FORMER Sky Sports presenters Andy Gray and Richard Keys have taken huge pay cuts to join radio station talkSPORT.
Gray, 55, was sacked last month from his £1.7million-a-year deal and Keys, 53, resigned from his £500,000 job after comments about a female assistant referee led to accusations that they were sexist.
The pair are said to be picking up about £150,000 each for hosting a 10am to 1pm, Monday to Friday slot at talkSPORT with weekends free for other work. Keys added: “This is the start of something new.”
But outraged women used internet forums to criticise the move.
Sue Tibballs, of Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, said: “Views like theirs belong firmly in a bygone age.”
At the risk of beating a dead horse, here is the final part to this story.
And as the HTML is being stroppy, this is Gray's quote (insert above): "It's an opportunity for me and Richard to do what we do best, which is talk about sport."
sourceTalkSport has often courted controversy, from Alan Brazil, who was censured by Ofcom for referring to Japan as "the Nips" during the 2006 World Cup; to Jon Gaunt, who was sacked for calling a local politician "a Nazi"; and to Adrian Durham, who argued that the Arsenal midfielder Andrey Arshavin should be booed and "not welcomed back into England" after Russia won the right to host the 2018 World Cup.
All that has not stopped the broadcaster from giving a berth to the two men who were caught red-handed a fortnight ago, making sexist comments about the assistant referee Sian Massey and uttering crude remarks to colleagues.
TalkSport has not bitten the hand that fed it its biggest story in years, Keys having used an hour-long interview on the station a fortnight ago to deliver the longest career suicide note in history. Keys' return to the Blackfriars studio – the scene of an apology that backfired spectacularly and led to his resignation hours after Gray had been sacked – suggests that he is willing to put his hand back in the fire. His interviewers two weeks ago, Andy Jacobs and Paul Hawksbee, skilfully gave him just enough rope.
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