbed it.

So, Sky and Spurs had teamed up to find ways of reducing this fixture’s carbon footprint, and any that was generated, David reassured us, would be “offset at a later date through natural means such as tree-planting around the UK”.

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Just for divilment, at times like this, you head to the comments section on the Daily Mail website to check for exploding heads, and there they were, a heap of them, under a story headlined ‘Fury as Tottenham urges fans to go VEGAN’. The all-caps here are critical because they’re generally used to denote offensive things, like ‘TERRORIST’, ‘MEGHAN MARKLE’ and ‘AVOCADOS’.

“How many times must it be said: keep politics out of football,” typed Big Joe Canoe, and when someone suggested that wanting to save the planet wasn’t actually a political thing, he called them a “spoonfed sheep”. Then there was Angry-In-London who noted that “punters go to the football to forget about all this woke crap”.

Gawd alone knows how Big Joe and Angry coped with a double whammy of wokeness ahead of the Spurs v Chelsea game when Martin Tyler talked about carbon emissions while the players of both sides took the knee. You’d guess they needed a lie down.

As did some of us when Graeme explained that his love of plant-based food isn’t so much a health thing, rather it’s because of his passion for “animal welfare - how we treat them is despicable”.

Hands up, Graeme is possibly the last human on earth who some of us would have expected to be passionate about animal welfare, the misjudgement probably influenced by his time as a player when he saw opposing shins as legitimate targets. So, you’d just be kind of thinking, compassion wasn’t really his thing. But now? Well, some of us are ordering Graeme Souness pillow cases. Cripes, even Paul Pogba might buy a couple.

Gallons of tea

David, meanwhile, was giving tips to his panellists about how they could reduce their carbon footprints, his suggestion to the fragrant Micah that he spend less time in the shower the least well received.

“Roy. You drink gallons of tea - just put as much water as you need for a cup in the kettle.”

Roy: “O…..kay.”

“But I do my bit,” Roy argued, sensing David was blaming him for the melting of the Polar ice caps. “I walk a lot, I do a bit of cycling, I don’t buy much clothes.” The debonair Micah and Graeme thought, ‘we can tell’, but were too afraid to say it out loud.

David then saluted Sky reporter Geoff Shreeves for cycling two hours to the match, as part of his effort to reduce his carbon footprint. “He probably set out last Tuesday,” said Graeme, “how dare you,” David replied.

There was much comment about the irony of Game Zero featuring a club owned by an oil magnate and a players’ car park crammed with Hummers and such like, but sure look, the intentions were good.

Before then, Ronaldo helped United see off West Ham. “The biggest comeback in these parts since Dirty Den,” as Rob Hawthorne put it. And then, in Game Zero….. “meat pie, sausage roll, come on Tottenham, give us a goal’ …. Spurs went VEGAN, registering neither a goal nor a point.

The Manchester City-lusting emissions from Harry Kane’s face come full-time would have left the Polar ice caps in a puddle. A bit like Roy at home, all he wants to do with his Spurs career is turn the lights out.