RICHARD KEYS has slammed Gary Neville for his criticism of BT Sport’s coverage of the Champions League final.
Neville, 47, who works as a pundit for rival Sky Sports, spoke out against BT Sport’s lack of reporting of events happening outside the stadium which caused the match to be delayed.
Thousands of fans were held up outside the Stade de France by police and security for hours, before police began pepper-spraying and teargassing peaceful fans waiting to get into the match.
But BT Sport did not have a reporter on hand to provide details, which meant presenter Jake Humphrey lacked information for viewers.
Commenting on BT Sport not having a team covering events outside the stadium, Neville tweeted: “Are you surprised? I’m not. They can’t react or aren’t agile to things like this happening.”
But former Sky Sports presenter Keys, replied suggesting Neville was out of order – pointing out Sky’s coverage is not always spot on.
He wrote on Twitter: “F**k me Gary Neville is there nothing you’re not an expert on?
“I’ve worked with guys at BT Sport and they’re top pros as Jake Humphrey has said.
“I’m quite certain Saturday was a challenging night for everyone. Just like covering the Old Trafford riot you instigated and covered badly at Sky 🤷♂️”
Neville is one of the most vocal pundits and covers a lot of issues in and out of football, from ownership and tactics to political affairs.
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He has grown in popularity in his role with Sky partly for his expertise but also because of his sense of humour – often winding up opposition fans with his social media antics, such as laughing at Liverpool’s Champions League final defeat.
But Keys feels he was wrong to criticise BT Sport given the difficulty of the situation.
Humphrey described it as the hardest sporting event he has had to cover, telling beIN Sports: “Possibly one of the hardest sports events I’ve ever covered. And I’ve done some tricky ones.
“We had limited information about what was going on outside, my talkback (the umbilical cord to my production team) suddenly stopped working, the TV compound was impacted by the tear gas so our production team were barricaded in their trucks.
“And many of us had friends and family at the game and we had no idea if they were even safe.
“And amongst all that we were trying our best to get the tone right, under the scrutiny that seems exclusive to live football.
“Hopefully you wouldn’t have known too much about all that, the BT Sport production team are up there with the very best I have ever worked with.”
Source: The Sun